I've finished adding all the new features to 1.0. There's a bunch of them, and it's pretty evenly split between user requested features and ones I wanted to see. I'm pretty happy with it.

So, what is there left to do? It's mostly going back and fixing all the things I broke when I was adding new features. Most of the broken things are user interface related, which is sort of annoying, because those are generally harder for me to fix. On the other hand, the updated calculation engine is finished, and it's smokin'. I got an another 2-4x speed increase over the last version, and it's pretty instantaneous. The only other feature I'll reveal right now is the programmer mode was updated and improved quite a bit.

I'm not exactly sure when it'll be ready, but hopefully sometime within the next week or two. I'm pretty sure the wait will be worth it.

I already have a list of features to add for the release after 1.0, which will be 1.1. And some of them I've never seen anywhere else, not even in Matlab or Maple. It should be pretty sweet. After 1.1, I'm probably going to relax the pace of development of the widget so I can focus on some other things I want to code.

Version 1.0 is coming along nicely. It has a bunch of new things, and from using the development version for the past couple weeks, I can't go back to 0.93... the new features are that useful (to me at least). Sorry to leave you in the dark, but I like surprises. I think that this will be the biggest upgrade between versions, and I'll hopefully have it out soon. It depends on how much free time I have to fix the bugs and complete the features.

Meanwhile, version 0.93 was released a couple weeks ago, and I got a bunch of feedback on it, especially after it was posted up on The Unofficial Apple Weblog. I read everything, and I tried to get back to you if you left your e-mail address. If I somehow missed a question, use the feedback form to let me know again.

I figured I'd go over the biggest feature request real quick: "RPN Mode". This will never happen. I'm sorry to be blunt, but it's true. Not only do I not know anything about RPN, but the entire reason I wrote PEMDAS is because I didn't like the one-button-at-a-time calculators.

Here's my reasoning: if I'm calculating an equation dealing with boundary layers, I don't want to have to think about how to enter the equation... it seems like there are all these weird backwards rules about how to do equations in RPN. Boundary layers hurts my head enough... I want to type the equation exactly how it is on my paper, hit enter, and have the answer pop up. It's really cool that you think PEMDAS is nice and would want to use it more, but I have no desire to implement any feature that's contradictory to the reason I wrote the program in the first place. On the bright side, there are a bunch of RPN calculators out there already... a lot more than formula-based calculators, at least.

But... a big thanks to everyone who requested features, a lot of them were really good, and will pop up in 1.0 or later revisions.

In other news, I am thinking about releasing an early alpha or beta version of another widget I have. I hate memorizing things, and this thing helps out a bunch. But right now it's pretty unusable for anyone that doesn't know Javascript, so I have to fix that.