Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone

by Istof • 13 years ago

411 147 13 years ago

cdcarter• 13 years ago

This looks great, for some uses, but I know myself (and a lot of my coworkers) would much prefer a beautiful iPhone calculator that behaves more like a 10-key/adding machine than an iPython notebook.

mwc• 13 years ago

The linked numbers are brilliant. Lacking the "in my head" math skills I should probably have, I regularly whip out Excel to solve the kind of use cases you can imagine from the linked numbers in the video.

jckt3• 13 years ago

Graphing functionality on a phone reminds me of an old TI calculator. I really don't know why recent OSes (be it on PC, smartphone, tablet) always came with such feeble calculators. It's not like TI calculators are difficult to use. Sure if all you want is add/min/mul/div functionality the TI is essentially a traditional calculator, and then behind that you've got all these nifty graphing utilities. It's not like a graphing calculator app is going to be that difficult to program, or going to be large in size. But no, in 2013, vanilla OS installations are stuck with a calculator app that has less features than that of a computer a few million times less powerful.

(Now I feel bad; bitching and complaining is against the Open Source Spirit).

Edit: I do recall that OSX comes with something similar, except that not many people actually know of it (as far as I can tell, from my friends with OSX).

Void_2• 13 years ago

Bitching and complaining is good for products, makes them better. Don't know much about OSS spirit, but doesn't their work need any improvement??

jckt3• 13 years ago

By OSS spirit I meant that it's better to get coding than start complaining. But I see your point -- indeed we should do both, and plenty of it.

shurcooL3• 13 years ago

On that note, iPad doesn't even have the iPhone Calculator app, and it's _impossible_ to get it (without hacking) because it's a built-in app; one you cannot remove nor acquire from the App Store.

It's also missing Compass, Voice Memo and Passbook apps. Edit: Weather app too.

frik• 13 years ago

yes weird, plus the weather app is missing too.

What's the reasoning behind the decision? Was it Steve Jobs who decided that?

superuser2• 13 years ago

Missing compass because the WiFi version does not contain a GPS or magnetic compass.

tolmasky• 13 years ago

Just a musing: perhaps its considered not as valuable an investment to program since a (the?) primary market is students, and students are probably not allowed to use phones on tests for obvious reasons (internet connectivity, texting questions to each other, overall distraction). However, TI's are state approved or whatever.

fophillips2• 13 years ago

Never been allowed to use a TI for exams in the UK. I've only ever been allowed to use a Casio.

visakanv4• 13 years ago

It's so sad that kids with iphones aren't allowed to use phones on tests. They're being tested in an archaic context for archaic purposes. Under what circumstances are people going to be working without internet access? School has a lot of catching up to do with the real world. :(

fredsted• 13 years ago

Yep, Grapher is a nice app with an interesting history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapher

Someone2• 13 years ago

Does Grapher share any source with Graphing Calculator?

I guess it might, given that Apple shipped Graphing Calculator with Mac OS before, and given Graphing Calculator's interesting early history (http://www.pacifict.com/Story/)

(I wonder how Apple negotiated that deal originally. I guess some lawyers spent quite some time arguing whose intellectual property it originally was. The programmers weren't paid by Apple, but worked at Infinite Loop)

Someone2• 13 years ago

"It's not like a graphing calculator app is going to be that difficult to program"

It is surprisingly hard to get something that produces reliable plots. It starts with getting something as simple as sin(1/x) or x/(x^2 + 5x + 1) to plot reasonably well, and gets harder from there soon (edit: if you want to complicate things, pick a function that is only defined on some numbers, such as sqrt(x^2 * sin(x^3 - x). Adding a pair of || around subexpressions also complicates things)

For example, at https://www.desmos.com/calculator (one of the top results from a google search) zooming in on sin(1/x) shows a plot that sometimes doesn't go up to 1.0 for values of x close to zero. Its plot is decent, but deceiving.

And you will have to do those well, as the target audience of students encounters such functions every day.

