10th July 2008

A Touch of Class

PCalc is now available to buy for the iPhone and iPod Touch on the iTunes Application Store! You can find out more details here. Let me know what you think at the usual address!

2nd July 2008

PCalc In Your Pocket

So I can finally talk a bit about what I've been working on for the last six months!

PCalc for the iPhone (and iPod Touch) is now ready for release, and has been submitted to the iTunes application store this afternoon. All being well, it should be available immediately when the store opens for business.

Apple has asked us not to show any screenshots from iPhone apps until after the store goes live, so I will respect their wishes (and mighty legal teams) and not put anything up here yet.

But I can still tell you some details.

LIke the desktop app, PCalc for the iPhone includes an extensive set of unit conversions, constants, a paper tape, an RPN mode, engineering and scientific notation, as well as support for hexadecimal, octal and binary calculations. It has been redesigned from the ground up with the handheld experience in mind. It looks great too!

It's going to cost $9.99 in the US - pricing will vary in other countries, but in that range.

More details to follow soon. I hope you like it!

3rd April 2008

PCalc At Your Fingertips

A very small tease for now :)

7th March 2008

The short answer is yes, I am working on a version of PCalc for the iPhone / iPod Touch!

I expect to have it ready for the introduction of Apple's new application store in June, but at this point I'm still digesting all the details of the SDK announcement. More to follow!

1st January 2008

Happy New Year! Thanks to everybody who has helped support us in 2007!

29th November 2007

Ok, so where did the last year go?

Just wanted to reassure people that I haven't forgotten about PCalc, despite the lack of updates here. DragThing has needed a lot of work for Leopard compatibility, and I've been focusing my efforts there of late. And PCalc works just fine on Leopard!

If you have any suggestions for things you'd like to see in a future release, let me know on the forums or at the following address:

Thanks!

8th January 2007

A slightly late Happy New Year!

If you haven't seen it already, and were wondering why things were a little quiet here, I have been working hard on DragThing for the last couple of months - you can see the latest version 5.7.1 with dock themes here.

I'll get back to PCalc soon!

22nd September 2006

PCalc 3.2 is now released!

"6.65245873e-29"

A number of neat things in this version:

• Firstly, in anticipation of the great new speech in Leopard, I've added full speech support to the application. PCalc can now read your actions and results back to you, as well as speak the current number being displayed. It's still very usable on Tiger of course.

• Secondly, I've added two new extra large calculator styles with big buttons and displays. I've had many requests from people who wanted bigger calculators, and I think these certainly qualify! In addition, I've greatly improved the support for VoiceOver and other accessibility software. Hopefully, these changes - as well as the speech support - will make PCalc more useful to a wider group of people than before.

• Thirdly, there's support for an unlimited number of constants. 3.2 ships with around thirty new scientific constants built-in and more can be added by means of simple to create plug-ins. The constants menu is now hierarchical, with the constants grouped by subject area.

• Lastly, this version also improves support for international users, especially those who use a comma as decimal separator rather than a dot.

There's a full list of all the changes here. Go get it on the Download Page and let me know what you think.

Oh, and needless to say, this is a free upgrade for registered users. For everybody else, check out the DragThing / PCalc special offer that's currently running on the Kagi order page...

Enjoy!

13th September 2006

The next PCalc release is likely to be a small 3.2 update which adds full speech support and various other accessibility features. When I was at WWDC last month, I was really impressed by the new speech in Leopard, and I wanted to experiment with it.

In the meantime, I've started a new promotion on our Kagi order page.

From today, if you buy PCalc and DragThing together, you can get them both for $34, saving $14 on the previous total price. Look for the "PCalc 3 & DragThing 5 bundle" special offer at the top of the order page.

You can look at it as getting DragThing for nearly half-price when you buy PCalc, or getting PCalc for a mere $5 when you buy DragThing. Your choice!

28th July 2006

I've just released a small PCalc 3.1.1 update.

This version fixes a display problem with the Engineering Notation support that was added in 3.1.

