Every now and then someone writes something on a website, and then Google indexes it, and then I encounter a problem and start going crazy trying to figure it out, and then I go to Google and search for something, and then I find that persons site and read it, and then my sanity is saved.

Today it was this site.

But seriously, that site was definitely was a huge help, thanks to the guy who wrote it.

Ok, so I may have been a little vague yesterday. The irony, of course, is that I was telling the truth -- though I was only talking about changing the name PEMDAS, not stopping development on the calculator altogether.

You see, the problem with "PEMDAS", while a freaking awesome name, is that not everyone learned PEMDAS in school, especially in other countries (who knew?). Also, as time goes on, my focus will gradually shift to the Cocoa app, and I want the Cocoa app and Dashboard widget to share a similar name.

Although the current name of the Cocoa app, "Super PEMDAS", is probably one of the coolest names ever (especially with the icon), I don't think as many other engineers share my fondness for Mario. In my experience, it's hard enough to get engineers to even consider using a Mac, so getting them to use a program called Super PEMDAS is just one more hurdle to jump.

Finally, there is also a marketing aspect. Calling the app "Super PEMDAS" makes it sound like the Cocoa app is the Pro version of the widget, when really, I see the widget as an 'express' version of the app. It may not be obvious now, but I think as the Cocoa app gets better, you'll see what I mean.

But anyways, I'm still actively working on Version 1.3 of the Dashboard widget. I couldn't help myself, and rewrote most of the interface code, since that portion of code hasn't changed much in the past two years, and really needed an overhaul. Both the code and the interface look a lot cleaner now, and I'm shooting to have 1.3 ready in the next couple weeks.

'Til next time...

A little more than 2 years ago, I started work on a calculator, with the main goal that it would help me work faster and with less effort than everything else out there. Originally, it was actually called MikeCalc -- it wasn't even until June 8, 2006, a week before I made the calculator public, that it became known as PEMDAS.

I've been a little busy lately, as you may have noticed with the lack of updates, so sorry for not announcing this sooner. But I've been thinking about it for the past couple months, and I've finally come to a decision -- that after 8 public releases, I've decided version 1.2 will be the last release of PEMDAS.

At some point, I'll try to post a follow-up with a bit more explanation. To the fans of PEMDAS, I apologize. But I think it's for the better.

Thanks for understanding,
Mike

I've been working on Super PEMDAS 0.2, and I found a couple bugs in PEMDAS as a result of going back and looking at the calculation code. Mostly that, in PEMDAS, floor(), ceil(), and round() don't work with negative numbers.

So I'm going to be working exclusively on fixing those bugs, as well as adding some new features into the version 1.3 update. If I can find some time, hopefully it will be released late February or early March.

Back to programming...