NASC calculator

[disciple]

Not exactly a request - I'm not asking for someone to package it - but if you use your computer to compute, you might like to check out NASC.

Basically it is a calculator similar to say speedcrunch, but it has been made a little like a spreadsheet - you can easily refer to previous lines in a calculation, and you can go back and edit any line and calculations that refer to it will update. i.e. it doesn't have a history, all the calculations are "live".
Watch the video if you find that hard to follow

I'd be interested to hear if anyone knows of any other calculators that work like this.

Unfortunately this one depends not only on GTK3, but on libs from Elementary. (Nice to see Elementary actually do produce useful things... and it turns out to be a clone of a Mac program, so I guess it's also nice to see people actually produce useful things for Mac )

[Mike Walsh]

@ disciple:-

Nice idea, I must admit. But what's with all this "meson", "vala", "ninja", etc. in the source code?

Peculiar to ElementaryOS, I suppose. And some of those deps could be awkward to source for Puppy, too....

Mike.

[disciple]

Well, meson and ninja are a build system, and you must be familiar with vala, as Barry was keen on it back in the day. All quite common for gtk3 apps I think. The elementary specific lib is granite.
I expect it wouldn't be hard to install in a puppy based on a major distro, e.g. it is available in ppas for ubuntu.

[Mike Walsh]

Well, meson and ninja are a build system, and you must be familiar with vala, as Barry was keen on it back in the day. All quite common for gtk3 apps I think. The elementary specific lib is granite.
I expect it wouldn't be hard to install in a puppy based on a major distro, e.g. it is available in ppas for ubuntu.

A-HA. Ubuntu, huh? And PPAs.....hmm. Well, that's 'do-able'. PPAs are hosted at Launchpad, and I'm fairly 'au-fait' with getting around the Launchpad site; I know just how to access the contents of a PPA, get at the components.....I've built a few packages that way over the years.

(Should be able to find a libgranite package over at pkgs.org...mm. Mm-hm). I'll investigate. Cheers.


Mike.

[tallboy]

Hmmm, I have seen some of these smart calculators up through the years. This one is interesting, but it has a problem; who needs it?
Most people that I have met during many math courses at the uni, find work like this very entertaining, especially when it comes to making hopelessly complicated equations, just to crash the program! Or, to rewrite it.
The problem is that most people who can make complicated equations, don't need such a program. They either make solutions in their head, or use a computer program because a result is only part of a much bigger calculation. But, it is a nice toy.

[Mike Walsh]

@ Olaf:-

This one's "source-code only", it appears....even from its Launchpad PPA. It's compile or nothing, it seems.....and the way it's set-up is like nothing I've ever seen. Certainly, the normal configure->make->make-install doesn't work with this one; I guess it's a special ElementaryOS build-system.

(*shrug*)

I did try!


Mike.

[Keef]

A statically compiled 64 bit binary of Qalculate (which it uses) can be downloaded here:
here
You will need gtk3 though.
Runs ok on FatDog (there is a gtk3 sfs available). Not that I need ianother calculator though.

[Mike Walsh]

A statically compiled 64 bit binary of Qalculate (which it uses) can be downloaded here:
here
You will need gtk3 though.
Runs ok on FatDog (there is a gtk3 sfs available). Not that I need ianother calculator though.

Thanks for that, keef. Now Qalculate is more my type of calculator; more like the things I started using in 1973 (or was it '72? Memory's getting "flaky"..! )

Like an AppImage; stick it anywhere you like and fire it up....

Cheers.


Mike.

[Keef]

I probably need my head looking at, but I have been trying to compile this. First tried FatDog but meson could not find webkit2gtk where ever it looked. The dependencies weren't hard to find (meson is in the FD devx) but the webkit2gtk is probably incompatible - tried Debian, Ubuntu and opensuse but no joy.
Now my regular laptop is playing up so am running EasyOS off a USB stick on another laptop. I have managed to compile and run NACS, but had to comment out a couple of lines of code (javascript I think) that were causing errors. No idea how to fix it.
I won't post the binary as it was a crude hack and although it seems to work ok, it may end up becoming sentient and taking over the world.
The move to meson (the build system) seems to be very recent so hopefully a few bugs will get ironed out.