20th July 2006

PCalc 3.1 is now released!

Toy Surprise

Three notable additions:

• Firstly, and most importantly, I've added extensive AppleScript support to the application. Not only is PCalc itself fully scriptable, but you can now write your own functions and conversions in AppleScript instead of the old PCalc code. Functions can do anything that is possible with AppleScript, including displaying dialogs, calling scripting additions, and talking to other applications.

• Secondly, I've added Engineering Notation support to the application and also to the Dashboard widget (the widget also gains Scientific Notation support). Hopefully this will be appreciated by the engineer types out there.

• Thirdly - and purely for some eye-candy I'll admit - I've added a new calculator style to the application which looks just like the PCalc Dashboard widget. This was one of the most common feature requests after the original release of PCalc 3!

There's a full list of all the changes here.

Of course, this is a free upgrade if you've already paid for PCalc 2 or 3. So go and grab a copy from the Download Page right now and enjoy.

On a personal note, this release marks my return to coding, after a longer than expected period of illness and recovery. Thanks to everybody who helped me through it!

29th May 2006

Just wanted to give people another quick update on my health. Things seem to be generally okay now. I've been healing a little bit slower than the doctors expected, but it doesn't sound like I need an operation thankfully. I'm still a little tender, but mostly back to normal. I'm off all the painkillers, so at least my brain is working again!

Anyway, many apologies for the lack of updates and thanks again for your patience and support while I got better. Normal service will be resumed shortly!

21st March 2006

A quick update on my health for those who were worried!

The good news is that I seem to be improving - I came off the antibiotics nearly three weeks ago, and things haven't got any worse since then. That's a hopeful sign that the underlying infection has been dealt with, and I won't need to go back into hospital for an operation. I'm still on a lot of painkillers, but I'm slowly reducing them.

I'm not allowed to work yet, but I think I'll be able to start doing things again sometime next month. Saskia has been answering all the support emails and watching the forums in the meantime.

Generally, I'm feeling a lot better than I was, but I've still got a way to go. Thanks for all your patience and good wishes!

28th February 2006

Just a quick post to let people know what's been happening.

I've been rather ill recently - I just spent 16 days in hospital due to a nasty abdominal abscess (around 5cm in diameter) which has been pushing all my internal organs around. It's not exactly pleasant, but not life threatening.

Due to the position, the doctors don't want to operate for fear of damaging things in the process, and so were treating me around the clock with IV antibiotics to reduce the size as well as giving me lots of pain killers. If things don't work out with the antibiotics, I could still end up back in hospital again for an operation.

They think it started with a mild appendicitis which led to the abscess forming from the appendix. All I can tell you is that it hurts! I did convince them to let me examine the CT scans out of curiosity, but to my non-medically-trained eyes, it was just a big black blob next to some lighter blobs.

Anyway, as of last week, I'm back home again. The doctors say I have a three month recovery period ahead of me until I'm entirely well, and with the pain killers and antibiotics I don't have a lot of energy or lucidity during the day. So, I'm not going to be checking my mail or reading the forums too regularly, answering messages even less, and I'm certainly not allowed to be working! I'm hoping that it won't take me that length of time to get back into things, but I can't make any promises, and my focus at the moment has to be on getting better.

Saskia has assumed all the support duties for TLA Systems in the meantime, and I'm just in recovery mode for now. If you send us an email, we'll do our best to reply as soon as possible, but please be patient if it takes a little while longer than normal, or we don't have a fix ready right away.

Thanks for your understanding!

James

12th January 2006

Ready on day one!

Yes, PCalc 3 is a Universal Binary, and includes full support for the new Intel based Macs announced at Macworld. You can download the latest version here.

5th January 2006

PCalc 3.0.3 is now released!

A quick change of clothes

The main point of this release is to improve the Intel processor support in preparation for Macworld next week, as well as fix some bugs. But I've also added some new styles to the PCalc Dashboard Widget, including wood, metal, and a number of colours.

