My project was all about personal growth. I haven't had an extensive background in GUI so I wrote a little calculator application in Java to better get a feel for how swing works.
What interested me was my lack of knowledge about graphics. I took the graphics course at UGA but had very little knowledge of how to use Swing otherwise. I really wanted to take this opportunity to improve my arsenal of programming expertise and learn something new.
This is a simple calculator application that should do almost everything that your handheld calculator does with the exception of being able to negate a number before typing it.
I took much of what I learned and used to build this project from the Internet. I found a very useful youtube video that helped a lot and purposefully coded it differently from how it was implemented in the video in order to really be able to play around with things and see how these classes work.
A challenge that I ran into while building this project was finding a quality source of information. The youtube community as well as many other locations on the internet have a very vast set of ideas on how to build GUIs and I needed to find the methods that I liked best and could also understand well.
I am proud of accomplishing what I set out to do and learning more about GUI/Java Swing. It was very informative to gain this expertise and with luck this is something that I will be able to use on future programming projects.
I learned many things about Java Swing. Although this is one of the more primitive GUI building tools, it was a very good introduction to GUIs and I hope to be able to translate this knowledge into useful things in the future.
Hypothetically, I could add more complex mathematical operators to the calculator (sin, cos, power, square root, etc.). This is not my intention at this time however as I would rather take these skills I have learned and go forward with them as useful tools for future projects.
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