And the Mac OS X one is Grapher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapher)

bane2• 13 years ago

It's depressing to me that the closest I can get to the TI-92+ I had in college is to emulate a TI-92+ on my computer or Android devices (actually on a tablet it's not too bad). My other options (Octave, Matlab, etc.) are way too heavy for what I want to do and require too much time to learn.

They don't have that sort of pickup-and-use feature my old calculators used to have. I think it's the presence of most of the buttons I'm ever going to be interested in on the keyboard rather than having to figure out how to type something that means the same as an integral or some such. The discoverability of those buttons beats most modern software hands down.

I also suspect that writing simple to use general purpose solvers and simplifiers for the things the TI calcs do (the CAS) is likely very hard. I remember putting even pretty complex physics equations with all sorts of trig functions and exponents and integrals and such in during college and it handled most of them without trouble and pretty printed the result.

csmuk6• 13 years ago

Ha I had a TI92 (not plus) a number of years ago. Weighed a ton - you could kill someone with it. Sold it and got an HP48GX after I discovered that you couldn't get the plus module for it in the UK for a reasonable price. Never looked back.

cstejerean• 13 years ago

I miss my TI-92+ as well. It feels like an iPad has enough screen real estate to be able to simulate the same experience, and I was surprised that nobody has done it yet.

Edit: looks like there are some good options for Android that actually emulate TI calculators, and apparently TI has Nspire for the iPad.

robterrell• 13 years ago

On OS X it's Graphing Calculator. See the amazing story behind it: http://www.pacifict.com/Story/

axman6• 13 years ago

I was just going to write this comment myself before checking to see if I'd been beaten. It's definitely one of the great stories of computer history.

userbinator• 13 years ago

This looks closer to Mathematica/Maple/MATLAB than a basic calculator, although still nowhere near the power of those.

Of course 1/0 should be +Infinity, not ?...

(Disclaimer: I have a Mathematica console always open on my desktop, and regularly use it for all kinds of calculations.)

cycrutchfield• 13 years ago

Why should 1/0 be +Infinity? Think of 1/x at the limit as x->0 from the left and from the right

chinpokomon4• 13 years ago

I still think the 1/0 problem can be solved if we step outside Euclidian geometry. It is undefined for the very reason you give. The Numberphile YouTube channel has an excellent video [1] discussing why x/0 is undefined and worth watching.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRRolKTlF6Q

mbq2• 13 years ago

With IEEE floats, 0 has a sign which can be used to denote the direction of the limit; if you try 1/(-0) in any program or language with sane numerics (i.e. not Excel or other dumb calculator emulators), it should give you -Infinity.

Void_2• 13 years ago

Why do you put that down as "disclaimer". This is why people make fun of us.

milhous• 13 years ago

Bingo. If I'm in front of a computer, Mathematica. If not near one, then Wolfram|Alpha app/PCalc Lite on my iPad, else TI-83. But I've had my eyes on the HP Prime for a while. That'd be a huge jump from the 83!

airtonix• 13 years ago

And now for the majority market share, the android version?

avolcano• 13 years ago

Just because an OS has a "majority market share" doesn't make it a suitable market. Elegant, minimal premium apps like Clear have done well on the iOS app store, but it's hard to imagine a $5 calculator app getting much interest on Android.

chinpokomon4• 13 years ago

Why is that hard to imagine? If the application were released for Android, I would have considered it. I've already purchased several Android calculators. There's no real basis for your claim, but I say this while I also realize I haven't provided sufficient evidence to support why Android would be a better platform. The reason I think a lot of applications like this fail on Android is that the developers first target iOS and then try to port it to Android without really designing for Android. The result is something lackluster that doesn't really work for Android devices.

zarify• 13 years ago

I basically stopped using "calculators" when Soulver and more recently Calca came out. Much easier to use and a lot more flexible.

That said the graphing in this looks quite nice.

