One of the things that I enjoy about looking at an app for the first time, is the interest in how the coder decided to make his interface look. Just because I think everyone likes to look at what other people have done, I've grabbed screen shots of all the apps I have tested...
Some of them are very detailed, most of them use a second pop-up type window for their configuration type settings, and of course, you can see that some of them are strictly set up by the command line. All of these apps gave the correct answers, and when you get down to it... That is all that matters.
So in alphabetical order... Enjoy...
I have ALWAYS enjoyed the fact that when Istvan Bozsik rewrote his app for me, he left the title in Hungarian! Istvan confirms that the title is the word PALINDROME... The says literally, it translates in English to "Mirror Number".
Ben Despres' app was the speed king for quite a while. It has a pop up menu for configurations settings, that has like a thousand buttons on it!! It is simple to understand, and always ran solidly.
Jack Driscoll sent me four versions of his app that got faster each time, but I haven't heard from him in quite a while...
Matt Stenson was kind enough to compile David Gillies code, so that I could run it, for testing. Turns out it is pretty close to Matt's own app speed... Straight forward and without frills, Davids code is listed on Ben's site, along with most of these others'.
Eric Goldstein's app has more milestones under it's belt than any of the others... His ini file is simple to understand and almost infinitely configurable. His app writes a very nice log file, and the SUSPEND button has been extremely useful.
If I remember correctly, Doug Hoyte's app was the first one I ever got that would allow the user to test numbers in bases other than 10. It was only moderately behind the speed leaders at the time I got it, but Doug didn't feel like racing, and I havn't heard from him in quite a while.
Pierre's app was the first one I ever received that would take advantage of CPU Hyper-threading or operate across a network. This image shows the server app running with it's status, as well as two clients running slaved to IP address 127.0.0.1. There is also an HTML monitoring program that can be brought up on a remote machine, that provides some useful status information.
Chris Lomont had a hell of an app... It was the first app I ever had that would automatically test a range of numbers (Like a Lychrel Search.). Tell it what number to start with, tell it what number to end at, and how many iterations to do of each, and it would run off on it's own... Timer to milliseconds... A pause and continue button... Everything but a log file.... It was ahead of it's time.
Nathan Moinvaziri only emailed me two or three times, but his app prompted you for answers instead of making you remember to get them all in the command line, and the time of startup. It was friendly.
Eric Sellers has quite a few milestones to his name because of this application. Always one of the fastest, and a simple to understand pop up configuration window. His little stick figure man for the RUN button always makes me laugh. Eric hasn't made any improvements in quite some time. :-(
Matt Stenson has a clean quick, easy to understand interface. There is something about the way that this is laid out, that I really enjoy looking at it... He is actively working on his core algorithm, and is making strides in speeding it up. One update alone improved almost 300%!!
Every time Eric Goldstein gets a bit of a breather in the speed race, Vaughn Suite comes right up behind him and taps him on the shoulder or passes him. Vaughn has AGGRESSIVELY worked on his app, and has sent revision after revision. EVERY revision he has sent, has been faster than the last... He is a long way from content with where he is at... I'm sure the battle will continue!!
My own amazingly slow application, written with LabView 6i. I'm ashamed to include it with all these other incredible apps, but I did it, and this is my page, so....
This is the exciting output from John Walker's app!! It's exciting, because thanks to Matt Stenson, I was able to actually RUN John's application. The screen doesn't update, there is no configuration options, no log file, no display of any kind, but it was the ball that rolled the rest of us over, and we have all been thankful for it!! (Yes, the app IS running in this picture. I hit enter, and visually, NOTHING happens. It's kind of unnerving the first couple times, since you don't know what it's going to do, or if it's running, but hey!! At least it's easy to watch... You can do it from any other room in the house!!)