Recently I've participated in a mortgage calculator contest. The grand prize was 10K$ and the second and third place was 500$ gift certificate at newegg. I tought I'd give it a try.
Today they announced the winners.. apparently I didn't even made it to the third place.
That sucks.
I just spent three weeks putting 13,022 lines of code together for basically .. nothing. At least if I had learned something interesting in the process.
That money would have been more than welcome .. but I took a bet and lost, that's life.
That said, now I have a badass and useless jQuery mortgage calculator fully customizable and cross-browser with all the bells and whistles you can dream on. What can I do ?
Release it Open Source of course.
So here it is, have fun with it, tweak it or use it for your clients I don't care.
It's free and Open Source.
But don't mind asking me to fix something or add a new feature, I've spent more than my share of time on this dead-end project and I don't plan to put any more efforts on it.
That said I will probably move it to Google Code and will grant commit access to people I deem serious (and good) enough to work on it.
The license will be MIT.
So here it is:
And in case you're wondering which calculators were deemed better than mine, here they are;
Congratulation ton the winners, you've done a good job guys.
Finally, if you like my Mortgage Calculator and feel charitable, you can always tip me as a consolation prize..
I would like to thank the guys from webhostingsearch (domain hosting review place) for supporting my work. Your donation will keep my site up and running for another year :)
Dude, the first place winner doesn't compare to the one you made. Good work, and thx for making it open source!
@Brian
Technically .. I think it is, I've compared their source code.
But for some reasons mine didn't respond to their criteria. Maybe I pushed to much on the technical side and not enough on the UI, I don't know really.
But thanks for confirming my gut feelings ;)
Only briefly checked yours and the 1st place, personally i like yours better.
I really liked your too but acodingfool's is pretty sweet. Being able to customize colors, drop logo's in and turn it into a 'widget' is pretty sweet.
How the hell did #3 come in as #3? That was some god-awful UI work, there.
Yours is beautiful, but it does have a major flaw.
Interest rates in the US are almost always in 1/8ths of a percent, which means that 5.125, 5.375, 5.625, etc are very common rates. Chopping off the .005 causes enough of an error to matter.
Hindsight, but that may have really hurt you in the comp.
Great work, tho.
@dave
Only the output is chopped, the internal calculation are all made with JavaScript's maximum precision (15 decimals).
Furthermore, the output can be controlled with a Python 3000 like string format given as option. The default is "${0:0.2f}", so if you'd wanted to display three decimal instead, you'd only have to pass the option {format: "${0:0.3f}"}
mCalc is awesome - you should have won the first place.
Sorry, but the archive link is broken, could you please update? thanks