Implement a user-friendly view for fractions and powers

[MarcAnt01]

Problem Statement
Making more intuitive for the user to deal with complex calculation

Evidence or User Insights
Because scientific calculator isn't meant for simple calculations.

Proposal
Photo talks better than words

Goals
Making more intuitive for the user to deal with complex calculation

Non-Goals
None

Low-Fidelity Concept
I have no idea

[MicrosoftIssueBot]

This is your friendly Microsoft Issue Bot. I've seen this issue come in and have gone to tell a human about it.

[grochocki]

Thanks for the feature suggestion! I think this is a great start, but it seems like there are some missing details. Can you update your original comment with more detail? Check out our New Feedback Process for more info.

[MarcAnt01]

Thanks for the feature suggestion! I think this is a great start, but it seems like there are some missing details. Can you update your original comment with more detail? Check out our New Feedback Process for more info.

Is it OK, now?

[grochocki]

Thank you for the update! Let's keep this idea open for discussion so the community has the chance to provide feedback.

[aWeinzierl]

I think it is an excellent idea.
Maybe it is out of scope, but one could also use the concept of the replay button to edit the formula, i.e. implement it using the arrow keys (navigate the cursor around in the formula and edit in place).
But then, I think, there already arises the question wether it still should be integrated into the scientific version of the calculator, wether the scientific version should be replaced or wether a another version should be created.
That is because it would be a fundamental change of the concept of using the calculator compared to the current scientific version (which is just queueing and dequeueing afaik).
A half done adoption/integration could maybe worse the user experience.

There are actually many more calculators which work like the Casio (even for Android). They make scientific calculations really much more simple and comprehensible. This is why I usually also favour such calculators, when doing more than I can do with the standard mode of this calculator.
Video which demonstrates that:
https://youtu.be/hlwM9PfnKhI?t=175
https://youtu.be/hlwM9PfnKhI?t=341

[grochocki]

This could be supported, in part, by #71 and #72.

[tehKaiN]

The calculator shown in image (fx-xxxES) has WYSIWYG, easy to use interface for formula input, which could further benefit by replacing navigation buttons with mouse/touch/keyboard arrow input. It would be extremely cool to have similar interface in calc, with similar feature set.

[grochocki]

We reviewed the pitch and would love to explore this idea further! I think this pitch is a great start, but there are still some open questions. Moving this into planning to iron out some of the details. Keep in mind that not all ideas that make it into the planning phase are guaranteed to make it to release.

With this pitch in particular, we believe there are significant platform dependencies that may prevent us from implementing this feature today. Having said that, we should think through the experience we want to provide to help us better understand dependency requirements.

A couple top-of-mind open questions:

• Do we understand all of the UI surfaces that may be affected by this change?
• Is this initial idea scoped to read-only? Should the input be editable?

I created calculator-specs/friendlymath to track progress. For more information on next steps, check out our spec workflow.

[MarcAnt01]

Cannot understand the first question, as for the second one, it'd be better to add editable input, but isn't a requirement

[mdtauk]

Essentially the proposal is about the output generated by the Calculator app when it comes to the visualisation of Fractions and mathematical operations.

Segoe UI will need support for creating ligature fractions, as well as math functions. Maybe a Segoe UI Math font specific for this functionality?

Perhaps it should have compatibility with LaTeX

Maybe someone could talk to who is responsible for the Microsoft Math Input Panel?

[grochocki]

#338 will also needs to support for richer display output.

Cannot understand the first question, as for the second one, it'd be better to add editable input, but isn't a requirement

By UI surfaces, I mean all of locations we would need to add support for this friendly view:

Segoe UI will need support for creating ligature fractions, as well as math functions. Maybe a Segoe UI Math font specific for this functionality?

Cambria Math is another option that seems like it already has support for these symbols: "The regular weight has been extended with a large set of math and science symbols."

Perhaps it should have compatibility with LaTeX

There is also MathML (Mathematical Markup Language), which is a low-level specification for mathematical and scientific content (source).

Maybe someone could talk to who is responsible for the Microsoft Math Input Panel?

We can certainly take a look, though I imagine whatever they use is not part of Windows SDK. Office is another example that supports rich equation input/display:

[MovGP0]

Here is how it looks on my pocket calculator. I think that the Windows Calculator should work much the same way; at least in scientific mode:

[MovGP0]

See also: #620 #975 #978

[MovGP0]

btw: I don't think we need the ± symbol. The n solutions of the n'th root are just

ANS · e^((2·i·π)·m/n)

where m ∈ [0, n] ∈ ℝ and ANS is the solution of the principal solution.