This is a free upgrade if you've already paid for PCalc 2 or 3. You can get it from the Download Page now. I've also released a new version of DragThing today.

Enjoy!

22nd December 2005

A little teaser.

I'm currently working on small - free - updates to both PCalc and DragThing which may well become quite relevant on the 10th of January. As well as the main feature of those releases, I'm going to try and sneak something fun I was playing with into the PCalc widget…

29th October 2005

This one was a surprise to me too - it's PCalc 3.0.2!

Thanks to Michel Couture for spotting a mistake in the nautical mile unit conversions yesterday. Since I didn't want anybody to sail to the wrong place this weekend, I thought I should do an update to fix the problem as soon as possible.

I also went through all of the remaining 479 unit conversions and found a few things that needed correcting (notably the names of the UK and US tons had been swapped round), so I'd recommend that everybody updates to 3.0.2.

Apologies.

27th October 2005

As previously hinted, PCalc 3.0.1 is now released!

Can you spot the difference?

One complaint I heard after the PCalc 3.0 release was that it still wasn't supporting parentheses some thirteen years after the original release of PCalc 1.0. Not wanting to give anybody an excuse not to register, I decided it was time to remedy that.

Go and grab a copy of 3.0.1 from the Download Page. I'll wait.

Here's what's new:

• Added support for using parentheses while entering expressions.
• Added an option to show thousands separators in the Dashboard Widget.
• Added comma key to the default keyboard shortcuts.
• Improved keyboard handling in the Dashboard Widget.
• Now display a warning if you choose a keyboard shortcut which is already in use.
• Fixed a problem setting certain keyboard shortcuts.
• Fixed a problem displaying negative hexadecimal numbers in the Info drawer.
• Fixed a problem saving the full state of the calculators.

This is a free upgrade if you've already paid for PCalc 2 or 3.

For new users, PCalc costs US $19 for a single-user license. A special upgrade price of US $10 is available for those people who got PCalc 2.2.3 included with their Macs. Five and ten packs are available for US $64 and US $99 respectively.

This release still requires Mac OS X 10.4.2 or later. I've looked into supporting older systems, and unfortunately I don't think it's feasible. Even some of the simple things I'm using like the lists in the Preferences and Conversion windows don't work properly on 10.3.

And now a quick message for developer types. Regular users, avert your eyes!

Developers with Intel-based hardware should note that there is a known bug in the long double maths libraries of the current pre-release Mac OS X 10.4.x seed which stops PCalc 3 from working correctly. PCalc 3 works fine on the previous 10.4.2 seeds, and I'm reliably informed this problem is already fixed in later builds inside Apple. So hopefully a fix will show up soon. In the meantime, you might want to set PCalc to run under Rosetta in the Finder Get Info window. PowerPC-based Macs are completely unaffected of course.

Okay, you can look again.

19th October 2005

Regular readers of dragthing.com know how much I like my teaser images… Not sure when this will be ready for release, but hopefully soon.

(What could this mean?)

13th October 2005

Hey, a shiny new website! What could it mean? Surely, it couldn't be… a new version? After five years?

Yes, PCalc 3 is finally released! It's available now from the Download Page.

PCalc The Dashboard Widget

Here's a taste of what's changed:

• Completely rewritten to take advantage of Mac OS X Tiger.
• Includes a companion PCalc Dashboard Widget for quick calculations.
• More accurate maths engine.
• Brand new unit conversion mechanism including many new supported units.
• Editable keyboard shortcuts for all actions, including functions and unit conversions.
• New calculator styles including Metal and Basic.
• Support for adding third-party calculator styles, functions, and unit conversions.
• Enhanced RPN mode.
• Multiple undo and redo.
• Single icon drag install.
• Built-in software update mechanism.
• Universal Binary with support for both Intel and PowerPC processors.
• Lots more!

PCalc 3 is a free upgrade for registered users who previously bought PCalc 2, and existing serial numbers will continue to work. A special upgrade price of US $10 is available for those people who got PCalc 2.2.3 included with their Macs.

