41 thoughts on “GUADEC Hacking

  1. Alexander

    Out of curiosity, what is it with this recent fetish for tabifying things that seems to have swept GNOME?

    Not that it doesn’t always make sense. As long as you could name the tabs in gcalctool, I could see it working out pretty nicely.

  2. Arafat

    I don’t want to sound rude.. But can’t you hack on something useful instead of adding tabs to a calculator??

  3. Vadim P.

    The tabs are cool but how’d you tone down the darkness of the newhuman theme? if that’s the one

  4. Jeff Schroeder

    If you can, please use the tab widget from epiphany (and now nautilus). It would be really nice to have one consistent tab implementation in major gnome applications.

  5. Jones Lee

    Very cool indeed but please do not commit this upstream simply because I find it’s not that needed for a calculator program. Leave thing as simple as it is, or else GNOME would turn to KDE soon,

  6. Stephane C.

    I always wondered why calculator applications were always mimicking the real like calculator.
    As soon as you want to do more than just a few operations, the command line model found in tools such as Matlab, Octave or bc is far more powerful.
    If tabs are introduced in the calculator, why not reserve one for a small command line interpretor?

  7. Marcus

    As you are currently in the code, I have a usability annotation: due to the many buttons it would be nice to have some kind of visual help for orientation. I use the calculator only from time to time and every time again I search for the Clr button. If that is compatible with the HIG, could you i.e. make its bg color some kind of red? And probably the +,-,/,* somewhat darker so one has some visual clue relative to other buttons.

    Unless I need some more advanced functions I always use xcalc for this reason only.

    Have fun hacking, anyway!

  8. Anonymous coward

    Does the application display the whole equation that you are inputting as you are typing it (as opposed to only displaying the last key pressed).
    That would be a big help

    Liking the “=42″ reference :)

  9. troll

    It’s nice but remove the tabs. They are a usability nightmare, and no ORDINARY users (outside the uber nerdy developer commmunity) wants them.

  10. Stoffe

    People seem to think it’s a joke, and maybe it is. But I definitely see the use for it, if only because window managers do not handle this as good as applications (or even close). I do want multiple calculations open, just like I want multiple documents and multiple directories. But I do not want a cluttered taskbar/awn/similar. Since WM/taskbar/DE/whoever should be responsible handles it poorly, applications need to. And don’t get me started on that Compiz plugin, that’s completely unusable, sadly. At least one DE tried, I’ll give them that. :)

    Tabs are a great working model, tried and true, proven and liked. So far many other models have been (often loudly) totet as “superior” on various mailing lists and forums, and never ever been so in practice. There’s a reason spatial mode is not the default in most distros. Because it’s only better in theory and even then it’s highly doubtful.

    So, be it a joke or not – I don’t really mind for this app – it would actually make it a better application, using a UI that many feel very comfortable with (and which is ignorable for those who doesn’t).

  11. Vadim P.

    Because gcalctool is default in gnome? one doesn’t really need qalculate by default.

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  13. Trung Le

    You have done a very good job, but I don’t think normal user need Tab Feature for an calculator, simply because they do not need to switch to multiple calculator to do calculations. I agree with Jones and Eric’s opinions.

  14. Eric Duminil

    one doesn’t really need tabs in calculator by default either;)
    What’s next, tabs in Sudoku & MahJong?

    In comparison, “3€ to $” or “10kWh to J” from qalculate are way more useful than tabs in calculator.

  15. Colacanth Nicholson

    You only get inspired when you do HACKING. (though not all HACKING are to be merged back to the upstream). Have fun hacking @ GUADEC.

  16. Vadim P.

    I’ll have to protest on the claim that they’re a usability problem. Unless you have one with them? Tabs, for one, are an optional feature. Two, while they aren’t as easy to figure out as simply launching a 2nd window, they are figure-able, and are quite popular – in browsers, IM messengers, and so on.

    So, unless you have a proper HIG to backup your idea, I don’t consider it valid.

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  18. Christian Neumair

    I like the concept of being able to do parallel calculations.

    However, it would only make sense if we had a history of calculations for the various tabs, and offered other advanced features. At the moment, average non-programmable calculators CASIO fx-991ES are way more useful than our calculator.

    Before tabs are useful, at least the following features should be implemented:
    * input history
    * complex numbers
    * sinh, cosh, tanh
    * numerical integration
    * variable assignment (“A=exp(i*pi)…
    * formula
    * nature constants

    best regards,
    Christian Neumair

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  27. Alan

    @Marcus calculator used to include infrastructure that would allow you to do some button specific colour coding. It may have been removed since no one ever actually used it but if you poke around the source code you might still find it. (I only played around with it enough to make a relatively simple example where the text on the number buttons was differently coloured.)

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