tiistai 1. syyskuuta 2015

Rant: Windows' calculator


Windows 10, in many aspects (excluding primarily privacy) is pretty nice system. For example I was extremely and pleasantly surprised that it actually properly detected and installed USB serial (COM) driver even without having it in database, without needing that simple .inf file to tell it that "USB serial" device actually is USB serial, like with previous versions of windows (.inf being plain text that essentially gives name to device, so why exactly it needed to be signed, requiring damn reboots to install?)

One seemingly minor thing that has been going the wrong way lately is the simple calculator.

In windows XP (I'm not sure of Vista) there was essentially "simple" and "advanced" view, latter that included most of the functions I need; primarily of course decimal to hex (or binary, or other way) conversions. In advanced mode you could do decimal math (0.235 * 3 = ??) or change values from decimal to hex at will with no mode changes. Simple, easy, useful.

In Windows 7 that was replaced with newer calculator program. This also had separate modes for calculation: basic, programmer and scientific. I use programmer mode most of the time, but here is the bad thing: you couldn't do decimal math (like 0.235 * 3 above) at all in that mode, only integers. To deal with decimal values you'd have to switch to another mode. Unfortunately I need both decimal and hex math essentially all the time, so this added completely unnecessary mode switch. Not good.

Now, with Windows 8 (or 8.1, I never used 8 myself) they upated calculator again, and the same version seems to be used in Windows 10. You guess where this is goind already? Yup, changes weren't good.

Previous versions of calc accepted both comma and dot keys as decimal separator (I most often used comma, being at a locale where that is decimal separator). New version doesn't, I have to use dot key as decimal separator. Actually, scratch that - as a huge insult to history of localisation of windows, calculator isn't following system locale at all - I'm using Finnish locale, but calculator uses US locale exclusively (dot decimal separator, comma to separate thousands and so on).
What the actual fuck, Microsoft?

It also takes (relatively) ages to start. Previous versions were instantly there but this one takes between one to five seconds to start. Completely unacceptable for simple program like that. And I don't even bother mentioning stupidity of "shift" key to change operation used in desktop app (I know, it's supposed to be "universal". I read that "universally useless".) This calculator is nothing but complete disaster. I certainly hope that this stupidity doesn't continue and extend to other aspects of the OS, but I am afraing that we all know the answer to that already...

 

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