Okay, so I wanted to try my hand at making a simple calculator app today. Nothing too fancy, just something to handle basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. I figured it would be a good way to brush up on my coding skills and see if I could put together something functional.
First, I dusted off my old coding book and flipped through the pages to refresh my memory on how to set up the basic framework. Found a good example of a simple UI layout and started coding away. I decided to go with a clean and straightforward design – just the number buttons, the basic operation symbols, an equals button, and a clear button. Pretty standard stuff.
After I got the basic layout sorted, I started working on the actual calculations. I remembered I needed to handle the order of operations, you know, like how multiplication and division should be done before addition and subtraction. That took a bit of thinking, but I eventually figured out a way to make it work.
I wrote some code to store the numbers entered, picked up the selected operation, and then performed the calculation when the equals button was pressed. It wasn’t super smooth at first. I hit a few snags where the app would crash or give me weird results, especially when I tried dividing by zero – oops!
Spent a good chunk of the afternoon debugging and tweaking the code. I added some error handling to catch things like division by zero and made sure the app wouldn’t crash if the user did something unexpected. Also played around with different fonts and colors for the display, just to make it look a bit nicer.
Here’s what I did:
- Laid out the UI with buttons for numbers, operations, equals, and clear.
- Implemented the logic for each operation.
- Handled operator precedence (multiplication/division before addition/subtraction).
- Added error handling for division by zero and invalid input.
- Polished the UI a bit with some styling.
Finally, after a few hours of tinkering, I got it working pretty well. It’s not the most advanced calculator in the world, but it does the basic stuff just fine. It felt pretty good to see it all come together in the end, even if it was just a simple project. You know, kind of like, starting with a pile of bricks and ending up with a little house, even if it is a bit rough around the edges, it’s still my house.