"This project collects usage data and sends it to Microsoft to help improve our products and services. Read our privacy statement to learn more. Telemetry is disabled in development builds by default, and can be enabled with the SEND_TELEMETRY build flag."
Why not? If they're paying people to build this software, they presumably want to make it good. With this data, they can learn all kinds of things to help improve future versions: when/why is it crashing, what features are people using most/least, are there patterns of clicks that suggest people are mis-understanding or mis-clicking certain features, etc, etc.
edit: Another one that's often useful is looking at different usage patterns across countries. For example, if nobody in Israel is using COSINE, then there's likely a problem with the right-to-left internationalization that you should fix.
Basically every Android and IOS app you use collects telemetry (which you usually cannot disable) for UX purposes but suddenly when Microsoft does it it's a Big Deal. I don't see the issue with refining UX using anonymous data if it improves the product for the end users. Every high quality commercial app does this.
I had an interview last year with the Windows and Devices Group. On the day of the interview, I was told it would be with people that work on telemetry.
One interviewer told me that keystrokes were being measured by conhost.exe. Not just for internal testing. He clarified that it was done on customer machines. It wasn't clear if they collected individual key presses because we were discussing something you could infer by knowing keystroke timing.
Windows 10 is the most prolific malware in the world.
This seems to be the reason they put the telemetry in. They were solving a bug related to the time calculation feature. And, needed to discover if any customers had issues after the change was made.
Built-in applications are great opportunities to dogfood new platform features. I'm speculating, but calculator may have added telemetry as a way of testing the relevant SDKs, APIs, data visualization systems, etc, not necessarily because a PM a Microsoft somewhere actually cares what percentage of users press the "multiply" button.
I'm not sure if I should be disturbed or amused by Microsoft putting telemetry in (at this rate) literally every one of its products.
Like, what the hell do they even track? I guess the obvious ones are things like application crashes, but now I'm curious if they have the data on the most common calculations, folks' favorite numbers, etc.
> Telemetry is disabled in development builds by default
So it's not ideal from a privacy perspective to have to worry about usage telemetry in a calculator. But at least there is the silver lining of having telemetry disabled by default _somewhere_, even if it is only for dev builds.
On my windows machine I use Windows 10 Firewall Control (and outbound LittleSnitch type thing .. except crappy). I don't think it was calculator, but there was some other basic Microsoft app that wanted to make an outbound connection. I remember thinking, "WTF?! Why would this need to connect to the Internet ever." .. maybe it was calc. Is this telemetry currently enabled on the released version or is it only in the OSS code?
This is cool, but I really wish they'd release the source for the original Notepad. No real reason other than "this software was really important to me when I was a kid".
As it stands, though, Calculator is not something I've particularly cared about in the Windows world; pretty much anyone here could write a simple calculator app in an afternoon.
Still, I am glad MS is slowly becoming more OSS-friendly; I doubt anyone installs Windows specifically for the calculator app, so as a result, why the hell not open-source it?
Part of the Windows 2000 source code leaked and it included Notepad. I don't think it's changed much since then as it's pretty much a wrapper around the Win32 widget with a few features like changing the font, printing, etc.
"Original" is the issue there. They're far more likely to open source a modern UWP app, written with current best practices in mind, rather than a 20 year old C app with untold terrors hiding in the codebase. If they ever rework Notepad into a UWP app, I suspect that would be open sourced, as I expect many newer Windows components to be.
IIRC Notepad source code is in a Windows SDK. Probably an old one, but it only started to be actively maintained quite recently (and even then: only very lightly), so the source code you can get will likely cover most of its lifespan for now.
I'm not sure the source of notepad is that much interesting, though. I mean, yeah, nice to have out of curiosity, maybe, but I'm not sure I would get anything from looking at it. I'm even more interested by monstrosities like historical version of conhost, or of cmd, because it is both simultaneously horrendous and bizarrely not extremely buggy (probably was debugged by some kind of brute force effort, then... :p )
Although a version of the Notepad source under a free software licence would at least permit to strip it of the new ridiculous shits, like "Search with Bing" and maybe some spying features.
For me (and for a lot of other people) what I wish they would release as open source is VB6.
There are a ton of good reasons why this is unlikely to ever happen, though (third-party licenses mainly).
There are a ton of VB6 applications out there running, and Microsoft so far has continued to keep the runtime around, but that won't always be the case.
When it is finally EOL'd, people aren't going to be happy at all about it...
