Board Feet Easy Calculator 2.0

Board Feet Easy Calculator

Version 3.0 is here!

After too much delay (sorry) the new version of the Board Feet Easy Calculator is here. This complete re-write uses the latest tools - making use of the many new features in iOS and sporting a modern user interface.

The best part is that it's still free!

Introduction

The Board Feet Easy Calculator is a simple, easy to use application for calculating board feet. If you don't work with wood, this application is of no use to you. If you do have the need to calculate board feet, this easy to use calculator may be just what you're looking for. Simply enter the length, width, and thickness, and the calculator will tell you the board feet for the given dimensions. Optionally, you can specify the number of pieces, a waste percentage, and the cost per board foot, and the calculator will produce the total board feet, the board feet including waste, and the total cost.

Although there are other free board feet calculators (and I've tried them all), they either did not have all the options I needed, and/or had user interface quirks, so I created my own. I use this calculator often and find it handy, so I want to share it with any other woodworkers that need an easy to use board feet calculator.

Version 3.0 is functionally the same as version 2, with only some very minor feature enhancements that were requested by the user base.

Using the app

Calculator

Enter length (in feet and/or inches) and width in inches, then tap Calculate. Default settings are 4/4 thickness and 1 piece, so common calculations only require length and width. Optional inputs are:

• Waste percentage, to account for cutting inefficiencies and material defects
• Cost per board foot

Once fields are filled in, the calculator shows net board feet, total board feet with waste factored in, and total cost. Reset clears all entries back to their defaults.

Projects

Calculations can be grouped into projects, acting as a bill-of-materials list. Create a project, then add individual material calculations to it. The project keeps a running total of board feet and cost automatically. Each project can also hold notes for anything else worth remembering, such as delivery dates, client details, or a cut list.

Tap into a project to view, edit, or delete its materials; swipe a material to delete it individually.

Contact

If you have problems, suggestions, questions, feedback, or issues not covered here, please use the App Store's "Report a Problem" option, or reach out via the contact information on the app's App Store listing.

Privacy Policy

Last updated August 25, 2026

Board Feet Easy Calculator does not collect, store, transmit, or share any personal data, either with its developer or with any third party.

All information you enter into the app (projects, materials, dimensions, prices, and notes) is stored only on your own device, using Apple's on-device data storage. It never leaves your device. The app does not connect to the internet, does not include analytics or advertising, and does not track you in any way.

The app has no user accounts and no sign-in, so there is nothing to link your use of the app to you personally. Since no data is collected from anyone, this applies equally to users of any age.

If this policy ever changes, an updated version will be posted here.

iPad embodies Star Trek designer's vision?

As a follower of Star Trek from the earliest days, I found this article interesting - and somewhat nostalgic.

Of interest was the ST designer Okuda's comment on how hard it was to simulate pinch and zoom using FX, and how easily the iPad seems to handle it.

And finally, some of the insight into the direction that user input may take in the future (such as a 3D gesture system similar to Minority Report for example) was food for thought.

I think Apple's acquisition Siri has potential - in more ways than one

Siri is all over the Apple news sites today.

I heard that apple purchased this company, Siri, but didn't have a clue as to what it did until I watched this video.  Its a keynote from the Semantic Technology Conference.  It begins with Apple's own vision (from 20 years ago!) of a virtual personal assistant called the "Knowledge Navigator" (video here).  It goes on to describe the challenges of creating a "Virtual Personal Assistant", such as semantical searching, reasoning, speech recognition, NLP, etc. - and presents a method to reel in the problem domain by first filtering on the current context to narrow the domain.  The slides from the keynote are also available.  It seems a practical approach and I look forward to trying it out (I just downloaded it from the App Store).

And I could see where this would fit with Apple's strategy: the iTunes Store, App Store, etc. all provide content and services, like Siri's servers do - and like all of these services, Siri would collect information that's valuable to Apple (and advertisers using its new iAd service).  Siri uses services to make recommendations, and allow commerce based on those recommendations, and it seems reasonable that paid recommendations (ala Google) would make their way into Siri.  And Siri (optionally) has access to your credit cards making it all too easy to engage in a bit of impulse buying.

Interesting.