Lazare2• 13 years ago

Wow, Calca is amazing. Thanks for the tip. :)

peterhajas• 13 years ago

Calca is such a great calculator. I've encountered some issues where it refuses to recompute (systems of equations confuse it when you keep redefining variables), but I suppose that's not what it's for. I love being able to define real functions in it. The documentation is also all composed in Calca, which is helpful.

ketralnis3• 13 years ago

Calca is amazingly good for its simplicity. It's replaced my use of Excel for the cases that Excel was overkill. Well worth the $5

wsr• 13 years ago

As a Matlab enthusiast, this is probably the coolest thing I've seen in years.

Good job guys, I have high hope for this in the future!

ra3• 13 years ago

Looks great. Just needs a new name. Tydlig?

wingerlang• 13 years ago

It means clear/apparent/obvious in Swedish.

eknkc• 13 years ago

I was just thinking about IKEA after seeing the name.

ethor• 13 years ago

It is Swedish for apparent (clear).

sorenvrist• 13 years ago

(Edit: it is swedish and...) Almost danish/norwegian: Tydelig == Apparent/Clear

dwc• 13 years ago

Litt mer øst...

jsilence• 13 years ago

In German the slang word tüddelig means fiddly or flimsy.

josteink• 13 years ago

As opposed to the weekly hipster-named gxstmo.io or whatever similar comes along?

Tydlig at least means something in a real language ;)

anilshanbhag• 13 years ago

I would just a ipython console Gone is the age of calculator

csmuk6• 13 years ago

No RPN. Neckbeard status confirmed.

Calculators are still an unsolved problem for me on glass devices to the point I still religiously carry around an HP50G even though its 6x the size of my phone. Also from some bad experiences, it appears that some "app" calculators are also seriously badly implemented. Even basic trig ops can return stupid values at extremes which makes them untrustworthy. Plus none are reasonably programmable.

My use cases are base conversions, simple CAS stuff, basic engineering calculations, unit conversions, financial (TVM etc) and generic math. I also canned a lot of knowledge in RPL programs over the years from fuel calculations to diagnostic tools and dice rollers etc.

Please can someone solve all these problems (without doing half arsed HP calc emulation).

chinpokomon4• 13 years ago

I just replaced the batteries in my 48GX. I think in stacks and RPN is a better system for how I think. I have 48GX emulators for my phone and still use them over more modern calculator apps. That being said, I appreciate the design considerations they've applied to this. I wish they'd make an Android version, because I might have been interested in trying this out.

ghaff2• 13 years ago

It's funny how, for some things, you tend to be more comfortable with whatever you're used to even if nothing newer is objectively better. I used an HP-55 for years and then an HP-41. The newer HP graphic calculators never did a lot for me and I still use an HP-41 emulator on my iPhone for most of my calculating--though I'll pull out a physical HP calculator is I need to do a lot of calculating.

melloclello3• 13 years ago

I'm working on an RPN calculator (with some pretty sweet gestural functionality) which solves approximately half of those problems. Wait, no, more like a quarter. Welp.

It does return the correct value for sin(π) though (you gotta call __sinpi(x / M_PI) if you don't want to return -8.74e-8 or some ridiculous value).

pascal_cuoq• 13 years ago

It does return the correct value for sin(π) though (you gotta call __sinpi(x / M_PI) if you don't want to return -8.74e-8 or some ridiculous value).

This is ridiculous. Your calculator (most calculators) cannot apply sin to π, because π is not representable is their system (typically base-2 or base-10 floating-point).

What you have done here is make sine worse for all values, including the representable value closest to π, in order to obtain what you think is a cosmetically satisfying result for the latter. Note that seeing the closest representable value to π does not mean that the user intended π. Perhaps the user obtained this value as the result of a computation and it's a coincidence. Or perhaps the user really wants to know what the sine of 0x1.921fb54442d18p+1 (the double closest to π) is. Hint: it is not zero.

garthdog• 13 years ago

Haha! I was going to suggest Droid48 until that last sentence. Yes, I emulate my HP48G whenever I feel the need to fire up a calculator.

