Sorry there hasn't been much word over here about the development of the PEMDAS widget lately. I've been pretty busy, between school reports, exams, homework, and that sort of thing. I've worked on the widget a lot, but it's still not to the point where it's ready to be released... there are still a couple bugs and non-complete features I need to pound out first. There are a lot of things going into it... a lot more new features than normal, and I'm also updating and adding several things to the website. Sorry for the wait, but I hope it'll be worth it. If you absolutely can't wait and want a beta version to test out all the new features, use the feedback form to let me know, and I'll see what I can do.

Now, I just want to rant a little bit about other pieces of calculating software, namely Matlab. Matlab is supposedly the 'de-facto' calculating software for engineering. And, I'll admit, it can do some pretty powerful things. But has anyone ever used it? It's... aggravating.

First, just a quick aside. Look at the About screen, which also doubles as the splash screen:

It's 256 colors! Now, although the last time I saw a 256 color image in a user interface was probably 1996, I normally wouldn't bash it too much because it doesn't get in the way of me being able to calculate things. But in Matlab's case, however, I think it's more of a symbol of their lack of concern to try new things (in my opinion).

Admittedly, I don't do too much with it... I work with matrices, plotting, or numerically solving ODEs and the like. I actually try to use PEMDAS as much as I can, not just because I like it a lot more, but because it gives me ideas for new features to add.

Going back to Matlab. I don't know, I just feel like because their target audience is engineers and scientists, they think it gives them a free pass to disregard common practices and not put any thought into making things easier, because we have a lot of experience with numbers and stuff, and we'll deal with it. And that's sort of true. But... I probably spend more than half my time just trying to figure out how to do what I want to do because everything is so backwards and non-graphical.

That, in my opinion, is where it fails. It can do calculations 300 times faster than any other language, for all I care. But if I mess up on the equation, or use the wrong equation to begin with because I spend so much time on writing a script rather than understanding what I'm doing, what's the point? I personally think one of the most important parts of engineering is understanding how you got from A to B, and making sure you're satisfied with where you are at B. And, in my opinion, Matlab makes it a lot harder than it should be to do that.

Here are some of my other gripes with it:

• Still no universal version yet
• Needs X11 to run - causes problems with at least system keyboard input (I type in Dvorak), and printing plots.
• The standard calculation formatting is really hard to read. format short eng seems to work the best, but even then it adds zeros to the end of the number, or lists 3 exponents in the exponent, making it hard to read.
• Doing element-by-element calcluations in an array is hard to do without a for loop.
• Array indices start with 1, unlike most other programming languages that start with 0. Plus you call array indices like a(1) instead of a[1].
• It's hard to tell what variables are already defined.
• You can't use a variable in an equation if it hasn't been defined yet.
• You can't use units.
• The help isn't very good, and not available in PDF format.
• Functions must be defined in separate files.
• Most error messages, beside the line it is on, are not helpful.
• The way the program interacts with a licensing server is not very good.
• I always seem to have problems I shouldn't be having. Today Matlab wasn't letting me use global variables in a function, so I had to define everything in the function to get it to work right.

Aside from Matlab, I also use Maple a lot, which has a much better interface for doing calculations in, and the latest version has a lot of really great improvements. But Maple is not without it's flaws... the interface will often hang on you, so you have to quit the program and restart it. It's also not very easy to work with matrices, and it's plotting capabilites aren't even close to Matlabs, even with 2D plots. I tried Mathematica for about 10 minutes, and I didn't like it much... I prefer Maple, which seems to be similar to it.

So, what am I getting at? Well, I think after 1.0 of the widget, I'm going to try and write a Cocoa based calculator. I have a lot of ideas I want to see that would make my life easier, but I don't think they'd ever be implemented in software like Maple or Matlab... they have an enormous codebase with a trillion features, and they have to worry about backwards compatability... and the features I'm thinking of would have to be implemented in the core of the code.

So... if you're interested in beta testing my attempt at actual calculating software, instead of just a little widget, let me know using the feedback form. In the meantime, I'll try to get 1.0 of the widget out soon. Sorry for the delay...