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Friday March 07, 2008

What's In Gcalctool For GNOME 2.22

We'll all be cutting our tarballs for GNOME 2.22 on Monday. This release will see several major changes to the default GNOME desktop calculator. Many thanks to Robert Ancell and Sami Pietila for their help in making these improvements.

I sent the following to Davyd Madeley for inclusion in the GNOME Release Notes. Note that these are just the highlights. There have been a lot more bug fixes integrated as well.

Gcalctool now uses Glade for its user interface. This will make it easier and quicker in future to make UI fixes or add new UI features.
The number of significant numerical places has been increased to 99 and the number of displayable digits has been increased to 200.
(Note that if you have problems seeing the first digit in the display area, this is Gtk+ bug #482688).
The keyboard shortcuts for the hexadecimal digits have been changed back to "a" - "f".
With copy/paste operations, where the user is pasting a string into gcalctool, the copy buffer is now iterated over. If an "A", "B", "C", "D" or "F" character is encountered, it will be converted to its lowercase equivalent. If an "E" is found, and the next character is a "-" or a "+", then it remains as an upper case "E" (it's assumed to be a possible exponential number), otherwise its converted to a lower case "e".
Displaying of hex digits in the gcalctool display will still be in uppercase. Displaying of the "e" in an exponential number will still be in lower-case.

The following functions have also had their keyboard shortcuts changed:

      [A] - Set accuracy
      [C] - Change sign
      [D] - Double-declining depreciation
      [E] - Enter an exponential number
      [F] - User-defined functions

The way to enter exponential numbers in arithmetic precedence mode has changed. The following four examples should show you the new correct syntax:

        1  2  Exp + 8  =              1200000000
      - 1  2  Exp + 8  =             -1200000000
        1  2  Exp - 8  =              0.00000012
      - 1  2  Exp - 8  =             -0.00000012

In both left-to-right precedence and arithmetic precedence modes, if the user enters a numeric digit that is incorrect for the current numeric base, this isn't allowed and is not entered in the display.
There is now a cursor in the calculator display area. It understands the Home and End keys. This is in arithmetic precedence mode only. You can also "hand edit" the display by moving the position of this cursor.
A "Reset to Default" accuracy menu item has been added.
When the bit calculation extension is enabled, a message now appears in the status bar.
The Delete key is now used to delete the character to the right of the cursor in the display area. To clear the display area, use Shift-Delete.
The help menu shortcut has changed from Ctrl+H to F1 to match the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG).
There have been many changes to the online help. They include:
- The various screenshots have been updated to reflect all the latest changes.
- Square root documentation has been updated. The entry now includes examples for both arithmetic precedence and left-to-right precedence modes.
- The logical operations, And, Not, Or, Xor and Xnor now use uppercase letters (AND, NOT, OR, XOR and XNOR) for both the buttons and in the display area in arithmetic precedence mode.
  The result for the AND example is now correct.
  The syntax for using NOT in arithmetic precedence mode is different then for left-to-right precedence mode. The online help example has been updated to show both examples.
- Updated the documentation for bit calculating extension.
- Updated the documentation for Changing Modes Clears Calculation.
- Added in a new section titled "Changing The Display Area" and updated the keyboard shortcut for the Clear operation.
- Adjusted "monthly interest rate" to "simple monthly interest rate" for two of the financial examples.