Blog

Just a quick one today. I’ve uploaded a change to the blog layout. This new layout offers better separation of and navigation between categories. By using the menu you can quickly delve into the topics which interest you. This should make the blog more relevant to you, rather than requiring you to wade through posts [...]

Yesterday was a big day for Calcatraz. Here are a few of the highlights: New Design Launched – I got up at 4am to put the finishing touches to a complete redesign of the site. By the time I had to leave for my day job, it was up and running. I think the design [...]

Calcatraz has just launched its second free online offering, Typist, an optimized touch-typing practice app. A while ago I decided to try and up my typing speed. I tried out as many online tools as I could find, but found they all fell into one of two categories: fancy full-featured desktop programs with free trials [...]

Anyone watching the site will have noticed that things have been a bit quiet for the last few months. Calcatraz has definitely not been forgotten, however. I’ve been busily working away on a complete redesign of the calculator, which I hope to begin rolling out soon. I’ve also been working on a number of other [...]

Recently a number of changes I made to the calculator have been causing a bit of a performance hit. To counteract that I’ve been through and made a few simple changes: Removed some external file includes which were no longer needed Implemented better caching to prevent unnecessary re-requests Modified the core to minimise the amount [...]

Happy new year, everyone! 2009 was a very exciting year for me. The idea for an online calculator  has been kicking around my head for a few years, getting progressively refined. As of March 2009 I began work on turning it into more than an idea. The first few months were spent progressively refining the [...]

Looking for an online calculator? There are many web-based calculators around with different purposes and capabilities. I’ve sifted through the web to pick out some of the best calculators around. Here goes: General Calculators This section lists calculators which offer general calculation capabilities. These allow you to simply type any calculation into a free-form text box [...]

As promised in my last post, I’ve now uploaded the latest version of Calcatraz to the live site. The main feature is a new, hopefully more intuitive and consistent user interface. There are also a number of behind the scenes improvements such as general code tidy-ups. One improvement I’m particularly happy with is the integration [...]

Just a quick update on a few of the things I’ve been working on recently: A new user interface – the old Calcatraz interface has two main pages: the home page with a single calculation entry box, and the main calculation page which shows a history of calculations and other information. One thing I found [...]

To provide some structure to this site, I will over time be organising my posts into a number of “books”. Each book will be an ordered collection of posts linked to from a master contents page. I’ll use this master page as a place to park ideas for future posts and to ensure comprehensive coverage. [...]