Numi: Beautiful calculator app for Mac you will love to use every day | Hacker News Reader

Numi: Beautiful calculator app for Mac you will love to use every day

numi.io

63 pointsdaviducolo37 comments

Highly recommend Soulver in this category as well - I probably use Soulver 100+ times a day, it's particularly awesome around things like throughput - you can throw things like, "10 kbits/second at 30 days in megabytes" - the sort of stuff people screw up all the time with excel when they forget to multiple by 8 somewhere.

It can also do the Currency translation, "1 BTC in USD"

And string a bunch of them, to do things like, "$2/square foot in SGD/square meter"

You can solve all three of those with Wolfram Alpha too, with no need for apps. Seems like Google knows how to solve the last two, but not the first one. Perhaps with some different syntax it would be possible too.

What I like about this app is that there's context and history. I use Spotlight all the time for these conversions, but there's no way for me to keep the last calculations around for reference or reuse; I have to put stuff in a text editor for that, which is a lot more awkward.

This looks really, really nice. But I think a problem for adoption is that on a Mac Spotlight can already do most of the calculations this does that I'd actually want to do on a regular basis (for me, that's currency conversion and some basic arithmetic). I can imagine downloading this, being impressed by its slickness, and then routinely forgetting to use it in favour of Spotlight.

Agreed. I barely use Alfred that much and that's mapped to the similar-but-different option+space (Spotlight is mapped to command+space by default). If this kind of functionality could extend Alfred (or Quicksilver?), there would be no question that this would see relatively regular use from me.

If I need to open something, I'm much more likely to open another tab of my browser and dump queries (especially things like exchange/conversion rates) into Google. It's a shame, too, because the demo here is really persuasively showing that this can automatically do stuff I previously assumed necessarily takes an extra brain cycle or two.

I use Alfred too, almost entirely just to do "Sleep" and "Lock", which Spotlight - for no very good reason - doesn't let you do. If Spotlight could do those, I'd uninstall Alfred: even though it does many wondrous things, I just never remember to use it to do them. I'm certain this app would fall into the same category for me.

I also use Alfred for a quick definition if I'm pretty sure the system dictionary can handle the word (otherwise I ask Google), but I agree that a vanishingly small number of additions to Spotlight would render Alfred defunct for me. For 90+% of the things Alfred does, I find myself thinking "oh that's pretty neat", but I simply can't make it go into my workflow.

You could try removing your spotlight shortcut.

>But I think a problem for adoption is that on a Mac Spotlight can already do most of the calculations this does that I'd actually want to do on a regular basis

Not all, only in one single line, and without memory of previous calculations (I'm sure this has "variables" -- if not Soulver, which is similar, does). Not the same at all.

Similar apps already there: Soulver, Calca.

It's the area between spotlight and a spreadsheet where this is useful for me. I've used Soulver in the past but rarely open it these days.

For instance, this morning I was calculating the % uplifts of a recent sale and it quickly became annoying to do it all in spotlight but equally annoying to move all the numbers to Google Sheets once I was part way through. This would have filled the gap perfectly.

For such calculations, consider opening the REPL of your favorite dynamic language in a shell. I use Python.

same here!

I'll be using Spotlight more for basic calculator stuff now though, never knew it could do that :)

Apps for just a single OS _in this day and age_ upset me :( Why is this OSX only? What element of it could only be achieved or expressed on a Mac? Disappointing. I want to use it but I can't.

Ditto. If this was built with say, Qt, it would be very easy to run everywhere

Not just OSX, it is also just for one single version of OSX (Yosemite) so far.

I do not think I have ever seen a "beautiful" cross platform app.

Maybe blender.

I personally don't use it but I think the Atom[0] text editor is pretty attractive. Really there are plenty of examples, it's not impossible, you can make good looking apps with Qt without too much effort.

[0] https://atom.io/

I would argue that a text editor really stretches the definition of user interface. The non-text-editor chrome I am NOT a fan of, but I understand it's truly hard to make a good "native" app. These are rarely cross platform.

My previous example "blender" only passes because the interface is so damn weird it doesn't make sense on any platform. But it's consistent and easy to program.

Well, the text editor has just about as much UI as this calculator thingy, actually I'd say more.. That's why it came to mind as a good comparison.

> My previous example "blender" only passes because the interface is so damn weird it doesn't make sense on any platform.

Ha I definitely agree with you on that.

Well I opened the link being a bit sceptical but I have to admit it's really nice! well done!

Looks really nice. I'm a big fan of Soulver[1] too, which is basically a more featureful and less minimalist version of this. I've also tried Calca[2], which seems really good but ultimately didn't replace Soulver for me.

On a tangential note, it's really nice to see that the Mac app scene still turns out these kinds of more experimental apps. Long may it continue!

[1] http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/ [2] http://calca.io/

Soulver is great and is what i use when mobile but I love Calca. I mostly use it in place of a spreadsheet, less as a replacement for a calculator.

Seems worth mentioning the Frink programming language here:

https://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/

Looks very nice!

Is there something similar for Windows? Or for the linux shell?

For the linux shell, I just type `python` and do all my calculations in the REPL

`bc` is similar (ish) under Linux - less "natural" syntax though.

calc(1) on linux/bsd/etc is pretty good, and will work for most stuff. The "natural language" bit is not present though.

This looks really nice, I like the fact that I have the history in front of me and editable while I'm using it. Just an idea, it might be more useful to show $9 in EUR instead of $9 in Euro. I foolishly tried to do $9 in Peso, wondered why it wasn't working, figured out I had to do $9 in MXN, had totally forgotten you'd generally want to use the ISO Code.

You have a typo "You can use sing and word operators." in your first sentence on http://numi.io/docs/

I was quite happy they asked for the e-mail address after the beta started to download. That is a nice touch and makes me think they are worth giving the e-mail address to.

I've been using Numi for a couple of weeks now. It's a really nice way of playing with an algorithm and breaking down each part with variables.

Feature request: Inline comments and multiline calculations woulds be nice.

you should make a flashlight plugin so it can be used from spotlight http://flashlight.nateparrott.com/

This would be an awesome mobile app. I'd pay for it.

If this had Windows support, I'd be all over it.

Does this support hex/oct/binary? Doesn't seem to - that would be a very useful addition.

Wait, if it is just text then how is it "beautiful"? Don't you need fancy faded images and "creative" scrolling methods for something to be "beautiful"?

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