A different kind of calculator | Hacker News Reader

A different kind of calculator

stuifzand.eu

12 pointsstuifzand11 comments

This is a blatant copy of a great application from Acqualia software called Soulver:

http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/

Granted, Soulver is only available for OS X, but the author could at least give some credit to Acquilia for the idea.

Soulver is a fantastic piece of software, btw. I use it almost daily.

I've never used Soulver, because I don't have a Mac. I really liked the idea of using text editor style input for a calculator. Being a software developer, I created one to see how this would work. This is my interpretation of the text editor style calculator and I'm trying to found out where I can take this design.

I don't begrudge you bringing this concept to a different platform (kudos for that), but if you arrived at this idea of your on volition, it's a startling coincidence.

Having said that, I'll definitely be sharing a link to your software to all my Linux-user friends. The document-as-a-calculator concept is a fantastic. There's tremendous demand for it as well.

http://www.google.com/search?q=soulver+for+linux

Not terribly startling, no. Anybody that has thought much about advanced text editor features probably has a good chance of thinking to integrate a calculator with a text editor, especially given that spreadsheets are the essentially same idea restricted to a grid. I expect it's been independently re-invented hundreds of times.

Emacs has `calc' which is somewhat similar.

I like the fact one of the features for this app. is: "Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are all supported".

Personally, I prefer raw elisp to calc.

>I like the fact one of the features for this app. is: "Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are all supported".

If this thing ever gets traction, it will be because of this new 'multiplication' feature. Nobody I know uses division, and every calculator out there has some form of addition built-in. Of course, emacs already has it - try `M-x multiply-the-left-number-with-the-right-number-and-return-the-result`.

Available on iPad! I'm getting it now. Not enough of an app to be "killer" but 3 or more such apps would be a fatality! (Takes advantage of form factor to be more usable than the smartphone equivalent, yet is also very useful in a mobile context.)

I'm not interest whether or not this is a copy of something already in place, it looks like a neat little app. Anyway, honestly, the 'buy - go to the store' button at the end of the page was a bit unexpected..

Seems like it should have some minimal horizontal rules to guide one's eyes back and forth between a formula and the corresponding answer. Not necessarily all the time, maybe just when the density of formulas crosses some readability threshold (if that can be determined well).

How is this better than BC? Better scientific function support? bignum support?

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