Today I learned some interesting facts about the Windows 7 Calculator application and thereby noticed, why this tiny little thing indeed might have some unpredictable influence on what people will think about Windows 7.
Although Windows 7 has a lot of mind boggling new features such as the Library concept, an overall performance boost, better support for Solid State Discs, the Windows Health Center, less bugging User Account Control, the all new Superbar and so much more, on almost every single websites talking about Windows 7 you will read about the new calculator application. Why is that?
The obvious reason is pretty simple: It looks different. Indeed it now features four different modes to adjust to the peoples’ needs. Now you can not only do basic and scientific calculations but also statistics and calculations interesting for programmers. Also new is a history and an integrated unit conversions. People say it’s the first time in ages, Microsoft worked on the calculator and here comes the funny fact: It’s not.
The Vista version of calculator has already been an almost complete rewrite. Read what Raymond Chen said about it:
I find it ironic when people complain that Calc and Notepad haven’t changed. In fact, both programs have changed. (Notepad gained some additional menu and status bar options. Calc got a severe workover.) I wouldn’t be surprised if these are the same people who complain, “Why does Microsoft spend all its effort on making Windows ‘look cool’? They should spend all their efforts on making technical improvements and just stop making visual improvements.”
And with Calc, that’s exactly what happened: Massive technical improvements. No visual improvement. And nobody noticed. In fact, the complaints just keep coming. “Look at Calc, same as it always was.”
The innards of Calc – the arithmetic engine – was completely thrown away and rewritten from scratch. The standard IEEE floating point library was replaced with an arbitrary-precision arithmetic library. This was done after people kept writing ha-ha articles about how Calc couldn’t do decimal arithmetic correctly, that for example computing 10.21 – 10.2 resulted in 0.0100000000000016. Today, Calc’s internal computations are done with infinite precision for basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) and 32 digits of precision for advanced operations (square root, transcendental operators).
I found about that reading Jeff Atwoods blog (If You Don’t Change the UI, Nobody Notices). I really like that sort of blog articles, especially when they quote people who did it in the first place (like that really interesting inside information from someone who’s working at Microsoft).
And indeed, Jeff is right: People are currently talking about the obvious: Wow! Wordpad has ribbons! Cool, the calculator has a programmer’s mode! Awesome! Look at the all new Superbar! Excuse me,… the super-what?
Here’s some obvious change people will need to get used to. Microsoft indeed did a breaking change in how the taskbar works. It is said that it’s the first time since Windows 95, Microsoft did a real change on how the taskbar works. However, they offer a possibility for the user to change back its behaviour to what they know from Vista if they don’t get used to it.
But I guess, people won’t really complain, because the new calculator is sooooo damn cool (indeed it’s cool enough for people to explain how to get it working in Windows Vista!).
