Tips Calculator

This tool answered an important need around the office, and around the house: How much of a tip should the pizza delivery guy get? Hey, that's an important piece of info when you've been codin' hard all night long!

If 15% works out to $9.63, and there's a twenty in my pocket (lucky days!), then would it be appropriate to give him an even $10? Heck, ya' can't spend 37 cents very many places, anyway. Besides, who's got time to count pennies? There's code to finish! If 20% is close to a round number, shoot, I'd rather be a tad generous.

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Simple enough... Start the program. (Double-click its icon, put an item in your window manager's menu, type the program's name at a shell prompt.) Enter an amount in the entry box, and click the Calculate! button.

There are a couple of shortcuts incorporated into the interface. When the program starts, the cursor will be positioned in the entry box, so you can just start typing. Enter the amount, hit the Tab key to move to the Calculate! button, and hit the Space-Bar to calculate. You can also simply hit the ENTER or RETURN key. The Escape key kills the program.

Hit the Exit button when you're done, or hit the Escape key.

Under un*x, the amount can be specified on the command line:

$ tips 13.50

This will produce:

amount: $13.5
1.15% : $15.525
1.20% : $16.2

The program will not display a window, but instead simply perform the calculations, and display the results to standard output (the terminal window). Don't know why it doesn't want to work under M$ Windoze, but then I doubt that many users would care,anyway.

Notice that the program doesn't round to 2 decimal places. That's a feature, not a bug! I'd rather see how close the results are, so I can decide on an amount.

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Although free, this program is copyright © 1999, 2000 by dave w capella, and covered by this license. Please read it.

There is no warranty and no guarantee of support, but I welcome feedback. I will answer questions, suggestions, bug reports, and even kudo's as time allows. It's always nice to hear that one's program is actually useful to someone.

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tcl/Tk source

This is the same file as tips.tcl, but tips.tcl activates the tcl plugin in a web browser.

tips.exe

Windows program (611kb)

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Simple enough, just drop it into a directory that's in your path. Then, double-click it, type it's name at a command prompt, or install an item in your window manager's menu.

Enjoy!
...dave

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