A new and improved version of Rad Pro Calculator for Desktop PC has just been released, version 3.0.
The help file has not been updated since May of 2005, and it was based on the original 2001 help file. Needless to say, it was lame at best. A brand new help file has been written and produced as an Adobe Acrobat file. The document explains usage of each calculator step by step, in the way that I use it at work, as a user, not a developer. It also explains the power and limitations of the software in a way that only the developer can know. This help file will actually be of help, I think, especially to new users. I have always tried to make the software intuitive and user friendly. Many of you probably knew how to use it without a help file. Even if you are in that category, I would recommend going through the new help file. You may discover something that you did not know about the software.
The next major improvement is in the output of the calculator. In past versions the only output was screen prints of the calculator, a page at a time or copying and pasting input and answers onto a spreadsheet or Word table, one textbox at a time. I've noticed from looking at website statistics that people were visiting the decay page and hitting it up to 50 times per user in one day. I recently got an email from a software developer for the Canadian government about setting up a web services between my website and theirs. They were using my software to decay their entire source inventory. That prompted me to develop the code that I have been working on for the last month, Microsoft Excel output. For the decay, gamma, beta and Bremsstrahlung calculators, Excel output has been added. Now each time that you do a calculation and then press the button next to the calculate button, another row of data is added to an Excel spreadsheet. This spreadsheet may be saved, printed and the data may be copied and pasted into a database, Word document table or into a Power Point presentation. It is a very powerful feature. Before you use this feature, I highly recommend that you read the last section of the new help file.
In previous versions, the output format selection options were tied to Visual Basic 6 (VB6), the original language the software was started in. That had the limitation that scientific notation display was always rounded to two digits. That is no longer the case with VB.NET, but the code still had that limitation. I totally rewrote the format subroutine and now you have the choice between displaying full digit scientific notation or two digit, i.e. 3.42832456E-009 or 3.43E-009.
Several minor GUI and code bugs were discovered during the writing of the help file. They were all fixed. To download the new version 3.0, click on this link:
http://www.radprocalculator.com/RadProDownloads.aspx