I've always found the "App" version of Calculator lacking compare to its Win32 predecessor. In particular History. On the old Calculator you could double-click the history and edit the equation, and get a new result, no go on the App.
Plus the Programmer UI, while being more powerful is actually harder to use since the information is now split between two screens rather than one.
Oh and you cannot paste in currency ($10) is now invalid. The old one just stripped the currency symbols.
I worked on a win32 application for my first job out of college. My boss told me "want to learn win32 and c++, go program a windows calculator clone." It was a great project to get started and I did learn a lot. Now I have something to compare my work to ha
Yes I realize this calculator is now a universal windows app, I couldn’t edit cause noprocast locked me out after posting. Reguardless, building a calculator is still a great way to learn a new UI framework. I could see that this would have been a great resource for me as a new engineer (if building a universal windows app).
All the layers of more and more abstractions. What used to be a simple app with a few dependencies is now multi-team project requiring almost a virtual machine to run.
The "help wanted" label on some of the GitHub issues[0] is interesting to me. Presumably there are Microsoft employees who are being paid to work on Calculator, are they trying to crowd-source their jobs? I should convince my company to open source the project I am working on so I can offload some of my work too ;)
It's the Open Source issue tracker equivalent of the "Welcome mat". It doesn't necessarily mean that Microsoft's employees here need help, but it certainly shows that they welcome it.
(Which is a very useful indicator for engagement and shows presumably some stake in actually continuing to develop Calculator out in the open, as opposed it being a one time or rarely-if-ever code drop.)
maybe it become so complex that it's hard to maintain so they seek the community to maintain it for them for free so they can focus on selling the OS it runs on. ;)
speaking from experience working in a truck repair shop, I quit using calculator in windows as it was rather unreliable. if im calculating inner diameter or outer diameter for a part, or doing tooth math for machining a new bull gear, ive often encountered wildly different values in calculator from what a machinists handbook tells me. Ive even had an old-timer warn me about different depth and feed rate calculations that calculator has never done right. This is simple shop math, but i think we're calling it trigonometry these days.
This is an issue with any math-related tool in general, including the specialized software, where bugs are much much more sophisticated. Most App Store/Microsoft Store/Google Play apps can't be trusted even for simple square root and trigonometry calculations.
Awesome seeing another component of Windows (albeit a small one) shifting to open source. My hope is that over time, more and more components will end up open source as they get updated and rewritten.
I was trying to figure out if it was C++/CLI or C++/CX (I don't do enough Windows dev to know at a glance...). I was hoping it was C++/WinRT – I'm interested in seeing the new language projection in action.
Was this source previously in the Windows repository? Has all development moved to GitHub? If it was in the Windows repo, are they mirroring it back?
Do they still have the old history? There are multiple ways to deal with this in git (grafts, replacements) I wonder if they're using anything like this to get full history, internally.
[+] [-] turrini|7 years ago|reply
"This project collects usage data and sends it to Microsoft to help improve our products and services. Read our privacy statement to learn more. Telemetry is disabled in development builds by default, and can be enabled with the SEND_TELEMETRY build flag."
Even on a simple calculator.
[+] [-] Titanous|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badfrog|7 years ago|reply
Why not? If they're paying people to build this software, they presumably want to make it good. With this data, they can learn all kinds of things to help improve future versions: when/why is it crashing, what features are people using most/least, are there patterns of clicks that suggest people are mis-understanding or mis-clicking certain features, etc, etc.
edit: Another one that's often useful is looking at different usage patterns across countries. For example, if nobody in Israel is using COSINE, then there's likely a problem with the right-to-left internationalization that you should fix.
[+] [-] dtrailin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zerohp|7 years ago|reply
One interviewer told me that keystrokes were being measured by conhost.exe. Not just for internal testing. He clarified that it was done on customer machines. It wasn't clear if they collected individual key presses because we were discussing something you could infer by knowing keystroke timing.
Windows 10 is the most prolific malware in the world.
[+] [-] palisade|7 years ago|reply
https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator/blob/057401f5f2b4bb1...
[+] [-] bradleybuda|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yellowapple|7 years ago|reply
Like, what the hell do they even track? I guess the obvious ones are things like application crashes, but now I'm curious if they have the data on the most common calculations, folks' favorite numbers, etc.
[+] [-] smush|7 years ago|reply
So it's not ideal from a privacy perspective to have to worry about usage telemetry in a calculator. But at least there is the silver lining of having telemetry disabled by default _somewhere_, even if it is only for dev builds.
