The Space Calculator

The Space Calculator is finally ready to ship! Since the last devlog, I added buttons to remove a calculation in the history, and copy an expression’s value to the display. I also replaced the (+/-) button with an advanced mode menu, and moved it inside of it, along with parentheses and a button to add the last answer to the display. After that, I mainly just worked on presentation, updating the buttons to look nicer, creating a logo for the app, and finally adding the outer space theming! Although it might not look like much, I’m really happy with how this turned out, especially since it’s my first time making an app with a GUI.

I finally implemented history saving into the calculator and added a new font for the display! This time, it was really easy to implement the history! I made some notes on what I had left for the implementation, and using those, I got it done pretty easily! The only thing that took some time was styling and formatting, but overall it wasn’t that bad.

I finally added proper text formatting! I was originally trying to fix a bug where the text on-screen wasn’t syncing with the text in the backend, and by fixing that I got the formatting to work properly! What happend was that the textbox control that held the on-screen text wasn’t syncing properly, so I replaced it with hotkeys that trigger the buttons instead, which made all the button input logic apply to the keyboard! After doing that, I quickly implemented basic negative number support as well. My code was also getting pretty messy, so I moved the calculator engine into another file to keep things clean. Overall, I’ve gotten past a huge roadblock! Now, it’s time to finish that history menu.

These past 2 sessions were very unfruitful. First, I was trying to implement the history menu, but I was only able the get the menu working, no data. The other thing I was trying to do was intercept the textbox’s text to have proper formatting (ex. / -> ÷) and make the proper calculator functions work when typing directly, but that didn’t work. My goal for next session will probably be to make the history menu and then work on the theming.

I added the calculation part of the calculator, and made all of the buttons work. I also started working on multiple operand support, and added in the buttons for negative numbers and history.

Today, I started making my calculator, and implemented the basic visuals. I was originally going to write the backend logic first, and then make the frontend, but since this is my first time making an app with C# and XAML, I got stuck on implementing Commands and using the source generators and so decided to do the frontend first.