4/30/2023 0 Comments Best mac calculator app![]() Maybe they just want to use something they already know.įinally, the popularity of Soulver, PCalc, and even Apple’s Calculator.app is dwarfed by the number one calculator app out there: Excel. Maybe they loathed having to write down every single step of a calculation in school tests. The happy users of PCalc love how closely it mimicks the electronic calculators of their youth the more complex the better! Maybe they have above average working memory. In an icon update, the pocket calculator was replaced by a digital display, showing results only. The experience of painstakingly hitting keys on a calculator? That could be automated and abstracted away. He wanted to focus on the paper and pen experience - saying what you want and writing it down to supplement your working memory. Soulver’s design is superior not because it is less of an imitation, but because Zac’s choice of what to imitate was better. Soulver’s first icon showed a couple sheets of paper, a pencil, and a pocket calculator. It reproduces the experience of writing calculations on paper with a pencil, writing down a result, referencing that result later on, etc. Skeuomorphism is dead!īut as we’ve seen with Apple’s Calculator, an app’s visual style can be “flat” while faithfully mimicking a physical counterpart.Īt the risk of beating a dead horse, I’ll argue that Soulver’s design is “skeumorphic” as well. The design of Apple’s iOS 7 was seen as an about-turn, from apps that mimicked paper and leather to a “flat” minimalist look. “Skeuomorphism”, the persistence of essential features from old objects as ornamental cues, was a hot topic in the design community in the early 2010s. Quotes in this section are from Zac Cohan’s article “The creation of soulver”, which is a great read. If you want a similar app for Windows, Android or on the Web, the Soulver FAQ lists a few options. Soulver is my calculator app of choice on macOS. ![]() He has been steadily improving this feature for 15 years, and in my experience it works quite well. Zac also wanted Soulver to be able to understand natural language, or at least to identify numbers, units, and specific commands within text. Soulver also lets you store specific results in variables and reuse them on later lines. The current version, Soulver 3, works very much like their first prototype: Input and output are always visible, and input lines (on the left) can be edited at any time. It’s a paper pad that magically runs your calculations. They built an application, Soulver, based on that idea. Zac asked, What if the calculator was actually part of ‘the page’? ![]() Instead of copying a traditional calculator, they could copy the page of paper where one writes down calculations, results and notes. I couldn’t understand why it only displayed a single number at a time, and why it wouldn’t evaluate an entire mathematical expression like you’d see written out on paper. It mimicked the look and features of a pocket calculator. In 2005, an Australian high school student named Nik Youdale built a small calculator app over the summer. Its users sing its praises in Mac App Store reviews. It has a single-value display, “keys”, a separate “paper tape” window, themes if you want it to look like a physical calculator, and 3 memory registers like the best HP and Casio machines out there. It shows a log of your calculations and looks like this:Īnother well-loved calculator app on macOS is PCalc. Optionally, if you know the keyboard shortcut or go looking through the menus, you can show a second window called a “Paper Tape”.
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