[+] [-] kgwxd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djsumdog|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tombert|7 years ago|reply
As it stands, though, Calculator is not something I've particularly cared about in the Windows world; pretty much anyone here could write a simple calculator app in an afternoon.
Still, I am glad MS is slowly becoming more OSS-friendly; I doubt anyone installs Windows specifically for the calculator app, so as a result, why the hell not open-source it?
[+] [-] ktjfi|7 years ago|reply
The only place where I found it where it is publicly "browseable" -> http://www.codeforge.com/article/148667
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] temac|7 years ago|reply
I'm not sure the source of notepad is that much interesting, though. I mean, yeah, nice to have out of curiosity, maybe, but I'm not sure I would get anything from looking at it. I'm even more interested by monstrosities like historical version of conhost, or of cmd, because it is both simultaneously horrendous and bizarrely not extremely buggy (probably was debugged by some kind of brute force effort, then... :p )
Although a version of the Notepad source under a free software licence would at least permit to strip it of the new ridiculous shits, like "Search with Bing" and maybe some spying features.
[+] [-] cr0sh|7 years ago|reply
There are a ton of good reasons why this is unlikely to ever happen, though (third-party licenses mainly).
There are a ton of VB6 applications out there running, and Microsoft so far has continued to keep the runtime around, but that won't always be the case.
When it is finally EOL'd, people aren't going to be happy at all about it...
[+] [-] sixothree|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Someone1234|7 years ago|reply
I've always found the "App" version of Calculator lacking compare to its Win32 predecessor. In particular History. On the old Calculator you could double-click the history and edit the equation, and get a new result, no go on the App.
Plus the Programmer UI, while being more powerful is actually harder to use since the information is now split between two screens rather than one.
Oh and you cannot paste in currency ($10) is now invalid. The old one just stripped the currency symbols.
[+] [-] gdulli|7 years ago|reply
I don't know if it has the features you're missing, I use it because I don't like the look and feel of the new apps.
[+] [-] valleyjo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] valleyjo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ktjfi|7 years ago|reply
(Why the downvotes?)
[+] [-] nevster|7 years ago|reply
It's 2019, I have a multi-gigahertz processor, it's a calculator app, and it takes a few seconds to launch!
[+] [-] neop1x|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbsks|7 years ago|reply
[0]: https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator/issues?q=is%3Aissue+...
[+] [-] WorldMaker|7 years ago|reply
https://help.github.com/en/articles/helping-new-contributors...
It's the Open Source issue tracker equivalent of the "Welcome mat". It doesn't necessarily mean that Microsoft's employees here need help, but it certainly shows that they welcome it.
(Which is a very useful indicator for engagement and shows presumably some stake in actually continuing to develop Calculator out in the open, as opposed it being a one time or rarely-if-ever code drop.)
[+] [-] neop1x|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nimbius|7 years ago|reply
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/04/04/annou...
[+] [-] orbital-decay|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acqq|7 years ago|reply
Please some example, I'm curious, as Microsoft claims that they use the "infinite" precision library there.
[+] [-] Titanous|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james_s_tayler|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diminish|7 years ago|reply
What's next? Notepad, Ms Paint?
Shall we see anything bigger than VS Code?
[+] [-] nathell|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] favorited|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SloopJon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contextfree|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jacobparker|7 years ago|reply
Was this source previously in the Windows repository? Has all development moved to GitHub? If it was in the Windows repo, are they mirroring it back?
Do they still have the old history? There are multiple ways to deal with this in git (grafts, replacements) I wonder if they're using anything like this to get full history, internally.
[+] [-] nly|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edward|7 years ago|reply
https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator/pull/106
[+] [-] Tade0|7 years ago|reply
I like to calculate stuff from time to time, so I use the default OS calculator app a lot.
The Windows one is actually pretty decent, except maybe for the shortcuts - e.g. raising to the power is under "y" for some reason.
Ubuntu/Linux(es) has by far the best one. The shortcuts are obvious and the whole expression is visible at all times.
The one for macOS is surprisingly lacking.
[+] [-] ygra|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fetbaffe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slimscsi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mihaitodor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jchw|7 years ago|reply
I hope they continue down this road. I doubt we'll see the NT Kernel on GitHub in my life time... but, one can dream.
[+] [-] chungy|7 years ago|reply