Posts Tagged ‘pcalc’
PCalc 2.2
July 30th, 2010 at 7:51 am
PCalc 2.2 for the iPhone just appeared in the App Store. It’s not a big upgrade, but it does have a few new features I like.
First is a new theme, called Flynn. I can’t imagine myself ever using it, but it’s definitely fun.
I’m thinking James Thomson should have timed the release of this theme closer to December 17, but what do I know about marketing? Maybe he can do some cross-promoting with the publisher of LightBike.
On a more substantive note, PCalc’s Key Click preference now allows you to set the volume of the click.
If you’re like me and need to have the phone’s main volume set high to hear the phone ringing in your pocket but don’t like the extra loud clicks when tapping keys, this option is most welcome. And Nigel Tufnel fans will appreciate what happens when you swipe the volume slider all the way to the right.
Finally, PCalc’s advanced settings now have an option, called Clear Memories On AC, that prevents mistaken taps on the AC button from clearing out the memory as well as the stack. This duplicates some functionality, but makes the app work better without messing up its aesthetics.
PCalc already had an SC button for clearing the stack only, but because it was on the “2nd” keyboard, it required two keypresses instead of one. Personally, I always thought the SC key should be on the primary keyboard because it’s less destructive, but I understood the value of having a familiar key as the default. With the new setting, we get the best of both worlds. (There’s an MC key on the secondary keyboard for clearing the memory.)
To me, this is the biggest and best change. I often find myself with a bunch of items on the stack that I’d like to blow away, and I’ve always had to think twice before clearing to make sure I didn’t also delete an important number in memory. With the new setting I can AC with impunity.
Yes, I’ve written an absurd number of posts on PCalc. I’m an engineer; calculators are important to me.
PCalc 2.1 resolution
June 26th, 2010 at 3:35 pm
James Thomson sent out new betas of PCalc 2.1 last night so those of us with new iPhone 4’s could use it. As I said yesterday, version 2.0.1 was built for the pre-4 display and while it looked great on a 3GS or earlier, it had an interesting mix of sharp text and fuzzy graphics on the Retinal screen. Here’s a screenshot comparison of the middle of the Engineering keyboard layout:
Much nicer, isn’t it?
PCalc 2.0’s resolution mix
June 25th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
A week ago, James Thomson sent out a beta of PCalc 2.1 for iPhone to his testers. It’s the “Retinal” version of PCalc, with the graphics redrawn to take advantage of the higher resolution of the iPhone 4’s screen. At the time, I had no use for the higher-res graphics, but I downloaded and installed it anyway, because there was another improvement I wanted to test.
Yesterday morning, I picked up my iPhone 4 and installed all my apps and music. The PCalc beta wouldn’t install, presumably because it uses the Ad Hoc distribution method and my new phone’s device ID isn’t in the beta app’s provisioning profile. I’m sure James will update the list of his testers’ device IDs soon, but in the meantime I have no calculator.1
After a PCalcless day, I went to the App Store and got the unRetinal 2.0.1 version. I had already bought PCalc back before I was a beta tester, so there was no need to cough up any more money. I fired it up to make sure the settings were right and immediately noticed two things:
- It starts up really fast on an iPhone 4.
- The user interface is a hybrid of (lower-res) graphics and text, which gives it something of a split personality on the new screen.
Here’s a 320×480 view of the screen, what you would see on a 3GS or earlier:
Here’s a section of it in glorious 640×960 resolution:
See how the text—most of it, anyway—is really sharp and the images are kind of fuzzy? It looks like some things you would think are text, like the trig functions, are actually images.
PCalc works fine, of course, it’s just a little funny looking.
The fuzziness will be banished in version 2.1, which is going through the approval process as I type this. I’m looking forward to going back to the future.
Update 6/26/10
I’m back in business with PCalc 2.1. See a screenshot comparison with the new Retinalized keyboard here.
PCalc and conversions
March 17th, 2010 at 10:12 pm
A new version of PCalc for the iPhone has appeared in the App Store. The big new feature in version 1.9.2 is currency conversions, with the rates downloaded from the European Central Bank.
While beta testing this new version, I realized that for all my blogging about PCalc, I’d never spent any time on its unit conversion features. So here’s a video showing how it works. I don’t do any currency conversions, but they work the same as the length and angle conversions in the demo.
(This is straight from the camera—no editing—so there are a few more “ums” than I’d like. Sorry, too, about the interference bands waving around on the screen. There’s probably a way to prevent them, but I don’t know what it is. If I were PCalc’s developer, I could do the demo in the iPhone simulator and record a screencast off my Mac. Instead, the phone is propped up on a Gorillapod, and the camera, a Canon G10, is sitting on a conventional tripod.)
(Another parenthetical apology: the embedded video is Flash. If you’d prefer to see it in beautiful HTML5, you can do so on its Vimeo page.)
PCalc has a huge number of preferences. The settings that most affect what you see in the video are:
- RPN mode: On
- Number Of Decimal Places: 5
- Theme: Twilight
- Digits: Easier To Read
- Vertical Layout: Engineering
- Thousands Separator: On
- Show Trailing Zeros: Off
- HP48 Style RPN: On
- Recent Conversions: 2
- Recent Constants: 2
The Recent Conversions and Recent Constants features are important for quick use, because they allow you to repeat conversions without digging down through the (unavoidable, I think) hierarchy of units. One thing I didn’t mention in the video is the little circle of arrows button to the right of each Recent Conversion.
Tapping this button reverses the conversion—in effect doubling the number of Recent Conversions saved. PCalc is filled with little niceties like this that make using it a pleasure.
When working on one of my Macs, I tend to use Octave as my calculator and the old Unix units program as my converter. It’s OK that they’re separate programs because I can have them running simultaneously in different windows and quickly bounce between them—in fact, I prefer it that way because each program can concentrate on what it does best. But in the restricted environment of the iPhone, it’s important for the calculator and unit converter to be bound together in the same app. PCalc recognizes that and handles both functions.