Ok, so not **everyone** read my calculator rant
First of all, a note: I intend all this post as encouragement to Emiliano, the author of Kalcoolus.
You see, he turned bc into a on-screen keyboard thing . I don't like that UI much .
I can't post comments on kde-look (forgot my id, or maybe never registered), and I am not going to register just for this, but it's interesting to see how the same idea is recycled over and over and over.
This app seems to be a conflation of the following:
Writing frontends is good, because you don't need to write the hard part
A GUI calculator has to look like the real thing, in the name of usability
Well, the bad news is: writing frontends is fragile. What you want are libraries. And if GUIs had to look like the real thing, the UI to Skype would be a numpad, the UI to Amarok would look like an Ipod, and the UI to KWord would look different .
So, please, Emiliano, put a CLI in it. Pretty please? :-)
Hi,
I intended Kalcoolus as a scientific calculator, so
the GUI is a bit heavy, however I think that if I'm being able to solve some design issue the result should be a usable utility :-)
Great, looking forward to it! :-)
What is the point in creating a frontend to bc? In the end, it doesn't actually do anything that bc doesn't, and adding a graphical user interface to bc will either be reinventing the wheel (by adding a keyboard input method) or adding an interface which is a usability nightmare (such as the one that Kalcoolus has).
Surely konsole would be the best KDE frontend to bc in the end?
Well, I can't ever remember how to make bc not use integer math, so some hand-holding would be nice.
And konsole is way too slow to start!
Check out Qalculate - a C++ calculator with GTK+ user interface. Since it is written in C++, I believe a KDE user interface could be built for it. It is quite usable.
http://qalculate.sourceforge.net/