HP RPN can't be beaten for serious number crunching. It's not pretty, but by god, it is EFFECTIVE!

ronaldx2• 13 years ago

Right: calculator apps still don't compare to Casio hardware.

It's surprising: when smartphones came out I said calculators would be first against the wall.

diziet2• 13 years ago

There's a ton of calculators that do RPN on iPhone, for those who like that.

Ie: https://sensortower.com/ios/us/incpt-dot-mobis/app/calculato... https://sensortower.com/ios/us/vicinno-soft-llc/app/12e-fina... https://sensortower.com/ios/us/tla-systems-ltd/app/pcalc-the...

Lazare2• 13 years ago

Yes. I really want a decent, pretty, RPN calc on all the platforms I use. Which rules out any HP emulator. I've got several amazing HP calcs gather dust in a drawer; I want something better than that.

I've been pleasantly surprised with the built in calculator that ships with OSX; it's got a decent RPN mode, good keyboard support, and a nice stack display. Not brilliant, but better than what I've found for Windows or Android. :-/

gcv• 13 years ago

I use m48+. It's a decent replacement for my trusty old HP48.

jwr2• 13 years ago

Actually, I found HP emulators to be really good.

On my iPhone, I use HP-12C emulator from RLM Tools (I found most other emulators to be inferior). When I really need it, I use HP50G.

On the iPad, I use either m48+ or HP50G (it seems to be another fork of the emu48 code). Both work really well given the size of the iPad — very comfortable to use.

VLM• 13 years ago

In same boat as you. Don't laugh too loud but most of my "math" work is done via ssh (and ssh app on phone) and running octave or R on gigantic datasets.

I went thru the same annoyance on my phone/tablet and although I have droid48, free42, and hc-16C on my android devices I mostly just ssh into a real machine.

I have toyed with the idea of graphical environments like mathematica/maple on a real machine via rdesktop/vnc on my tablet, but I don't do CAS so much as stats where I stick with R anyway. And those apps cost lots of money for something I don't do much of anyway.

Eventually with any problem, either you solve it or reach an event horizon where the UI is too horrific to use anymore. So when I can no longer handle the touch screen keyboard I just disconnect from the screen session (yeah, yeah, I know kids these days use tmux) and reconnect on a real computer complete with keyboard and big display.

For medium sized arithmetic problems (as opposed to math problems), just use google drive's spreadsheet and then I can access it anywhere in the world on any kind of machine I have access to. So that's where "total of this column vs total of that column" level of problems live.

An add on android keyboard built specifically for math, or more specifically for R or octave, would be interesting.

maxerickson• 13 years ago

Frink fills in some of those holes:

http://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/

(but not RPN and trig functions are floating point)

bane2• 13 years ago

If you have an Android device, the TI and HP emulators are pretty good...especially on the larger screen phones that are popular these days.

TI calcs

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.supware.ti...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Bisha.TI89...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.natygames....

HP calcs

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ab.x48

Casio

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.developstu...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=o2s.emul.hp49g

ghaff2• 13 years ago

I use an HP-41CX app for my iPhone. I don't use 90% of its capabilities and it doesn't have the keyboard feel (obviously) of the original but it's pretty good for my purposes. I've used RPN since the late seventies when I got an HP-55 my sophomore year in college so I'm pretty wedded to it.

jwr2• 13 years ago

Couldn't agree more. I regularly use a HP12c, HP48 and HP50G. However, the emulators for all of those are really quite good (for hp12c, get the one from RLM Tools), especially when ran full-size on an iPad.

I am glad to see this effort because we really need some innovation in the world of calculators. The science of making them has stagnated in the late 1990s. HP50G isn't really different from HP48, first introduced in 1990.

