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Open-Sourcing Windows Calculator

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Open-Sourcing Windows Calculator

#61

Post by orbital-decay »

nimbius wrote: post #32

speaking from experience working in a truck repair shop, I quit using calculator in windows as it was rather unreliable. if im calculating inner diameter or outer diameter for a part, or doing tooth math for machining a new bull gear, ive often encountered wildly different values in calculator from what a machinists handbook tells me. Ive even had an old-timer warn me about different depth and feed rate calculations…

This is an issue with any math-related tool in general, including the specialized software, where bugs are much much more sophisticated. Most App Store/Microsoft Store/Google Play apps can't be trusted even for simple square root and trigonometry calculations.

Re: Open-Sourcing Windows Calculator

#62

Post by Someone1234 »

hadrien01 wrote: post #43
dvtrn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Microsoft open sources MSPaint.exe" two weeks later "Show HN: I added transparency support to MSPaint" two (more) weeks later "Adobe shares plummet as users cancel their subscriptions to Creative Cloud by the thousands, analysts baffled"

You joke, but Paint actually has a very rudimentary support of transparency: https://www.wikihow.tech/Make-a-Background-Transparent-in-Pa...

Be careful Transparent Selection also has a nasty bug.

- Rectangular Select part of an image

- Move it one pixel or more

- With Transparent Selection enabled Rotate -> Rotate 90 Degrees

This is the result: https://i.imgur.com/HlAkHM1.png

If you disable Transparent Selection it works as expected. I reported this to Microsoft twice over the last ten years, no fix yet...

Re: Open-Sourcing Windows Calculator

#63

Post by howeyc »

sebazzz wrote: post #21
abakker wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I guess it would be cool to know what kind of operations people are doing most often? Maybe you send different ads to people who only use addition/subtraction than people who use sin / cos?

Telemetry is not used for ads, but since it is open-source you can check and get a pretty good idea what they actually send.

How can you be sure it's not used for ads, their privacy statement says they do[1]:

"You provide some of this data directly, and we get some of it by collecting data about your interactions, use, and experiences with our products."

"Microsoft uses the data we collect to provide you with rich, interactive experiences. In particular, we use data to:

...

Advertise and market to you, which includes sending promotional communications, targeting advertising, and presenting you with relevant offers."

[1] https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-US/privacystatement

Re: Open-Sourcing Windows Calculator

#64

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

ktjfi wrote: post #18
valleyjo wrote: post #6

I worked on a win32 application for my first job out of college. My boss told me "want to learn win32 and c++, go program a windows calculator clone." It was a great project to get started and I did learn a lot. Now I have something to compare my work to ha

This calculator is not written using Win32. (Why the downvotes?)

I guess people downvoting you think it's obvious.

Re: Open-Sourcing Windows Calculator

#66

Post by sixothree »

tombert wrote: post #36

This is cool, but I really wish they'd release the source for the original Notepad. No real reason other than "this software was really important to me when I was a kid". As it stands, though, Calculator is not something I've particularly cared about in the Windows world; pretty much anyone here could write a simple calculator app in an afternoon. Still, I am glad MS is slowly becoming more OSS-friendly; I doubt anyo…

Accepting some pull requests on notepad would be nice....

Re: Open-Sourcing Windows Calculator

#67

Post by Tade0 »

Nice to hear that.

I like to calculate stuff from time to time, so I use the default OS calculator app a lot.

The Windows one is actually pretty decent, except maybe for the shortcuts - e.g. raising to the power is under "y" for some reason.

Ubuntu/Linux(es) has by far the best one. The shortcuts are obvious and the whole expression is visible at all times.

The one for macOS is surprisingly lacking.

Re: Open-Sourcing Windows Calculator

#68

Post by cbsks »

The "help wanted" label on some of the GitHub issues[0] is interesting to me. Presumably there are Microsoft employees who are being paid to work on Calculator, are they trying to crowd-source their jobs? I should convince my company to open source the project I am working on so I can offload some of my work too ;)

[0]: https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator/issues?q=is%3Aissue+...

Re: Open-Sourcing Windows Calculator

#69

Post by selimthegrim »

kevinventullo wrote: post #47
yellowapple wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if I should be disturbed or amused by Microsoft putting telemetry in (at this rate) literally every one of its products. Like, what the hell do they even track? I guess the obvious ones are things like application crashes, but now I'm curious if they have the data on the most common calculations, folks' favorite numbers, etc.

The Scientific/Math/Programmer expanded calculators have a bunch of features. Maybe they can test how often the "cube root" button is used versus Arcsinh or something.

This is actually pretty relevant because TI has been goofing up the cube root function in its calculators for decades.

Re: Open-Sourcing Windows Calculator

#70

Post by SloopJon »

nathell wrote: post #5

Whoa, it appears to be written in C++/CLI. I wonder how much Windows code also is, and how it impacts maintainability.

Thank you. I was trying to figure out what language this is, because there's some weird syntax in the .h and .cpp files that I don't recognize as C++.
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