Shannon Calculator is a cross-platform application which calculates the amount of information content in a message text or file byte data.
It is written in C# using the Avalonia XAML Framework, and is licensed under GPLv3.
Shannon Calculator is available as AppImage and Flatpak for Linux.
Don't forget to set the "Execute" permission for AppImage on Linux. On Windows, download the zip file, unzip it and
run ShannonCalculator.exe.
Shannon information is a measure of the information content contained in a message. The theory underpins many developments in compression, message transmission and error correction.
There were two motivations for this project. First and foremost, I became interested in the philosophical nature of information, rather than its engineering application.
I write on science and philosophy, and you may find my work: https://kuiperzone.substack.com/
The other reason for this project was to serve as a test-bed for Avalonia. As I've switched my personal computing platform entirely to Linux, I was interested to try out a .NET GUI framework that, unlike WPF, will run anywhere.
See also Avalonia on github.
- VERSION 1.1.0;2025-07-04
- Updated to Avalonia 11.3.2
- Many changes to bring codebase up to date
- VERSION 1.0.0;2021-06-10
- Initial release
- Built with early Avalonia 0.10.7