42S for iPhone v. 2.2 in App Store

[Les Wright]

Includes a few improvements, including an upgrade to Free42 1.4.52 with the most recent BCD-20 as its computational "core". This means more accurate transcendentals and numerical integration, among other things (hugh steers refined his code, Thomas Okken incorporated it, and Byron Foster incorporated Thomas' upgrade).

Thomas discovered a bug in the BCD-20 code and has fixed it, so Free42 is actually now up to 1.4.53. Byron will shortly submit 2.2.1, incorporating this fix, but it takes these things ages to meander through the Apple approval process.

The newest 42s displays the LastX register in small font in the upper right corner of the display. I find this distracting and have asked Byron to consider making this optional and not obligatory in future releases.

The speed improvements and overall performance that came with the move from v. 1 to v. 2 are maintained.

Great little piece of software--my main calculator these days, and I have a real 42s!

[Egan Ford]

There is also a 20-line stack option. PRST can be used to display/print the entire stack.

[Byron Foster]

There's a couple of additions you've mentioned in the past. The first is that you can toggle the display of the iPhone keyboard in alpha mode by tapping the display. The "auto keyboard" option has become just an option to display the keyboard automatically when going into alpha mode, but it can still be toggled regardless. The other is that you can switch to the Print View while printing and while a program is running. It didn't do this pre OS 3.0 because of the whole event handling thing, and it would get hosed up (I'll avoid going into detail).

As Les said, a version 2.2.1 was submitted last Thursday with Free42 1.4.53 which contains a BCD20 fix. It also provides an option to toggle the display of LastX (also a couple of minor 42s bug fixes). It should be out in about a week, or when Apple is good and ready!

[Egan Ford]

Excellent. Thanks. The Alpha toggle was much needed.

[Reth]

I already posted the following in the other forum, but it may get some feedback here:

- I'd replace L register display with the status of first 5 user flags
as it is on HP-41 and make both optional

- make 2 <> 4 line display switchable trough program

- make Alpha register longer and able to display on all 4 lines (2
extra L/F)

I find the white rectangle around arrow keys a brilliant idea, please
keep that in future releases at least as an option.


Excellent work and getting better!

Cheers,

[Les Wright]

Egan, several of my programs depend on the familiar behaviour of the 4-line stack (e.g., the duplication of the T register when a binary operation combines the X and Y registers and the stack drops is a fact I use quite a bit in preserving needed data without stashing it into a register).

The 4-stack option is set as default. I think Byron may include in future documentation the caveat that turning on the 20-stack may "break" programs that rely on the traditional 4-stack behaviour. Of course, serious RPN programs already know their stack behaviour and would pick up on this if there were spurious results coming from familiar programs.

Les

[Egan Ford]

As do mine. Hopefully in the future the stack depth can be programmable. It'd be nice to have programs run as-is, and to have a deeper depth for interactive modes.