March 06, 2009

A New Calculator Design

Calculator software used to simulate real calculator machine, which is, in turn, restricted with manufacturing costs. For example a wider digital screen or more buttons cost more and more money, while a virtual calculator on a computer screen can be far richer than a real calculator machine. And that's what I'm trying to do by my suggested design.

One of the most important thing in my design is adding a 'clipboard tab' in the calculator, so that you can see the memory content in an enough wide and comfortable screen. In this screen you can see a largest amount of content with one view.

This feature wouldn't be possible in a real calculator machine.

Operations board and clipboard will appear in multi-line text area, not in a one line as usual. here's an example, show you how calculating operations should appear:

          56
+           4
_____________________
          60
-          50
_____________________
          10
1/x
_____________________
           0.1
*            900
_____________________
          90
*          10
%
_____________________
           9
^           0.5
_____________________
           3

Take a look:

Copy/Paste/Delete/Backspace buttons:

These buttons offer a new mechanism to deal with the memory.

  • Copy: to insert the last line in the operations log, or the selected line in the operations log, in the clipboard.
  • Paste: to insert the last line in the clipboard, or the selected line in the clipboard, to the operations log.
    This button will be disabled when selecting (opening) the clipboard tab.
  • Delete: to delete the last line in the operations log, or the selected line in the clipboard.
  • Backspace: to delete the last digit in the last line in the operations log.
    This button will be disabled when selecting (opening) the clipboard tab.

Button maps:

I used the standard real keyboard map as much as possible.

  • It's easy to remember, because it's common,
  • And it's reasonable, especially the (+) and the (=) keys, it should be big because it's used very much.

The last note:

The font used for operations log and the clipboard, should be monospace.

Posted at 11:56 PM | Comments?
Categories: Desktop