InstaCalc Holiday Special (Part 2)

December 24th, 2006

A new release for the holidays with some experimental features: http://instacalc.com/beta

Example of InstaCalc beta

Example of table view in InstaCalc beta

1. Command bar to show available functions: Use the drop-down to browse and insert any commands you need.

2. Scratchpad view: An experiment where calc meets notepad. Just write text and the results appear alongside. From initial thoughts it changes the look quite a bit, so may not be the default. Still, it’s really useful for copying/pasting text around.

3. Table view: Paste data into your email, Word, or Excel (columns are preserved). This will be the basis for a print-friendly view.

And last but not least: Unit conversions

Get instant, real-time conversions in the style of Google calculator. Even better, you can use your own units, which are ignored but useful for readability. Let’s say you run an orchard making 5 apples/day (pretty small, I know). To find your yearly output you’d write:

  • 5 apples/day in apples/year = 1,826 apples/year

Now let’s say you want to produce 1000 apples/year. How many apples per day do you need?

  • 1000 apples/year in apples/day = 2.737 apples/day

Pretty sweet, eh? Try out these other conversions (copy & paste into the scratchpad):

15 mpg in km/liter
.002 cents/kb in dollars/mb
150 gallons/sec in liters/minute
150 lbs in kg
1 acre in m^2
3 dollars/week in dollars/year

But wait, there’s more! You can even include units when assigning variables. The units are politely ignored, but can help readability:

speed = 15 mph
2 * speed

One caveat

The “save link” in the beta is purposefully disabled, and points to the main site. The beta behavior / layout may change and I don’t want your links to behave strangely. The new features will be on the main site soon enough.

Gimme gimme gimme… feedback

I’m taking a break for the holidays, will let the beta bake, take in feedback, squash bugs and update the documentation. After that, the changes will appear on the main site early next year. Try out the beta and let me know what you think!

Posted by kalid Filed in General

9 Responses to “InstaCalc Holiday Special (Part 2)”

  1. Sean Says:
    December 30th, 2006 at 12:24 pm

    Love the beta! Instacalc is great.

  2. Jordan Running Says:
    January 1st, 2007 at 3:29 pm

    Wow, I love the scratchpad! It’s essential to be able to switch to the standard calculator view (and I love the new table view), but for getting started it’s a huge time-saver to be able to bang out those equations just like it’s Notepad.

  3. kalid Says:
    January 1st, 2007 at 5:10 pm

    Thanks for the feedback, I’m glad you like the new features!

    I’m currently debating which one (scratchpad or regular calculator) should be the default - scratchpad is faster but may not be intuitive for first-time users - it’s a bit of a new way to present a calculator :) .

  4. Peritus Says:
    January 1st, 2007 at 5:42 pm

    I’m missing the binomial coefficient. like google calculator’s (49 choose 6) or so.

  5. kalid Says:
    January 5th, 2007 at 2:07 am

    Thanks Peritus, I plan on adding that in. I had it in some private versions but haven’t added it officially - I’m still thinking about the syntax to use.

    Spreadsheets use the COMBIN function though something like “choose(49;6)” or (49 choose 6) is more natural.

  6. tom Says:
    February 19th, 2007 at 9:42 pm

    This will work great for creating characters and dice rolls for online roll playing games (think dungeons and dragons). Theres lots of things I could think of that would be useful to add to this program to help make it a better RPG assistant. One thought would be to allow it to understand “1d20″ as “result = random(20)”. Also, if there was a way to store values or lock cells so that they are uneditable. And if you could create a refresh button that a player could hit to indicate a new roll, along a way to instantly email the results to other players with every roll so that players cant cheat, or record results online. This would be awesome for RPGs if it had some of that functionality, as well as others.

  7. kalid Says:
    February 24th, 2007 at 4:32 pm

    Hi Tom, thanks for the comments. I like the idea of shortcuts, I might even extend it to be user-defined.

    For the refresh button, if you press “Enter” in a blank row (or even move the arrow key) it will recalculate the result for you.

    The emailing/anti-cheating stuff will be tough however, and a bit specific to D&D :)

  8. Bob Markowitz Says:
    May 16th, 2007 at 8:42 am

    Do you have (or can you develop) the ability to calculate the difference between two dates, or date plus constant = ?

    Other than that, the new Beta solved about all of the problems I had.

    Thanks,
    Bob

  9. kalid Says:
    May 18th, 2007 at 1:19 am

    Hi Bob, thanks for the comment. Right now I’m working on date calculations, so ideally you can say things like

    Feb 11 to May 23 (and get a number of days)
    today + 3 weeks
    now + 3 hours

    It’s in the works :)

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