I, of course, never make mistakes. Well … okay, there was that one incident with the fire in 1988 (hoo boy, that was a doozy) but I digress. For the rest of you, I’ve implemented a backspace key! That’s right, one of the most requested features has finally made it in.

I’ve tried to create an icon that blended in with the rest of the interface in an intuitive and unobtrusive way. It only appears when you’re typing in a formula and the formula display shifts over so everything is visible.

Now that I’ve put it in, I find I’m using it just about every time I put in a new formula. (So much for never making mistakes.) I know it’s silly, but it’s kinda fun to go back and forth between different dice sizes or numbers.

Incidentally, this is a good example of a feature which seems simple but is actually pretty tricky to implement. You’d think it’s just a matter of removing a single letter in a string, right? But actually, the dice formula is internally represented by a number of states: an array of number of dice, an array of dice sizes, the current mode (number mode, size mode, color mode), whether or not the current number is negative, etc., etc. Backtracking through all of that is, as I mentioned, a bit tricky.

Next up, saving preferences between sessions so that you’ll start the program with the same dice that you ended it with. That one’s going to take some work which is why I left it until the weekend to start…

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