I use a TI-89 emulator on my phone as well… I just know my way around it and how to do everything I need to.
Honestly I'm not using it all that much, despite trying to train myself to use it every time I need to calculate something. The well-rehearsed muscle memory of 'win+R, calc, enter' is kinda hard to beat. And the ergonomics aren't as good as I'd hoped - converting to/from hex and entering hex numbers involves more use of shift and alpha-shift keys than I had expected.
You write down your calculations and keep them with the work, as you're working on multiple jobs at the same time, and it helps keep things straight.
There's grease and oil everywhere, stuff tends to disappear or get forgotten, so a low budget knowledge base works best.
It's amazing how much stuff you can get done with such a cheap calculator.
In the field though, phone calculators are still kind of bad. They're a nice blend of being clunky to do anything fancy while simultaneously not supporting almost any features. If anyone has any recommendations for better apps I'm all ears, but if I were doing stuff away from my desk more often I'd want a real calculator.
for the latter i use maple calculator on android
I could of course get a more advanced calculator app, or use Maxima, but I already own a decent bitmap display calculator with scrollable history that I used in school, so using that is simply the path of least resistance.
Maxima can do things my physical calculator can’t do, like solving equations, at the expense of having to open or switch to it, as opposed to having it always ready on my desk.
But to warrant actually downloading, installing and learning a whole other application that application would need to have some pretty game-changing additional features over Maxima, and even if it does, my current needs I’m barely scratching the surface of what Maxima can do, so I would still have very little incentive to switch.
I tend to use either a command-line calculator (to minimise context switching, for simple calculations) or a physical TI calculator for simple matrix calculations, CAS features such as analytical derivatives simple integration, and dimension analysis (which is vital in my corner of Physics and very rarely done properly in software calculators).
It is a bit slow but has decent features, including some physical units support.
I set up Tilda (or another Guake equivalent; I tried a bunch of them and can’t remember on which I settled in the end) to run it automatically when a terminal is opened, when pressing Scroll Lock. It’s quite neat: when I need to do a quick calculation, I just hit Scroll Lock, which spawns a drop down terminal with the focus; then type whatever I want to calculate; then control-D to dismiss the drop down terminal and I am back in whatever I was doing without moving either hand off the keyboard.
I do more or less the same thing on my Mac with Alfred.
With rendering code I find a lot of the time you have to draw it out on paper to understand what it is doing/how it works
Typically simple calculations involving trig/vectors
I find it easier to have a physical one rather than flipping back and forth between paper/computer
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Bisha.TI89...
[2] https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/84/8442.html
I spend a lot of time in excel and if I need a quick calculation I do it in a cell to the side. This is often quicker because the figures are often in the workbook already.
If I don’t have excel open, I will use the calculator app if I’m doing a quick check calc using some figures from a PDF, email, etc. However even this is remarkably faster than picking up a physical calculator let alone having to carry something with me.
Although some of the partners at the firm still use physical calculators, the overwhelming majority of people I work with do not use a physical calculator.
Due to force of habit, my physical calculator is easier and faster to use than on-screen calculators. Not unlike Emacs commands, the calculator interface is burned into muscle memory: my fingers know how to use it more than my brain does.
I use an emulator app on my phone when not at my desk, but it's always unsatisfying. Real calculator buttons give me some kind of brain-stem level of satisfaction that a functionally identical phone app can't match.
The calculator also comes in handy for tallying marks on exams, and it's much more pleasant to use than a calculator app on the computer. I do have Free42 installed everywhere but I don't use it that much.
Most of the time I'm not dealing with a number but lots of them anyway so excel is just better both practically and as a mental model
On another front, I use a physical calculator when baking. There's no worry about keeping it clean (ha), and hands that are wet or covered with flour do not have any problem unlocking it and getting presses on the screen to register.
It's a TI-86 that I bought on ebay in college because they were cheaper than the 83, 84, and 89.
Similarly, my income tax software pops up a built-in calculator upon pressing a function key, and the result is automatically pasted back when done.
Say I'm on the phone with a customer, looking up a part for their lawnmower, and I need to apply markup on the dealer price I see on the screen. It's quicker for me to one handed type on the large physical calculator that's stored right beside the computer than to open a calculator on the computer and the computer one might even cover up the numbers I need to see on the screen.
- actual (not simulated) haptic/tactile feedback
- I don't want to pull out my phone/laptop to do the non-trivial math
I also do mental math, making sure that what I'm calculating is in the right ballpark
I recently found my TI graphing calculator. I pushed the on button and it started. It's a killer calculator. I can graph, do statistics, it can be programmed and it's mostly useless to me now. A bit of a bummer :(.
Just doing a Google search with an equation is generally enough.