I think there is a widespread perception that calculators are no longer needed, because we have all those computers around us. But that simply isn't true. Many people still need to calculate things quickly, and that requires a good tool: a calculator with a well designed user interface. This is where most devices and programs fail. HP worked on this for more than 20 years and got really good at it, until the unfortunate reorganizations that got rid of the calculator division.

I can't think of any other tool that will let me equally easily multiply numbers, convert hex to decimal, work with complex numbers, and compute a Laplace transform.

And even if you are in front of a computer and have a powerful mathematical package available, there remains the problem of the user interface. For example: I use Mathematica for lots of things. But just try entering numbers using engineering/scientific notation: 4.7*^-6 and you'll see this isn't good at all for rapid calculations.

I hope that someone will start where HP left off and design a better calculator using the huge computational power that we now have at our disposal. Without throwing away all the experience we already have.

csmuk6• 13 years ago

To be fair both HP and TI have tried their best to do something better than their older lines but it's resulted in the following:

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/calculators/product-detail...

I've used the emulator, but it's less productive than the 50g. Also TI's nSpire offering is just horrid.

I don't use my calculator in education which means I'm completely forgotten.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

I just have an HP48 emulator on my android phone. It's pretty sweet actually.

karlshea• 13 years ago

Seems sort of like a slicker Soulver, I'm going to give it a shot.

pranayairan• 13 years ago

beautiful

notpg• 13 years ago

For the iphone and ipad? You mean for direct interface devices? (is there any reason this couldn't be applied to non idevices?)

ketralnis3• 13 years ago

Because it's written for UIKit for iOS, presumably in Objective C?

lajospajtek• 13 years ago

Good to see that Bret Victor's ideas outlined in "Inventing on Principle" start taking some foothold.

hisham_hm• 13 years ago

Impressed to see only one comment, with no discussions, mentioning Bret Victor. His influence is clear on this work.

edoloughlin• 13 years ago

Tydlig supports external Bluetooth keyboards or numpads for really quick entry

It's been a while since i did any ios development and this was never a requirement for me. Can someone explain why an external keyboard is something that had to be explicitly supported at an individual app level? Surely this should be an OS-level thing?

interpol_p• 13 years ago

It's not an explicit requirement, but you definitely need to test your app with an external keyboard to polish the experience.

Here's a couple of situations that can get you when supporting an external Bluetooth keyboard:

- Input accessory view. If you use an input accessory view (bar that sits atop the regular software keyboard), then connecting an external keyboard will cause the software keyboard to hide but keep the accessory view on screen. This is great — but if you had any controls underneath the keyboard (especially on iPad) that required the user to dismiss the keyboard to get to them, then you have to build a way for them to 'dismiss' the keyboard when using an external keyboard.

- Custom keyboard. You might build a custom keyboard for your app. Connecting an external one will not show your custom keyboard. You'll need to ensure that functionality is still provided when an external keyboard is connected.

There are a few other things like making sure your keyboard view resizing code is robust enough to handle all the possible state transitions ("no input -> software input -> bluetooth input", or "no input -> bluetooth input -> software input", and so on).

If you're just using a standard text view you probably don't need to do anything special. But in this case Tydlig seems to do a lot of special stuff and probably required a bit of extra work to get Bluetooth keyboards running without issue.

cormullion• 13 years ago

I love this app, and it's interesting to see the innovation in this familiar space. Oovium for iPad is a great example of fresh thinking. And coming soon, apparently, is the Wolfram Calculator for iPad, featuring user-programmable functions:

http://mvid.wolfram.com/mobile/dannewman_teachconceptsnotkey...

gcanyon• 13 years ago

That interface is a bag of hurt, but it looks powerful.

diziet2• 13 years ago

This is great, though there are 15,230 calculator apps on iPhone alone. Tydlig ranks as #443 in the US for 'calculator', quite a tough fight!

oliwary• 13 years ago

I love it! Great design and should be very flexible to create simple functions through linked numbers.

Is it really a good idea to allow 96 + 15% though (at 0:45)? Might cause some problems for people learning maths, as it won't work on normal calculators and doesn't really make it obvious what percentages actually are.

