8 ms·

I don't have a problem with UWP and I really like the new Calculator. Being able to pin the calculator on-top and resize it so that it's touch friendly really

I don't have a problem with UWP and I really like the new Calculator. Being able to pin the calculator on-top and resize it so that it's touch friendly really boosts productivity for me on a laptop without a 10key. If you're not using a touchscreen then I can see the improvements not being that big of a deal but I'm not aware of any regressions in functionality.

airstrike 7y ago
I'm sorry, but I find the Calculator app woefully unimpressive. I can't even type a simple expression with parenthesis. There's no RPN option. There isn't a "financial" setting (only scientific and programmer, for some reason). The list goes on; I'm sure I'm not alone on this one. It is so, so, so basic it's essentially useless, I end up being forced to open Excel, run Python in the terminal, go on Wolfram Alpha or, worse yet (!!) grab pen and paper to perform basic math. I know this is unrelated to UWP, but I'd rather they focus less on improving an UI that is inevitably trivial (little boxes with numbers arranged in a grid within a bigger box) and instead added some much needed features. The fact that I am using a computer must be lost on whoever decided to green light this abomination as the default calculator in any OS ever, let alone one released in the 21st century.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Feel free to try contributing if you think it that trivial to add "much needed features": https://github.com/microsoft/calculator https://github.com/microsoft/calculator
  - airstrike 7y ago
    Not my cup of tea, sorry. I don't need to provide patches to be allowed to bash software I've paid for ;-)
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      Contributions doesn't mean just patches. Also, technically you didn't pay for Calculator, you paid for Windows and got a calculator. The fact that Calculator today is open source adds additional insight that it was always probably a "bonus" accessory, as the most interesting stuff happening to it today are from community contributions. Anyway, for instance, you could see that RPN is on the radar: https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/issues/128 https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/issues/128
      - grenoire 7y ago
        There was a version with all of these features; new version doesn't even have its functional feature parity down...
        WorldMaker 7y ago
        calc.exe never had RPN support. Some of y'all seem to be remembering a very different calculator than the one built in to Windows. "UWP" Calculator has feature parity with the calc.exe of Vista/7, and has features that calc.exe never had. I wish more of the source control history had been migrated to the git repository, but it's pretty clear from the header comments that one was built out of the codebase of the other (the core of the calculation engine itself goes way back).
      - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        "Yeah, well technically you bought a car, you didn't pay for an engine, so the engine being crap isn't something you can complain about." I don't think this sort of argument works. The reason it's open source is most likely because it's got nothing of value to competitors but lets them point and say "see, we've changed, look we make things open source now"; aka marketing.
        WorldMaker 7y ago
        I find that analogy weak because Windows works fine without a calc.exe or Calculator app, but a car doesn't run without an engine. Calculator is more a cup holder. I'm not trying to stop anyone for complaining about their cup holder, that's a great day-to-day productivity tool for a lot of car owners. Just pointing out that fit/finish/polish on a cup holder comes after the things like the engine. Fwiw, it seems to go far beyond marketing that Calculator is open source, as community contributions have made it into releases and Calculator has seemed to benefit from more (and more diverse) development resources than it had in XP/Vista/7.
  - grawprog 7y ago
    So become an unpaid Microsoft employee to re-add features that used to exist and that do exist in nearly every alternative? Don't they make enough money off of os sales, subscriptions, forced ads and telemetry? They need free labour to fix their broken software too?
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Many people love to be FAANG unpaid employees, why should it be any different for Microsoft?
      - grawprog 7y ago
        Why not put those efforts towards an actual open source calculator project that could really use the volunteer efforts and doesn't already have an army of paid employees? https://qalculate.github.io/ https://qalculate.github.io/ https://bitbucket.org/heldercorreia/speedcrunch/ https://bitbucket.org/heldercorreia/speedcrunch/
