A Solution for the Slow OS X Calculator
- Thread starter Ricky
- Start date
Wow! That's a huge speed improvement. Now why is it so slow when normal, that's what I want to know. 
Javintosh
Meember
I got a better one (much better): Menulator http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/14818
It sits in you menu bar. Hit cmd-esc to activate/expand it, use the keypad to to your calculatoins and then see the result in the menubar or copy the result to the clipboard. Hit cmd-H and it collapses to a calculator icon in your menubar. My only gripe is that there is no preference to launch in collapsed mode. If you look at the readme you'll see that it can get pretty advanced!
It sits in you menu bar. Hit cmd-esc to activate/expand it, use the keypad to to your calculatoins and then see the result in the menubar or copy the result to the clipboard. Hit cmd-H and it collapses to a calculator icon in your menubar. My only gripe is that there is no preference to launch in collapsed mode. If you look at the readme you'll see that it can get pretty advanced!
phatcactus
The Ugly Organist
Uhm... okay?
My guess is that the slowdown has something to do with the interaction between the physical keyboard keys and the buttons on the calculator. Maybe it's waiting for a key to be pressed so it can highlight the right button or something.
Maybe it's just OS X's natural interface sluggishness and it seems magnified here because of the larger-than-usual number of key presses we use?
- Brian
yeah, ok, sure thing there...
It uses a whopping 1.3MB of ram, and a few buttons that are actually loaded into ram when the app starts.
mr. k
Registered
What KC meant was it takes a lot more power to run the calculator GUI then it does to process keyboard commands... That makes it take longer then just typing it.
Doing stuff from >console is faster then from a normal user with a gui, but then you have to type everything... Console uses less graphic card and less ram.
Doing stuff from >console is faster then from a normal user with a gui, but then you have to type everything... Console uses less graphic card and less ram.
Yes, it does take more power to run a GUI than a command line program, but this is a calculator we're talking about. When you press a key, they have to change a little button from one colour to a grayer colour making it look pressed. That's not very CPU intensive.