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GarfNet Unit Converter applet

ByGarf

Skip preamble and launch Units Converter applet

Another GarfNet software project snatched from the grave, this is a complete rebuild of the original GarfNet Unit Converter. The main feature of the new GarfNet converter applet is that it is bi directional. Whatever “Quantity:” box you use, the conversion will automagically appear in the other box. Which means you can convert units in either direction! Another feature is that instead of having a row per conversion type, this offers the user a “Conversion Type” pick-list. User then selects the type of conversion he/she wants. This populates a pair of “Units type” pick-lists will all the available conversions for that particular type of unit.

Despite its greatly simplified user interface, this version has a lot more conversions too. It also offers new “Force” section, together with a greatly improved computing section that includes bits and bytes, as well as ISO and IEC multipliers. Its new extensible codebase makes it much easier for the developer to add additional conversions. Importantly it now plays nicely on mobile devices. It also plays nicely with DarkReader theme changer plugin for web browser. So if you like dark themes then this applet supports them.

Based on SI

To make this applet bi directional required the use of “base units”. We chose to use those provided by the SI metric system. Many important customary units such as the inch, the foot the yard and the mile are now defined by the metre anyway. So this seemed the obvious way to proceed with this project.

Scientific Notation

By default, Converter will show normal numbers as normal numbers. However when numbers grow too big, or too small, it automatically displays numbers greater than or equal to 100,000,000 as “1e8” and numbers smaller than .0001 in the format “1e-4”, in JavaScript style scientific notation. A number expressed in Scientific notation has two parts:-

  1. significand
  2. exponent

The exponent is always the number of times the significand pattern needs to be multiplied by 10 to obtain a value equal to the “regular number”.

For example, the regular number 4321 in scientific notation is represented as
4.321 × 103

In this instance the significand is 4.321 and the exponent is 103

Because this is essentially a JavaScript applet, it displays scientific numbers JavaScript style, in a manner similar to this

4321e3

Where “e” represents a decimal exponent, and the “3” is the power of ten.

Thus 4.321e3 = 4.321 × 103 = 4321

Conversions

The current version supports 16 types of conversion plus a new section to help those not familiar with the SI metric system learn about metric prefixes. However the new design is very modular and further types of conversion may appear in the future.

  1. Length
  2. Mass
  3. Time
  4. Energy
  5. Power
  6. Force
  7. Pressure
  8. Temperature
  9. Angular Measurement
  10. Area
  11. volume
  12. Speed
  13. Acceleration
  14. Fuel Consumption
  15. Radio
  16. Computing
  17. Metric Prefix Visualiser

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