Version 1.3.2

It was brought to my attention that YaRPNcalc miserably fails when the device's regional settings decimal point symbol is not actually a point (.). So that is what version 1.3.2 fixes. The decimal point symbol as well as the thousands separator now depend on the device's regional settings.

Version 1.3

I just released version 1.3 of YaRPNcalc. This version includes the new menu button handling mentioned in my last post.

Additionally, I implemented a little tool that generates a currency conversion file out of an exchange rates file generated by the Bank of Canada Exchange Rates web service. What this means is that you can use that web service to create an up-to-date exchange rates file, then use my tool to convert that to a file which can be read by YaRPNcalc. The tool is available on the YaRPNcalc history page or here is a direct link. A small user guide that explains how to create and download the exchange rates file and how to convert it to a file that YaRPNcalc can read and copy it to your Pocket PC is included in that package.

Menus and the conversion mode

In a former post I mentioned an idea of how to make the conversion mode better accessible. To achieve this, I now changed the way the two menu buttons work. Until version 1.2 (the current version), conversions are implemented as a base (i.e. BIN, OCT, HEX, DEC, CONV). But the conversion mode is really the same as the decimal mode. The conversion 'base' existed to change the function of the menu button.

The menus now work like this:

LEFT MENU	RIGHT MENU	LEFT MENU	RIGHT MENU
Menu	Function	Menu	Function
(press)			(press)
Constants	Back	Back	Convert
(press)			(press)
Menu	Back	Back	Function

Pressing back always takes you back to the digits panel.

Version 1.2

Version 1.2 is now available. It implements user constants and user conversions. Also, I finally fixed the problem of big binary numbers not being visible completely. When switching to 32bit binary mode, the stack display now uses a smaller font. The release also contains some bug fixes and some minor cosmetic changes.

Almost there

I'm almost ready with a new release. User constants and conversions are implemented and everything is now using non-xml text files, which makes startup a bit faster and the definition files a bit smaller. It's really not that much of a difference though. There are still some small things that I need to fix before I can make the release.

Progress

User conversions and user constants are basically implemented. I'm still working on changing the code from using xml files to non-xml text files. One performance issue on startup turned out to be initializing (or jitting?) the xml parser. Also, the non-xml text files are obviously much smaller then their xml counter parts, e.g. the constants file is now about 1k compared to about 5k when using xml.

User conversions and user constants

Unfortunately, I didn't have time to work on YaRPNcalc for quite some time now. I was very busy with my 'real' work and just came back from Frankfurt where we showed our new mixing console for the very first time. If someone's interested in what I'm doing for a living, check out this site: soundcraftdigital.com.
Concerning YaRPNcalc: I implemented user conversions about two weeks ago, but I wanted to add user constants to that before making a new release. I hope I will find the time to do that in the next couple of days.