![]() ![]() The smooth animations, textures, and lighting effects are impressive, but there’s a lot more fun to be had.Īlong the top of the About screen is a series of buttons. When tapped, your screen is taken over by a 3D rendering of PCalc’s ’42’ icon that you can spin around with your finger. At the top of the Help screen, is an ‘About PCalc’ button. To access the About screen tap the info button in PCalc’s main view to enter its settings, then tap the Help button. Thomson has used PCalc’s About screen to create a 3D and ARKit playground that shows off what is possible when you combine Apple’s Metal APIs and ARKit. Still, you wouldn’t expect it to incorporate 3D animation or augmented reality, but that is exactly what the latest version of PCalc has tucked away in its settings. It’s available on iOS devices, the Apple Watch, and even the Apple TV. PCalc is an excellent calculator app that was one of Federico’s ‘Must Have’ apps of 2016. Even more fitting though, is that the app reviewed is PCalc by James Thomson. Many people using PCalc on their shiny devices today don't realise that the app has been around for a lot longer than they think.As apps updated for iOS 11 begin to trickle out onto the App Store, it’s fitting that the first of what will be many reviews on MacStories in the coming days features ARKit, which from all indications is a big hit with developers. In some cases, a lot longer than they've been thinking. PCalc is twenty years old on the 23rd of December 2012, so I thought I should take the opportunity to look back at how it has evolved over the last two decades. The app you've known for all these years. PCalc actually started out in 1992 as a design for a central heating control panel. I was a student at Glasgow University's Computing Science department, taking a class in Human Computer Interaction on how to build good user interfaces. One of the class projects was to design a simulated control panel for a central heating system - setting temperatures, letting you switch heat and water on and off separately, and so on. It was to be implemented as a Hypercard stack. Sadly, it doesn't survive to contradict me, but my design was likely impeccable. I figured it had to look authentic, and handcrafted a set of custom 1-bit black and white fake LCD digits and little buttons that you could push in. Skeuomorphism has been around a lot longer than Corinthian leather.Īt around the same time, we'd started coding using THINK Pascal, and I had begun to explore the Macintosh programming APIs in my own time. I had come to the conclusion that I was not going to be the next Jean Michel Jarre, but I really liked the way the Mac user interface worked in comparison to my old Atari. So I sold all my synthesizers and my ST, and bought one of the latest Mac Classics - 4 meg of RAM, a 40 meg hard disk, and a 512x342 1-bit display. I was looking for a small project to learn how to program my new Mac properly, and I remembered the graphics I'd done for the control panel, and thought that they would work well for a calculator as well. Take note of “a small project just to do X”, this will be referred to many times during this story. The built-in Mac OS calculator of the day was a very simple affair, and so I decided I would write a calculator that could do binary and hex, to help me with my programming. I bought the books Inside Macintosh, Volumes I, II, and III, and sat down to figure it all out. We didn't have the Internet back then - well, no web at least - so that was basically all I had to go on. Eventually, I started to get the internal logic working, and built a user interface around it all. System 7 was new, so I eventually got a copy of the massive Volume VI to see what had changed there. ![]()
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