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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? :-)

Emiliano / 2006-04-03 15:22:

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 :-)

Roberto Alsina / 2006-04-03 15:23:

Great, looking forward to it! :-)

George Wright / 2006-04-03 15:24:

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?

Roberto Alsina / 2006-04-03 15:25:

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!

Claes / 2006-04-03 15:26:

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/


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