7 Reasons to Hate Your Code

I found this post to be a good, alternate way to look at the code we write.
However (as is stated in the author's update) it is not meant to imply that shoddy code should be written if it yields more features and faster releases.  In some systems (where the life expectancy is short) this might be acceptable.  But for long-lived systems (such as large enterprise applications), which have to be maintained for a significant period of time, the cost of maintaining code shoddy code, that is difficult to debug and extend, can be staggering.  This can easily outweigh any advantages gained in terms of features and "time to market".  So I don't believe there is a "one size fits all" approach.

Also, with today's tooling (IDEs with formatting, refactoring, etc.), is takes little or no effort to create well formatted, readable code that enhances maintainability.  You don't have to gild the lilly, but there is no excuse for slapdash work either.

So in my opinion, professional developers should be able to produce code with good craftsmanship in an efficient and cost effective manner.  This is true in most trades where the quality of workmanship is always balances against cost and schedule.

Introduction: My history with Macs (or how OS X hooked me)

Macs are hot right now. The hardware is well designed, sexy, and highly coveted. But while many new users are drawn to Macs because of image or status, I think they ultimately buy - and stay - with the platform because of a superior balance of functionality and ease of use. My story may be a bit different: it’s the new Mac operating system, OS X, that hooked me.

My history with the Mac and Mac OS X

Least anyone think me a Mac zealot, I am actually a relatively recent convert to the platform. I’ve been a Windows user from pretty much the beginning of Windows (and a DOS and even CP/M user before that) - so I have a lot of history with PCs. And I have experience with Linux, OS/2, BeOS and even the Commodore 64 BASIC OS.

My first exposure to Macs was not a positive one. Decades ago I helped a graphic artist friend buy his first Mac. He brought me along to the store because I was “a computer guy”. When I was test driving the machine at the store I found it hard to adjust to (coming from DOS/Windows). Back then there were no multi-button mouses, and the classic Mac OS worked much more differently from Windows than the current Mac OS does today - both because of changes in the Mac (like multi-button mouse support), but also changes in Windows that “borrowed” a lot from the Mac interface and experience. This old Mac experience - an experience like I had with the old Mac OS - is what most people (myself included until recently) think of when they hear about Macs. The think of all the differences that existed in the UI, file incompatibilities, etc. These no longer exist - but most people don’t know that. Interestingly, many Mac “old timers” still long for the classic OS and the different way it worked. Not me.

The classic OS always seemed strange to me. Not so much the UI, but basic things like the cryptic finder (the Mac equivalent of the Windows File Explorer) and the “extras” folder (a folder where drivers and system level things were put in order to be loaded at runtime), lack of preemptive multitasking - so that it often just didn’t feel, well, predictable. But even worse was the fact that I was a Windows (and before that DOS) programmer, and things at the system level (the architecture) were just too different on the Mac (both because of different, RISC-based hardware and the way the operating system was designed).

But in the early ‘90s I stumbled across NeXT computers, and dove into their architecture a bit because of the rave reviews it was getting from Object Oriented developers at the time. Its architecture and the developer resources were cutting edge. But the boxes were too expensive for most independent developers to buy, so they were relegated to niche industries were they did quite well for a period. So I watched NeXT with interest during that period, and when they decided to port the NeXT operating system to the PC platform, as a product named NeXTSTEP, I bought a copy in the hope of exploring this wonderful object-oriented, developer-friendly OS. But, as is the case with any OS running on PC hardware, the variety of motherboards and peripherals in different PCs (with their associated drivers, etc.) meant that only a few hardware combinations worked - a problem everything from Linux to Vista has faced on PCs - and so I never got a working system up and running. But the desire for an OS like that persisted.

So, when the NeXT venture finally failed to be profitable, and Steve Jobs was brought back to Apple (along with the NeXT technology), I watched with interest as the company made OS X from the NeXT OS’s bones. When OS X was released I knew it was time for me to take a peek. So I found a under-utilized Mac, loaded OS X 10.1 on it, and gave it a good going over by using it as the primary computer for doing my job for a few months. And it worked so well that I got a Mac for my exclusive machine for work, and them for home, and then replaced my wife’s computer at home, and so on.

And I haven’t looked back since.