HCIdivision17• 13 years ago

The New Old Thing has an article on this topic [1]. Personally, I avoid ever using the percent button simply because I can never remember exactly how it will behave.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2008/01/10/70474...

jimmytidey• 13 years ago

Can we have something other than jingly guitar music for tech videos?

pfisch• 13 years ago

This looks much worse than symcalc.

SymCalc has pretty much all the functionality of a TI-89 including solving calculus and algebraic equations.

Tydlig looks like it has a nice ui but it doesn't even seem to support variables....

jamesjguthrie• 13 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation for SymCalc, I've just downloaded it. I had been using TouchCalc and GraphCalc but this is much better!

stormbrew• 13 years ago

This really seems much more like a freeform spreadsheet than a calculator to me. Which is also a cool idea, obviously, but I find it interesting no one else has made the same observation.

fpp• 13 years ago

On Android you have a choice of TI Calculator emulations

see https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Bisha.TI89...

http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/02/15/nostalgia-ti-89-calc...

dirtyaura• 13 years ago

Great work. A few thoughts from the initial experience:

I like the linked numbers design. As it reminded me of Bret Victor's work, I was expecting scrubbing to work directly with numbers, which caused occasionally a bit of havoc, but I think you did a right choice of putting linking as the main action - touch design is hard.

The free-form infinite layout gives a mindmap vibe: it's potentially great when you are trying to understand pieces of a problem that you need. The downside is that the canvas becomes a bit of mess quickly.

The other alternative could be a Mathematica style, free-form document, with more restricted flow of equations (and text).

Because the organization becomes a bit of problem, undo is a must and solves a bunch of other problems. I'd implement area selection of equations (initiate with long tap?) to quickly move things around.

Y-axis could auto adjust by default or quick slider scrubbing should work directly for axis max-min values.

You probably want a simple document model as this is something between calculator and full featured computation software. Maybe just save every canvas when user clears/starts new one

All in all, great work!

smikhanov4• 13 years ago

Great to see more people attacking the underserved math app segment on the iOS.

I'm the author of Scalar (http://scalarapp.com), another calculator replacement for iPhone / iPad. Just tested both versions of Tydlig very heavily, looks like the author ran into lots of the similar math/UI problems as I did when I was working on my app. :) Some approaches he has chosen look similar, some are unique.

Great work, good luck!

rooster82• 13 years ago

I'd love to hear you highlight a few of the unexpected challenges.

smikhanov4• 13 years ago

For example:

1. When someone enters "1 / 3" how many decimal places you display in the result? My approach: use MAX(4, MAX(decimal_places(entered_values))). His approach: use 3 everywhere.

- Bonus 1: how many decimal places you display when someone enters "sin(3.14)"? What about "sin(1 / 3)"? My approach: use as much space you have on the screen.

- Bonus 2: how do decimal places propagate when you're using refs?

2. What to do when someone taps "=" on the expression where we already have a result? Chinese $2 hardware calculator approach: redo the last operation. My approach: do nothing. Tydlig's approach: insert last result as a ref.

3. What to do when someone enters huge numbers? My approach: trim them to the width of the screen, clearly displaying that, but keep the full figure when doing copy/paste or export to text. His approach: start using E-notation somewhere around 16th figure.

4. In an app like this there's a temptation to stop using cursor because calculators don't have it and you want to be backwards compatible with them. When you create a ref, how to make sure the destination of the ref is at the right position in the expression without introducing a cursor? I.e. how to make sure you're not getting "2 + 3 [ref] + 12" (you need an operator before "[ref]")? My approach: use a semi-rigid table, where operators are separated from operands. Tydlig's approach: use a little cursor, a part of the app I don't like, because your finger normally would block the cursor.

