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

by daviducolo • 11 years ago

63 37 11 years ago

duiker101• 11 years ago

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

Osmium• 11 years ago

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/

nicerobot• 11 years ago

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.

quonn• 11 years ago

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

Fannon• 11 years ago

Looks very nice!

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

JosephRedfern• 11 years ago

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

izolate• 11 years ago

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

hobarrera• 11 years ago

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

bshimmin2• 11 years ago

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.

coldtea• 11 years ago

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.

alialkhatib2• 11 years ago

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.

bshimmin2• 11 years ago

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.

anarchitect• 11 years ago

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.

scott_s• 11 years ago

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

ghshephard• 11 years ago

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"

kiiski• 11 years ago

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.

lobster_johnson• 11 years ago

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.

jbrooksuk• 11 years ago

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.

kbd• 11 years ago

Seems worth mentioning the Frink programming language here:

https://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/

anu_gupta• 11 years ago

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

protomyth• 11 years ago

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.

Skovy• 11 years ago

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

acron0• 11 years ago

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.

dharma1• 11 years ago

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

geekam• 11 years ago

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

duaneb2• 11 years ago

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

Maybe blender.

jokr0042• 11 years ago

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/

rxaxm• 11 years ago

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

cpursley• 11 years ago

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

ummjackson• 11 years ago

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

J_Darnley• 11 years ago

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"?

unknownzero• 11 years ago

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.

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

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