For new users, PCalc costs US $19 for a single-user license. Five and ten packs are also now available for US $64 and US $99 respectively.

Please note that PCalc 3 requires Mac OS X 10.4.2 or later and won't run on earlier versions of Mac OS. PCalc 2 is still available for those with older systems. This release only includes English language support at the moment. Other languages will follow.

I've put a lot of work into PCalc 3, so I hope you like it. Visit the new PCalc section of the DragThing Forums and let me know what you think, or send me an email to:

Of course, if you like PCalc, don't forget to check out my alternative dock application DragThing.

26th September 2005

Believe it or not, I'm currently working on a brand new version of PCalc!

More information to follow very soon... In the meantime, here's a list of some of the new features:

• Completely rewritten to take advantage of Mac OS X Tiger.
• More accurate maths engine.
• Brand new unit conversion mechanism.
• Editable keyboard shortcuts for all actions, including functions and unit conversions.
• New calculator styles including Metal and Basic.
• Support for adding third-party calculator styles, functions. and unit conversions.
• Enhanced RPN mode.
• Multiple undo and redo.
• Single icon drag install.
• Built-in software update mechanism.
• Universal Binary with support for both Intel and PowerPC processors.

And perhaps the best news. PCalc 3 will be a free upgrade for registered users who previously bought PCalc 2, and existing serial numbers will continue to work.

26th May 2003

So, people have been asking - "You haven't released a new version of PCalc in quite a while, are you still working on it?".

Well, it's true that I've mainly been concentrating on DragThing recently, but I haven't given up on PCalc either. No promises when the next release will be, but if you've got any suggestions for features you'd like to see, send them to the address below:

10th September 2002

Well, it was nice while it lasted!

Mac OS 10.2 has a new calculator (which I didn't have anything to do with, I should add), so Apple has stopped including PCalc with Macs sold in the US.

Their new calculator doesn't do RPN, Hexadecimal/Octal/Binary, user functions, or many of the other things PCalc does, so if you are looking for a more powerful alternative to the Apple calculator, please check out PCalc!

Also, in an effort to cut down the amount of spam I'm getting, I've removed all the links containing my email address from this site. Of course, you can still email me directly at the following address:

But hopefully that will stop spammers from getting this address quite as easily.

23rd January 2002

I'm very proud to announce that, thanks to Apple, PCalc is shipping as standard on the new Macs, at least in the US. It's a great way to celebrate PCalc's tenth birthday!

The version included is PCalc 2.2.3, which is a special release I made for Apple. Aside from being pre-registered, and using US English spellings, it is the same as the regular PCalc 2.2.2 available for download here, so you aren't missing any new features or bug fixes.

Needless to say, you should still register your copy if you didn't get it included with a new Mac - PCalc remains shareware, and the 2.2.3 version shouldn't be distributed at all except by Apple. Let me know if you find anybody else who does!

I'm hoping to get PCalc included with Macs in other countries in the future when I have more localised versions.

Thanks again to everybody at Apple, and to my beta testers, who made this possible.

14th May 2001

Here's another small update to PCalc - version 2.2.2 is now available on the download page. This is another small bug-fix release, primarily to fix some issues on Mac OS X, but it also brings the code it shares with DragThing up to date and adds a few new functions.

As you might have seen, I've been very busy with the DragThing 4 release over the last couple of months, but don't think I've forgotten PCalc! I've got a lot of things planned so keep checking this page for the latest news. If you have any suggestions for things to add, please let me know.

Also, I thought I should note the passing of Douglas Adams who died last weekend. Given the numerous references to 42 in PCalc, you can probably guess I was a fan of his work, but I also had the chance to meet him a few years back and get to know him a little bit through email. He'll be missed.

5th January 2001

Happy new year everybody!

The French version of 2.2.1 is now available on the download page. Since this was just a bug fix release, and no text was changed, I didn't need Philippe Bonnaure to help this time - but thanks to him anyway! And thanks to Sylvain-Pierre Dobrzynski for the French website updates.

