Socialcalc

Today SocialCalc received a minor feature. When a cell is selected, pressing the TAB key will select the cell to the right of the current cell. Presently this is a poor man’s implementation of TAB navigation in a spreadsheet, copying the functionality of pressing the right arrow key (→) verbatim.

That’s OK, though, because the next steps in the UI will be refactorial. We’re going to clean up the event handling enough to properly handle TAB – and SHIFT+TAB – with minimal effort. You can read more about this on the mailing list, or get involved in the discussion, too.

As usual you can download the very latest from SVN.

There iswas a small bug in SocialCalc that disallowed the input of colons, parentheses, and other valid characters with a keyCode less than 48 when typing directly into the cell. Today I’ve fixed that problem with a simple patch. It’s revision 66 in Subversion. The latest snapshot, ready for download, also has the fix.

Feel free to play around with it. Let us know how it goes on the mailing list.

(aka, When is the next release going to be?)

If you’re wondering what’s behind the ‘latest shapshot’ link, this is a regularly updated pre-release version of SocialCalc (some other projects call this a ‘nightly build’). We try to ensure that this is never broken, so if you ever notice anything odd with it, please let us know on the mailing list.

As of writing this post, the latest version is an “almost ready” version of SocialCalc 1.1.0. This will be a major step up from SocialCalc 0.98 (which if you were following along with prior releases was mostly just wikiCalc 1.0 with some colour-scheme changes), due to the addition of support for Named Ranges, so you can say things like ‘=SUM(monthly_totals)’ rather than ‘=SUM(C3:C14)’.

We also have a whole bunch of other tiny little changes, improvements and tidy-ups that we hope to apply prior to the official release as well. We’re hoping to ship at some stage in the next few weeks, once the lawyers finish tidying up the license. Part of the change from wikiCalc to SoclalCalc involves a switch from the GPL to a new license, provisionally called the Common Public Attribution License (née Socaltext Public License) and once we get the all clear on that, we’re ready for release. As Casey has said, you can keep an eye on the Subversion repository or our RSS feed to watch our progress towards that.

SocialCalc development is an open affair.

Join our mailing list to get involved. Tony Bowden and I will be taking patches and developing openly on the mailing list. If you want to play with SocialCalc today you can download a snapshot or checkout the latest from Subversion.

Thanks for your interest. Keep your RSS reader tuned to this station for ongoing updates. We look forward to working with you!