A conversion is as good as a rest.
Late last year, Chris Johnson made available version 2.35 of UnitConv, his application for performing conversions between different units.
Mainly offering SI and Imperial units, UnitConv also allows for some more specialised conversions, such as energy equivalents, along with a few other gems, such as binary, octal, hexadecimal and decimal conversions, a gas molecule speed calculator and an image size reckoner.
The changes that went into this new version include:
- Percentage (%) and back-slash (\) characters are now allowed in unit names when saving custom data.
- Using a leading forward-slash (/) character in the conversion factor signifies that the multiplication and division actions must be inverted, thus allowing a reciprocal relationship.
- Custom edit options now include “Delete item” and “Insert item”.
- Unit configuration files now accept tab characters as well as spaces to line up columns.
- User settings that can be saved have been added to the binary, octal, decimal and hexadecimal conversion, including an option to decide how to deal with leading zeros.
- Converted values (top-bit set) can now be displayed as negative in decimal format.
- It’s now possible to toggle the value of a binary digit between 0 and 1 by clicking on it.
UnitConv is 26/32-bit neutral, and should therefore be compatible with all versions of RISC OS from 3 to 6, and it has been tested successfully on the BeagleBoard and Raspberry Pi. The application is freely available from Chris Johnson’s RISC OS software page (mirrored here and here).
