A Cross-Platform Programmer’s Calculator

This paper details the development of the first cross-platform programmer’s calculator. As users of programmer’s calculators, we wanted to address limitations of existing, platform-specific options in order to make a new, better calculator for us and others. And rather than develop for only oneplatform, we wanted to make an application that could run on multiple ones, maximizing its reach and utility. From the start, we emphasized software-engineering and human-computer-interaction best practices, prioritizing portability, robustness, and usability. In this paper, we explain the decision to build a Google Chrome Application and illustrate how using the developer-preview Chrome Apps for Mobile Toolchain enabled us to build an application that could also run as native iOS and Android applications [18]. We discuss how we achieved support of signed and unsigned 8, 16, 32, and 64-bit integral types in JavaScript, a language with only one numerical type [15], and we demonstrate how we adapted the user interface for different devices. Lastly, we describe our usability testing and explain how we addressed learnability concerns in a second version. The end result is a user-friendly and versatile calculator that offers value to programmers, students, and