        chaorace 7y ago
        Is that a rhetorical question, or do I really get to argue the benefits of contributing to one of the most installed calculators on the planet? Contributing to small projects is good, but it's not for everyone and you're definitely kidding yourself if an MIT licensed software on Github doesn't qualify as "actual open source".
        grawprog 7y ago
        Yeah I tend to consider moral and ethical implications of my decisions also, I forget not everyone does. I feel time spent working on projects for a company that hasn't spent the better part of 3 decades trying to dominate and control the entirety of the computer market using strategies that destroy competition and supress innovation, that tracks and monitors its users, that has such a small amount of respect that it will inject ads into a product most customers are forced to purchase should they wish to own a computer, is more valuable in that it makes the world just a slightly better place, rather than a slightly shittier one.
- McP 7y ago
  > I can't even type a simple expression with parenthesis Use Scientific mode and parentheses work fine
  - airstrike 7y ago
    Work "fine" but not quite "great". Made a mistake? Retype the whole expression, as there's no backspace / undo even before hitting =
    - dpwm 7y ago
      It sounds like they made the behaviour imitate that of a bad scientific calculator. I've not used a physical for some years, but even then the Casio ones had a backspace, and had apparently done so for a good few generations.
- cptskippy 7y ago
  TLDR; it's an abomination because it's not matlab?
- xaedes 7y ago
  Yea, the new calculator is kinda bad. But you can search the web for "windows old calculator" and replace the new one with this. It is exactly the calculator as you are used to from Win7.
badsectoracula 7y ago
The regressions are in that it is much slower and wastes screen real estate. 90% of the window size is for faux buttons that have zero purpose for anyone who doesn't use a touch screen on their Windows computer (ie. at least 99% of the Windows users) and the 10% that remains uses oversized elements with wasteful padding. Here is what i use as a calculator on Windows: http://runtimeterror.com/tools/calc/calc.hta.txt http://runtimeterror.com/tools/calc/calc.hta.txt It looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/eWZfcXB.png https://i.imgur.com/eWZfcXB.png and not only is much faster to open than Windows Calculator (ironic, considering it loads an entire browser engine) but also more compact and doesn't waste any screen space (100% of its window is dedicated to its actual functionality instead of being an obsolete skeuomorphism that was originally made to help people associate desktop calculators with the virtual desktop metaphor used on the Macintosh back in 1984 when actual physical desktop calculators could be found everywhere).
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  > ie. at least 99% of the Windows users I bet a lot more than 1% of Windows users have touch screens at this point, since they've become more-or-less standard on high-end laptops. Mind, it still could easily be < 10%, given how many people have old/cheap PCs. I don't quite know what the solution is though. The last thing Windows 10 needs in addition to its two separate control panels, command lines, and web browsers are two separate calculator apps.
  - olyjohn 7y ago
    At least they only have one kernel running both Windows and the Linux subsystem. Because that is somehow better than just running a Linux VM with a real Linux kernel.
    - uncletaco 7y ago
      They are running a linux VM with a real linux kernel is WSL2.
- kalleboo 7y ago
cricrosoft 7y ago
It's a travesty that you're even using Windows. With Arch Linux which is the best operating system, it's really appalling to hear that people use Windows these days. Come to arch my nigger. Fucking windows man listen to it. Arch Linux is the only sane operating-system my nigger.
viraptor 7y ago
There's nothing uwp-specific about that behaviour though. The classic calculator could be made resizable and gain a "stay in top" option.
- 1996 7y ago
  My calculator is bc in a bash so I don't really care about either. However, I really like the live weather tile, and I use it every day, sometimes several times a day by just pressing the start button, looking at the forecast, and pressing it again to go back to my app. It was not intrusive and helpful. I also used the live calendar and mail that way (I hate notifications) -- and the photos too to see if new pics had been synchronized. I'm afraid Windows 10 is going way from Windows 8, and closer to Windows 7. I don't think this is progress.

