We’re looking for a Software Developer to work on PythonAnywhere, Resolver One, and our other products, based in our offices in Clerkenwell, London, UK. More information on our jobs page.

[UPDATE] This position is now filled.

Interested in an online Python environment?

We recently noticed that many of the users of Project Dirigible weren’t actually using it as a spreadsheet: instead, they were essentially using it as an online Python development environment. This sounded like a great idea, so we’ve started a new project: PythonAnywhere. It’s starting as a Python console in the browser, but we’re adding new features daily, and the plan is to gradually turn it into a fully-featured online Python IDE and cloud deployment platform.

If you’re interested, sign up for the beta waiting list today!

Today we’re proud to announce something new from Resolver Systems: it’s called Dirigible, and it’s a spreadsheet-like tool for Python grid computing. If you know Resolver One, that might sound familiar! — but Dirigible isn’t just a web-based version of our flagship product. We’ve written it from the ground up, and designed it to play to the strengths of the web and cloud computing.

If you’d like to try it out, you can sign up for the beta program on the Dirigible web site; numbers are currently limited while we make sure it’s secure and stable, but we’re bringing more people on board daily.

If you’d like to know a bit more about Dirigible, and particularly how it fits in with Resolver One, read on!

Let’s take a look at Resolver One first. It’s a super-programmable desktop spreadsheet, targeted at developers and technically-savvy spreadsheet users. It works well with your existing Windows desktop applications, connecting seamlessly to .NET components, importing your documents from Microsoft Excel, and making it easy to script with IronPython. If you want it to talk to your Bloomberg console, there’s a plugin for that — and if you want to share your .NET environment over the network, there’s the Resolver One Web server.

By comparison, Dirigible was designed from the ground up for the more technical user, and plays to the strengths of utility computing. We took the things from Resolver One that made software developers say “wow” — like Python-based formulae, objects in the grid, and the ability to treat a spreadsheet as a function and call it from another sheet. Then we worked out what we could make better by coding just those things as a web application backed by traditional Python — not IronPython — on a grid of Linux servers. You can access your spreadsheets from JavaScript on your own web pages — building simple web apps using a spreadsheet. It runs your spreadsheets on a grid of servers (hosted by Amazon EC2) and makes it easy to build calculations that scale across that grid. (Imagine writing a spreadsheet to work out the price of a financial instrument, and then using 100 computers for a few seconds to price up a portfolio of a hundred of them.)

Of course, we couldn’t stop there — new ideas kept popping up. Why not make user code control how the spreadsheet is recalculated — perhaps you want to run the formulae multiple times within one recalculation to do goal-seeking? And surely we should make it easy for people to change formulae from any user code, not just button handlers? The great thing about improvements like this is that we can see how people like them in Dirigible, and bring them back into Resolver One if they work out well.

We’re proud of what we’ve created so far with Dirigible, but we know that early feedback is essential. So while it’s only a few months old, it’s already in beta — if you’d like to give it a go, you can sign up on the Dirigible site and we’ll let you know as soon as we can.

We also have a developers’ blog, where we’re posting details about some of the technical choices and challenges we’re encountering as we develop the software — and, of course, there’s a Dirigible Twitter account that you can follow too.

We think Dirigible is a great addition to the Resolver Systems product line, and we hope you will too.

We’re happy to announce the release of Resolver One 1.9! As always, you can download it here.

We released Resolver One 1.9 to get some useful new features out to everyone while we worked on our new grid component. It was originally going to be called 1.8.5, but there were enough new features that we decided it deserved a full point release number:

• Intelligent patch-up functions — when you enter a formula, instead of waiting until it’s been evaluated before returning control to you, however long that might take, we wait for a maximum of a few seconds and then move the calculation over to a background thread. This makes things much more responsive when you’re working with complex spreadsheets, and is just one of many improvements we’ve made to Resolver One’s responsiveness.
• Improved performance when importing files from Microsoft Excel.
• A much-requested feature: moving around the grid using Control and cursor keys.

If you want more details, here is a full list of every change in this release.

Don’t forget, we have forums to discuss and ask questions about Resolver One, and there is detailed documentation too.

We’ve been analysing the UK political news and Twittersphere as part of a project for the New Statesman, and for a bit of fun we decided to see what else we could do with the numbers.

There’s an excellent Python library called the Natural Language Toolkit, which includes a function for generating text based on word-frequency analysis, so we decided to see what would happen if we hooked it up to code that reads the UK’s newspapers. We discovered we’d created a monster!

We’ve named it REABot, for the Resolver Electoral Analysis Robot, and you can read its political musings here. So far, it’s treated us to an overview of the electoral campaign so far, and profiles of the leaders of the three main political parties: Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and Nick Clegg. It also makes occasional appearances on Twitter.