I can go on and on. Math-related stuff is hard.

jamesaguilar2• 13 years ago

Some of the copy on your page is not quite right. "Each value could be . . ." -> "Each value can be . . .". There are one or two other places with this improper word usage. Just a heads up.

smikhanov4• 13 years ago

Thanks! It's hard to be a non-native speaker!

jckt3• 13 years ago

This looks rather good (sadly no iDevice). Looks as if Apple came up with it, if they weren't so silly with the way they applied their skeumorphism.

I always imagined that if you were aiming for the mathematician market (huge market!!1 /s) you could have an app like that except on a tablet you'd use with a pen. Then you'd just write down calculations and OCR would figure out what you are trying to calculate and do the number crunching (where applicable), and intelligently recognise variables and a lot of different mathematical functions (I just don't like the whole process of going back and forth between my TI and my legal pad). That'd be a mathematician's (or just mine) wet dream.

mnx• 13 years ago

Something like that exists(for android): MyScript Calculator. It's probably not powerful enough for a matematician, but works for me.

jodrellblank• 13 years ago

There is a Windows / Office component called "Math Input Panel" for writing equations with a pen and OCR'ing them, and Surface Pro is a tablet you can use with a pen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZKjc4Rzm2Y

But it doesn't do any of the number crunching, mathematical work.

dhaivatpandya• 13 years ago

For research mathematicians, working on a tablet would probably just feel cumbersome; why not use a computer?

silverlake• 13 years ago

How does your app compare to Soulver?

smikhanov4• 13 years ago

I think very well. :)

Scalar does not deal with plain text as math. At all. Plain text is good on Macs with keyboard as it allows very quick, familiar and intuitive copy/paste and document restructuring, but is terrible on touch screens. That was the main motivation for me to start the project, BTW.

Commenting system is different as well (Soulver simply ignores all non-parseable text).

daturkel• 13 years ago

Just a heads up, the inverse hyperbolic trig functions are arsinh, arcosh, and artanh. That's "ar" and not "arc" which stands for area.

zschallz• 13 years ago

Very cool. Unfortunately, I think the price point is a bit too high (at least for me).

pazimzadeh• 13 years ago

$5 for a calculator with updateable functionality?

snambi• 13 years ago

excellent new idea.

ricardobeat• 13 years ago

If you're mainly interested in having all calculation steps visible and 'linked', there is also a great app called Digits (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/digits-calculator-for-ipad/i...) which is at $0.99 right now.

acqq2• 13 years ago

Which number system does it use? 8-byte doubles or its own library? What are the ranges? On which libraries is it based? Does it have complex numbers?

protomyth• 13 years ago

This looks very nice, and I'll probably buy it and Scalar this week, but it did get me to wondering. It would be interesting to see how an APL app would fair these days.

kangax• 13 years ago

It would be fun to build this as a webapp in JS + canvas/SVG.

jweir• 13 years ago

So I bought it

Here are my thoughts as I use it (I will add to this comment. Hopefully the kids won't wake up soon.)

Wish there was an UNDO. I just moved a number and didn't want too. Shake to UNDO?

Pinch to zoom in and out. I'm using this on an iPhone.

Can I save a canvas? It doesn't look like, but maybe I'm missing it.

sifarat• 13 years ago

Handsdown it has pretty good ui. But i regret buying it, because i can't calculate % seriously why isn't on the front. I have to press folder button to find it.

additionally, I am baffled why do i have to press = to find end result, it should automatically calculate as i enter figure just like my $3 citizen calculator does.

bukka• 13 years ago

I was actually working on something really similar. (http://i.imgur.com/w4F8ms4.gif)

It really is true that at any moment there is probably 4 other teams working on a similar idea as you are.

Well I will not give up. Good luck to you too!

melloclello3• 13 years ago

Dope interface, I would use that

songgao2• 13 years ago

Nice work! Would be nice to have more tips on graphing. I spent 10 minutes and still can't figure out how to do graphs. The video on website is pretty helpful though.

songgao2• 13 years ago

Never mind... The video is in intro guide!

Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone

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