Widget Workshop: A Mad Scientist's Laboratory is a hands-on science kit, for use on the computer and off. It was released in 1995 and is one of the more obscure Maxis products. It was designed by Lauren Elliott, co-author of the Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego game series.
The game has two main modes. Much like in The Incredible Machine, users can solve a variety of puzzles using a limited selection of parts or tinker with the freeform mode. Widget Workshop focuses more on the freeform mode than the other game.
Unlike the Rube Goldberg nature of The Incredible Machine, the parts in Widget Workshop are not restricted to the mechanical or physical. Items include display boxes, graphing windows, random number generators, and mathematical tools ranging from addition and subtraction to Boolean logic gates and trigonometric functions. The items can be connected in a manner similar to dataflow programming. While the arrangement of the items on screen does not matter, the connections do: a numerical constant box could be connected to a mathematical function; connected to a graph, which would display a horizontal line; input as a color value on an RGB monitor; or even used to trigger a sound effect.
An electronic calculator is typically a portable electronic device used to perform calculations, ranging from basic arithmetic to complex mathematics.
gnuplot is a command-line and GUI program that can generate two- and three-dimensional plots of functions, data, and data fits. The program runs on all major computers and operating systems . It is a program with a fairly long history, dating back to 1986. Despite its name, this software is not part of the GNU Project.
The BallyAstrocade is a second-generation home video game console and simple computer system designed by a team at Midway, at that time the videogame division of Bally. It was originally announced as the "Bally Home Library Computer" in October 1977 and initially made available for mail order in December 1977. But due to production delays, the units were first released to stores in April 1978 and its branding changed to "Bally Professional Arcade". It was marketed only for a limited time before Bally decided to exit the market. The rights were later picked up by a third-party company, who re-released it and sold it until around 1984. The Astrocade is particularly notable for its very powerful graphics capabilities for the time of release, and for the difficulty in accessing those capabilities.
A graphing calculator is a handheld computer that is capable of plotting graphs, solving simultaneous equations, and performing other tasks with variables. Most popular graphing calculators are programmable calculators, allowing the user to create customized programs, typically for scientific, engineering or education applications. They have large screens that display several lines of text and calculations.
Yahoo Widgets is a discontinued free application platform for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, specifically Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. The software was previously called Konfabulator, but after being acquired by computer services company Yahoo on July 25, 2005 it was rebranded. The name Konfabulator was subsequently reinstated as the name of the underlying rendering engine. The engine uses a JavaScript runtime environment combined with an XML interpreter to run small applications referred to as widgets, and hence is part of a class of software applications called widget engines. On February 27, 2012 Yahoo updated the License agreement stating that as of April 3, 2012 Yahoo! Widgets will continue to be available for download but support and development would stop.
In computing, text-based user interfaces (TUI), is a retronym describing a type of user interface (UI) common as an early form of human–computer interaction, before the advent of graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Like GUIs, they may use the entire screen area and accept mouse and other inputs. They may also use color and often structure the display using special graphical characters such as ┌ and ╣, referred to in Unicode as the "box drawing" set. The modern context of use is usually a terminal emulator.
The Incredible Machine (TIM) is a series of video games in which players create a series of Rube Goldberg devices. They were originally designed and coded by Kevin Ryan and produced by Jeff Tunnell, the now-defunct Jeff Tunnell Productions, and published by Dynamix; the 1993 through 1995 versions had the same development team, but the later 2000–2001 games have different designers. All versions were published by Sierra Entertainment. The entire series and intellectual property were acquired by Jeff Tunnell-founded PushButton Labs in October 2009. Pushbutton Labs was later acquired by Playdom, itself a division of Disney Interactive, so as of now the rights are held by The Walt Disney Company.
A diagram is a symbolic representation of information using visualization techniques. Diagrams have been used since prehistoric times on walls of caves, but became more prevalent during the Enlightenment. Sometimes, the technique uses a three-dimensional visualization which is then projected onto a two-dimensional surface. The word graph is sometimes used as a synonym for diagram.
A graphical widget in a graphical user interface is an element of interaction, such as a button or a scroll bar. Controls are software components that a computer user interacts with through direct manipulation to read or edit information about an application. User interface libraries such as Windows Presentation Foundation, Qt, GTK, and Cocoa, contain a collection of controls and the logic to render these.
Xlib is an X Window System protocol client library written in the C programming language. It contains functions for interacting with an X server. These functions allow programmers to write programs without knowing the details of the X protocol.
There are various ways in which calculators interpret keystrokes. These can be categorized into two main types:
Freeform surface modelling is a technique for engineering freeform surfaces with a CAD or CAID system.
The Casio FX-7000G is a calculator which is widely known as being the world's first graphing calculator available to the public. It was introduced to the public and later manufactured between 1985 and c. 1988. Notable features are its ability to graph functions, and that it is programmable. The calculator offers 82 scientific functions and is capable of manual computation for basic arithmetic problems.
Task Manager, previously known as Windows Task Manager, is a task manager, system monitor, and startup manager included with Microsoft Windows systems. It provides information about computer performance and running software, including name of running processes, CPU and GPU load, commit charge, I/O details, logged-in users, and Windows services. Task Manager can also be used to set process priorities, processor affinity, start and stop services, and forcibly terminate processes.
The Dreamcast VGA Box is an accessory for Sega's Dreamcast video game console that allows it to connect to a video display such as a computer monitor or a HDTV set through a VGA port. Because the Dreamcast hardware can produce a VGA-compatible video signal natively, this connection provides improved picture quality compared to standard composite video or S-Video connections, along with support for progressive scan video.
Clutter is a GObject-based graphics library for creating hardware-accelerated user interfaces. Clutter is an OpenGL-based 'interactive canvas' library and does not contain any graphical control elements. It relies upon OpenGL (1.4+) or OpenGL ES for rendering,. It also supports media playback using GStreamer and 2D graphics rendering using Cairo.
Graphic calculators made by Casio include the touchscreen ClassPad 300 as well as the models with traditional buttons which can be divided into two main generations listed below. Casio produced the world's first graphing calculator, the fx-7000G.
GTK Scene Graph Kit (GSK) is the rendering and scene graph API for GTK introduced with version 3.90. GSK lies between the graphical control elements (widgets) and the rendering.
Scrap Mechanic is a sandbox video game developed for Windows by Swedish game studio and publisher, Axolot Games, in which players can build machines, vehicles, and buildings, and share their creations online. The initial version of the game, released on January 20, 2016, was a creative mode with unlimited access to all available parts for building. On the day of its release, it was the top-selling game on Steam and is estimated to have 1–2 million sales. The survival mode update for the game, with new game mechanics including wildlife, scavenging, farming, and cooking, as well as an underwater biome, was released on May 7, 2020. It was the third-best-selling game on Steam the week after the update.
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