I have a bunch of new features to announce, thanks again for the feedback (and for those I still haven’t replied to, I’ll get there soon). I wanted to release this earlier, but I had so many new pieces that I hesitated to change one section for fear of harming the others. There’s a lot of lessons to learn, which I’ll write about in the future.

Now for the fun part - here’s what you get in the first wave of features:

New Calculator Features

• Easy percents. Write “100 + 10%” to get 110. You can even do combinations: “150 - 25% + 5%” would be a 25% discount followed by a 5% sales tax. Cool, huh?
• Easy exponents. Finally, you can write “5^2″ as you’d expect, rather than Excel-style “power(5:2)” which was quite ugly.
• Factorial. Write “3!” to get 6 (3 * 2 * 1).
• Easy Currency formatting. Write “$3″ and it becomes “$3.00″. Put a “$” in your equation to format as currency: “$5/3 = $1.67″
• Create binary numbers with “0b101010″. Write octal with “0o567″.
• Easier trigonometry. Degrees are on by default: “sin(30)” is in degrees. If you want radians, write “sin(30 rad)”. My current philosophy is no settings, so no deg/rad button. Just write “rad” if you mean radians.
• Easier logarithms. Use ln(x) [natural log] and log(x) [log base 10].
• Unicode support in the descriptions - save a note in Japanese!
• Nicer reference section that is much easier to read and loaded with examples.
• Create Shorter URLs with TinyURL integration in the save button.
• Prettier notes that look like a yellow post-it. Notes don’t seem to be widely used and are now hidden by default.
• Moved to Amazon S3 for file hosting (this should hopefully make things faster - we’ll see).
• Better formatting for binary, hex and octal numbers: they are printed with their prefix (0b, 0o, 0x) when you use bin(), hex() or oct().
• Better errors for undefined variables.

Easier Embedding

• HTML-only embed, for websites that do not support Javascript
• Editable height and width for the widget
• Simpler Javascript that has no newlines, making it easier for blogs to use (some blogs would format the newlines and not load the script)

And for those prone to typos:

• Autofix spacing errors. “123 456″ becomes “123,456″
• Autofix Excel syntax. InstaCalc recognizes “=3 * 4″ and “3 * 4 =”. Even though Excel conditioned you to put the equals sign in the wrong place, I like you anyway.

Ok, that’s it for the first wave. The next feature release will have a nice surprise