airstrike 7y ago

I'm sorry, but I find the Calculator app woefully unimpressive. I can't even type a simple expression with parenthesis. There's no RPN option. There isn't a "financial" setting (only scientific and programmer, for some reason). The list goes on; I'm sure I'm not alone on this one. It is so, so, so basic it's essentially useless, I end up being forced to open Excel, run Python in the terminal, go on Wolfram Alpha or, worse yet (!!) grab pen and paper to perform basic math. I know this is unrelated to UWP, but I'd rather they focus less on improving an UI that is inevitably trivial (little boxes with numbers arranged in a grid within a bigger box) and instead added some much needed features. The fact that I am using a computer must be lost on whoever decided to green light this abomination as the default calculator in any OS ever, let alone one released in the 21st century.

WorldMaker 7y ago
Feel free to try contributing if you think it that trivial to add "much needed features": https://github.com/microsoft/calculator https://github.com/microsoft/calculator
- airstrike 7y ago
  Not my cup of tea, sorry. I don't need to provide patches to be allowed to bash software I've paid for ;-)
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    Contributions doesn't mean just patches. Also, technically you didn't pay for Calculator, you paid for Windows and got a calculator. The fact that Calculator today is open source adds additional insight that it was always probably a "bonus" accessory, as the most interesting stuff happening to it today are from community contributions. Anyway, for instance, you could see that RPN is on the radar: https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/issues/128 https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/issues/128
    - grenoire 7y ago
      There was a version with all of these features; new version doesn't even have its functional feature parity down...
      - WorldMaker 7y ago
        calc.exe never had RPN support. Some of y'all seem to be remembering a very different calculator than the one built in to Windows. "UWP" Calculator has feature parity with the calc.exe of Vista/7, and has features that calc.exe never had. I wish more of the source control history had been migrated to the git repository, but it's pretty clear from the header comments that one was built out of the codebase of the other (the core of the calculation engine itself goes way back).
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      "Yeah, well technically you bought a car, you didn't pay for an engine, so the engine being crap isn't something you can complain about." I don't think this sort of argument works. The reason it's open source is most likely because it's got nothing of value to competitors but lets them point and say "see, we've changed, look we make things open source now"; aka marketing.
      - WorldMaker 7y ago
        I find that analogy weak because Windows works fine without a calc.exe or Calculator app, but a car doesn't run without an engine. Calculator is more a cup holder. I'm not trying to stop anyone for complaining about their cup holder, that's a great day-to-day productivity tool for a lot of car owners. Just pointing out that fit/finish/polish on a cup holder comes after the things like the engine. Fwiw, it seems to go far beyond marketing that Calculator is open source, as community contributions have made it into releases and Calculator has seemed to benefit from more (and more diverse) development resources than it had in XP/Vista/7.
- grawprog 7y ago
  So become an unpaid Microsoft employee to re-add features that used to exist and that do exist in nearly every alternative? Don't they make enough money off of os sales, subscriptions, forced ads and telemetry? They need free labour to fix their broken software too?
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Many people love to be FAANG unpaid employees, why should it be any different for Microsoft?
    - grawprog 7y ago
      Why not put those efforts towards an actual open source calculator project that could really use the volunteer efforts and doesn't already have an army of paid employees? https://qalculate.github.io/ https://qalculate.github.io/ https://bitbucket.org/heldercorreia/speedcrunch/ https://bitbucket.org/heldercorreia/speedcrunch/
      - chaorace 7y ago
        Is that a rhetorical question, or do I really get to argue the benefits of contributing to one of the most installed calculators on the planet? Contributing to small projects is good, but it's not for everyone and you're definitely kidding yourself if an MIT licensed software on Github doesn't qualify as "actual open source".
        grawprog 7y ago
        Yeah I tend to consider moral and ethical implications of my decisions also, I forget not everyone does. I feel time spent working on projects for a company that hasn't spent the better part of 3 decades trying to dominate and control the entirety of the computer market using strategies that destroy competition and supress innovation, that tracks and monitors its users, that has such a small amount of respect that it will inject ads into a product most customers are forced to purchase should they wish to own a computer, is more valuable in that it makes the world just a slightly better place, rather than a slightly shittier one.
McP 7y ago
> I can't even type a simple expression with parenthesis Use Scientific mode and parentheses work fine
- airstrike 7y ago
  Work "fine" but not quite "great". Made a mistake? Retype the whole expression, as there's no backspace / undo even before hitting =
  - dpwm 7y ago
    It sounds like they made the behaviour imitate that of a bad scientific calculator. I've not used a physical for some years, but even then the Casio ones had a backspace, and had apparently done so for a good few generations.
cptskippy 7y ago
TLDR; it's an abomination because it's not matlab?
xaedes 7y ago
Yea, the new calculator is kinda bad. But you can search the web for "windows old calculator" and replace the new one with this. It is exactly the calculator as you are used to from Win7.

badsectoracula 7y ago

The regressions are in that it is much slower and wastes screen real estate. 90% of the window size is for faux buttons that have zero purpose for anyone who doesn't use a touch screen on their Windows computer (ie. at least 99% of the Windows users) and the 10% that remains uses oversized elements with wasteful padding. Here is what i use as a calculator on Windows: http://runtimeterror.com/tools/calc/calc.hta.txt http://runtimeterror.com/tools/calc/calc.hta.txt It looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/eWZfcXB.png https://i.imgur.com/eWZfcXB.png and not only is much faster to open than Windows Calculator (ironic, considering it loads an entire browser engine) but also more compact and doesn't waste any screen space (100% of its window is dedicated to its actual functionality instead of being an obsolete skeuomorphism that was originally made to help people associate desktop calculators with the virtual desktop metaphor used on the Macintosh back in 1984 when actual physical desktop calculators could be found everywhere).

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
> ie. at least 99% of the Windows users I bet a lot more than 1% of Windows users have touch screens at this point, since they've become more-or-less standard on high-end laptops. Mind, it still could easily be < 10%, given how many people have old/cheap PCs. I don't quite know what the solution is though. The last thing Windows 10 needs in addition to its two separate control panels, command lines, and web browsers are two separate calculator apps.
- olyjohn 7y ago
  At least they only have one kernel running both Windows and the Linux subsystem. Because that is somehow better than just running a Linux VM with a real Linux kernel.
  - uncletaco 7y ago
    They are running a linux VM with a real linux kernel is WSL2.
kalleboo 7y ago

cricrosoft 7y ago

It's a travesty that you're even using Windows. With Arch Linux which is the best operating system, it's really appalling to hear that people use Windows these days. Come to arch my nigger. Fucking windows man listen to it. Arch Linux is the only sane operating-system my nigger.

viraptor 7y ago

There's nothing uwp-specific about that behaviour though. The classic calculator could be made resizable and gain a "stay in top" option.

1996 7y ago
My calculator is bc in a bash so I don't really care about either. However, I really like the live weather tile, and I use it every day, sometimes several times a day by just pressing the start button, looking at the forecast, and pressing it again to go back to my app. It was not intrusive and helpful. I also used the live calendar and mail that way (I hate notifications) -- and the photos too to see if new pics had been synchronized. I'm afraid Windows 10 is going way from Windows 8, and closer to Windows 7. I don't think this is progress.