29th December 2000

PCalc is now listed on the Apple Mac OS X Downloads page! Pretty cool, as it's listed next to Oni in the "New cool, hip, and just plain rad applications" section at the top. Thanks Apple!

I also just wanted to say thanks to everybody who has registered their copies of PCalc and DragThing, and wish everyone a good new year!

See you in 2001!

21st December 2000

The French language version of PCalc 2.2 is now available! Many thanks to Philippe Bonnaure.

Thanks also to Carlo Notarianni for finding a bug today which could cause PCalc to freeze during certain calculations when set to display 14 decimal places.

I've fixed it now and decided to release a small 2.2.1 update, just in case anybody else runs into this problem. In fact, it turns out it has been there since the original release of 2.0, so it's not as likely to happen as I first thought, but better to be on the safe side.

You can get PCalc 2.2.1 from the download page now. I'll update the French release again soon.

14th December 2000

The latest PCalc 2.2 release is now available from the download page!

The main new feature is support for Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) calculations. This was the most requested feature from registered PCalc users. I hope you like it.

Here's the full list of what's new in 2.2:

• Added support for Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) calculations.
• Added support for octal numbers.
• Added option to display thousands separators in the LCD.
• Added option to quit PCalc when closing the last calculator window.
• Fixed a number of function related bugs.
• Fixed a problem with displaying large numbers.
• Fixed a problem pasting certain numbers.
• Fixed a crash when closing a PCalc Classic style window using the close box.
• More OS X and Aqua fixes.

If you have any comments, or suggestions for things you'd like to see in future releases, please let me know.

20th November 2000

The next release of PCalc will finally have an RPN mode! It's working now and I'm just putting the finishing touches to it, so I expect I'll have a new version in a couple of weeks. Also included is support for octal numbers.

As always, if you register now you'll get the upgrade for free.

31st October 2000

Something regular readers of the DragThing home page will be familiar with - the top ten countries I've had PCalc registrations from so far (or twelve in this case, as there was a tie for second and tenth place):

An interesting comparison to similar figures for DragThing I think... Of course there is less than a month of data for PCalc at the moment.

27th October 2000

The French language version of PCalc 2.1 is now available! Many thanks to Philippe Bonnaure.

26th October 2000

As promised, PCalc 2.1 is now available from the download page!

I've added a number of new features that were frequently requested, including a tape window which becomes available when 2.1 is registered, extra hex buttons, and many more conversion functions.

• Significant speed increases over 2.0, especially on older machines.
• Added tape window showing calculation history, for registered users.
• Added information window showing register contents.
• Added cube and cube root buttons.
• Added round and percentage buttons.
• Added more bit shifting buttons in binary and hex mode.
• Option to auto-minimise the calculators in the background.
• All binary operations now work in hex mode.
• Many new functions and constants, courtesy of Roland B. Wassenberg.
• Fixed a number of drawing bugs under Aqua.

I hope you will like this new release! Let me know if you have any comments. RPN mode is still in the pipeline, but I decided I should get 2.1 out first.

15th October 2000

I'm working away on a little update for PCalc - I've added a tape window, and a have a few other things in the pipeline like an RPN mode. Let me know if you have any ideas for things you'd like to see added.

And thanks to Sylvain-Pierre Dobrzynski for the French language version of this site which is now online!

10th October 2000

With the usual thanks to Philippe Bonnaure, the French language version of PCalc is now available! You can download it here.

5th October 2000

PCalc 2.0 is released! The last update was back in 1993 so I figured it was about time that I released a new version.

PCalc is now shareware, and a mere US $10. You can download it and try it out for free, but if you like it you should register via Kagi.

I am now working full time writing shareware for my company TLA Systems Ltd., so if you use PCalc please do register your copy so I can afford to keep developing cool software.

If you like PCalc, check out another cool TLA Systems product, my dock application DragThing.

If you have any comments about PCalc, please get in touch and let me know what you think.