NumWorks open source calculator

[BruceH]

(11-12-2020 02:37 AM)rprosperi Wrote:  Bill and debrouxl - Thanks for the information and comments! Gives me, once again, pause before getting one of these... When it came out there was a bunch of flutter, but after each and every person that actually used it, whose background and views I know and understand, panned it, I passed and decided to wait a while.

I have one. It's nice enough but not RPL. So it's a bit like owning a TI or a Casio - nothing intrinsically wrong with it but you're an HP person, not a TI person or a Numworks person.

Quote:After that, I totally forgot about it as it never comes up, until the interesting post above. But it seems things have not improved much, other than it has become a new platform which is relatively easy for developers to hack into what they like. Which isn't a bad thing, but not of interest to me; it's all a matter of available time and focus I guess.

One of these days I'll port a subset of RPL to it. Don't hold your breath though!

Quote:Why on earth does the simulator not let you save? Is part of the logic that if it was fully functional and could save state, then lots of people wouldn't buy the real thing as this would provide everything but the portability for free? Which of course is a silly justification as it's very reason to exist (for students) fundamentally requires portability.

Is the simulator constantly updated to maintain parity with released versions?

If I were really cynical, I'd observe that requiring an online tool to install updates simply tells us about the limits of their developers and support staff. But I'm not always really cynical... just sometimes. But I admit maybe there is some non-obvious reason that makes sense.

On their website they make the point that they've written the download code just once and it runs (in Chrome or a Chromium browser like Brave) regardless of whether you are a Windows or Mac or Linux user. Actually the last update was extremely quick and simple for me - much less faff than updating a Prime. So much so I think HP should do the same.

Quote:And Reddit is the only support forum? Really? I get that students find that relevant and appropriate, but I don't, for plenty of obvious reasons, and won't waste time there.

Well there's perfectly good forum software you can crib from here if you want to host your own and aim attract a more refined class of commentard. :-)

Quote:The f/w update activity looks good; fairly active and appears to be pretty transparent. But why the odd jump in revisions? 13.1 -> 13.2 -> 14.4 ?

Can someone provide a brutally brief explanation of what Omega and Epsilon are? Neither term is mentioned in the manual, so I presume these are 3rd party hacks/forks of some kind? If so, are they intended by their developers to be used by students for academics and supported by Numworks, or are they simply community hacks for personal use?

Would like to find reasons to get this, but it doesn't look good