f/Calc Version Peculiarities

None of the various versions of f/Calc are exactly alike. I wrote the Windows one first, and then the Tcl/Tk and Palm OS versions about a year later each. Each time, I did things a little bit differently. This section describes the known differences between them.

Windows

The Windows version is the baseline: everything else below is relative to this version. This is because the Windows version is usually the most up-to-date, and it's the most featureful.

Palm OS

The Palm platform is tight on memory, tight on screen real estate, and relatively low on system features. These necessitated a few changes relative to the Windows version:

1. There is very little online help. The Palm OS only allows short help blurbs, and those only in dialogs, not in the main UI. So, this HTML manual is far more detailed.
   
   
2. The limited screen real estate forced me to take the circle of confusion fields out of the depth of field and hyperfocal distance tabs. Instead, it uses a calculated CoC, and then allows you to override this in one of the configuration dialogs.
   
   

Tcl/Tk

The main difference between the Tcl/Tk version and its closest relative, the Windows version, is the fact that I whipped it out quickly: about 40 hours, all told, and this with a language I'd only used on one other serious project. As such, it's a little less polished than the Windows version. There are also some platform limitations I ran into:

1. Tcl's math ability sucks rocks. Whether this actually shows up in the program at the user level is a different question, but I have a bit less confidence in its accuracy. More importantly, I have very little desire to go in and add more formulæ. :-(
   
   
2. Unix doesn't have a standard "online help" mechanism, so I cop out and depend on being able to launch Netscape to view the manual.
   
   
3. When changing values in some types of fields (like the drop-down lists), the program doesn't recalculate on every keystroke, since these controls don't tell me, the programmer, when they've been changed. I have to wait until you move to a different field to recalculate.
   
   
4. Being a 1.0 version, it is lacking all the refinements in the 1.1 versions.

Macintosh

I didn't write the Macintosh version. I just sent this guy (Dave Camp) a copy of the formula engine from the Windows version and he wrapped a UI around it. As such, any differences between the way it works and the way the others work is due to his porting choices. I've never even used that version, so I can't say anything more about it.