Dashboard Calculator ESC Issue

There's a 'C' button on the calculator to the left of the '='.

 

Hitting 'C' is WAY less ergonomic/intuitive/natural than being able to hit esc - or the numpad CLEAR key, forchrissakes (for which there's no excuse or reason not to work, but mysteriously, it's not implemented).

Why Apple's going so far out of their way to completely obliterate so many learned, reflexive, and intuitive behaviours throughout the OS is beyond me, and frankly leaves me with a bit of nauseous feeling... if the little stabwounds to productivity keep adding up, OS X is going to get tedious to use, unfocused, and ultimately jump the shark as a professional tool. Sadly, there aren't any viable alternatives, so the sinking feeling is all the more disturbing...

 

I don't have a fix for your problem, but I highly recommend Gooculator (click for link), which is simply a box in which you type whatever you want, and press Enter, and it solves it for you. You don't need to do operations in multiple steps (like Apple's calculator widget), as you can type your calculation in one go.

You can also use Spotlight to do calculations, even with parenthesis, and more complex operations.

 

I agree that the "clear" key not working is a bug ( I hope anyway, I submitted a bug report to Apple). In the mean time and almost just as easy, use the "c" key on your keyboard to clear the calculator. Alternately, you could just use the calculator application rather than the one in the dock, the clear key works there.

I do hope they fix the clear key issue though, as someone who uses the dashboard calculator a lot and also uses an adding machine, my right hand does all the work and hitting the clear key is much easier and intuitive than hitting the c key with my left hand.

 

Okay, well hitting "c" is almost as good as using the ESC key to clear the calculator so I suppose I'm not as mad as I used to be...but still...Apple, why did you do that? I just don't understand why they do random things like that... but I still love em.

 

I don't like having to press C instead of Esc just as you do, but I think this wasn't a random change: I can bet the modification is based on the many times most of the users display the dashboard and then want to close/hide it pressing the Esc key instead of the same key/gesture they used to display it.

Surely it was a matter of what was the most frequent use, which I think is the one I've just described above.

 

I'm using OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and have the same problem: pressing Esc not only clears the calculator but also quits the dashboard. I found that the 'solution' is to press Option + Esc.