Calculator currency exchange update problem...

wudja-cudja™ ,

Try searching for "calculator exchange rate not working" (no quotes, here in the search box) and see all of the topics for your issue.

It does seem to work every other day or so for me but it is very buggy.

It doesn't seem as though Apple will fix/support calculator for 10.3 as it has since released widgets in 10.4 for exchange rates/calculator.

hope that helps some,

littleshoulders [:-)

I'm having exactly the same problems (menu garbling and nonsense calculations) with currency conversion on Calculator tonight and I had no problems whatsoever two nights ago. I, too, am on 10.3.9.

However, I'm getting the same nonsensical conversion results (but without the menu garbling) in KoalaCalc, which gets its rates from the IMF server. This leads me to believe it's a server-side problem with both apps.

KoalaCalc is a much superior calculator to Apple's barebones offering and it can be had (free) by clicking here:

http://www.macropodsoftware.com/koalacalc/index.html

It may be something to do with the IMF website. I noticed both Apple Calculator and KoalaCalc (it's not as cute as the marsupial - but a nice program!) are having currency problems. (It seems this has happened before or maybe I had a dream about it.)

People are still having this problem as of 18-December. Apple support, please can you see what's up with this problem. Just try updating your currency exchange rates and do some converting. Kablooey.

I've just discovered something weird. Even though nothing appears in the "From:" and "To:" menus, when you click on them you can see the currencies aligned (but double-spaced) down the right-hand side of the menus. I've been playing round with conversions and I've found that even though your selections won't show up in the closed menus, they're still active.

But here's the weird part – the "From:" and "To:" currencies must be reversed in order for your conversion to work. An example: I needed to convert $95 to the euro equivalent. To do this, I had to enter euro as the "From:" currency and US Dollars as the "To:" currency. Doing it this way (backwards), I got the correct conversion: €72.55. You can check this against Google's IMF converter gadget.

...same problems here using Calculator version 3.2.1 with OS X 10.3.9. I tried thrashing plist preference files with no success. The FinancialRates plist resides in Library/Application Support/Calculator(folder). If you thrash this file without updating then the Calculator application will work o.k. at its default currency settings of year 2003(!). This would seem to indicate that there's some corruption going on in the current FinancialRates update file.
Otherwise, they are hardly dropping compatibility for Panther's Calculator without warning?
Is there any way of reporting this as a bug to Apple?
I need this facility badly for my Ebay transactions.

Hello
If it is any consolation, the same thing is happening with 10.4.8 and has been for at least a year on the PowerBook. It has now become a problem on the iMac: when updating the message comes up with The following currencies have been updated, but the content is blank.
It is sad that Apple has not addressed this problem: there is another Discussion page from 2005 discussing the same issue, and that has been closed with no solution offered.
Perhaps the US does not want to see how badly the dollar is doing?

The Calculator currency exchange update makes a file called FinancialRates.plist in the folder user/Library/Application Support/Calculator. I opened this file with TextEdit and found each line for the name of the currency had a bunch of spaces before and after the name. I used Find & Replace to get rid of the extra spaces and saved the file. This fixed the currency pulldown menus problem in Calculator. The numbers in the plist file reflect the reverse of what they should be. To get the right conversion for say Euro to Dollars, choose the reverse, Dollars to Euro. If you do fix the FinancialRates.plist file, clicking on Update Currency Exchange Rates, it will redownload the bad plist file.

This is a new problem. The same thing did happen about a year ago and Apple did eventually fix it. It seems as though someone has reintroduced the bad code somewhere. It is a real shame as I use this facility so much.

I am off to ook for a widgit.

It's fixed now. No more menu garbling and the conversions are now "right way round."

Server-side ****-up obviously. Don't the IMF IT people test these things?

Anyway, all's well that ends.