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Calca iOS - Mathematical text editor for engineers

94 pointsby AndreasFromalmost 12 years ago

16 comments

ori_balmost 12 years ago
This looks interesting, but I can&#x27;t see myself using it on an ipad or phone. This is something I&#x27;d want to use on a desktop, with a keyboard, while multitasking with other programs.<p>Edit: I&#x27;ll keep it in the back of my head, and I might try it later.
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scrumperalmost 12 years ago
Looks like an interesting halfway house between a text editor and a full-blown CAS like Mathematica (since I have a license, that&#x27;s what I use as a scratchpad for this kind of thing). It also seems to overlap with Soulver, which is my go-to calculator on iOS.<p>Cleverly, Calca appears to go a bit further than even MMA by back-filling changed definitions, almost like functional reactive programming. This is neat and something I&#x27;ve wanted to see for a long time.<p>I&#x27;ll be buying once I get home to my iPad, but I really want to see the Mac OS version!
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frsandstonealmost 12 years ago
Glad to see Soulver [1] has some competition.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acqualia.com&#x2F;soulver&#x2F;</a>
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kyle_martin1almost 12 years ago
It would be really neat if you could tap a number and drag it left or or right to adjust it&#x27;s value. Everything would recalculate and you could have a small dialog box out to the side to adjust the increment level of the &#x27;drag adjustment&#x27;. An iPhone screen probably wouldn&#x27;t have room for the dialog box so you could putting it in settings but for iPad it would fit just fine.
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HCIdivision17almost 12 years ago
I certainly can&#x27;t speak for others, but my typical use case is projected to be in meetings. Imagine sitting in a room with a bunch of engineers and managers, and someone says something worth checking the math on.<p>If you&#x27;re not the lucky dude at the conference room&#x27;s computer and just happens to have IPython Notebook&#x2F;LightTable&#x2F;Excel&#x2F;`w&#x2F;e`, then this will be handy. Be the guy who keeps up with the conversation <i>and</i> can check assumptions.<p>The fact it allows variable names with spaces is just the sweetest syntactic sugar.<p>It runs a smidge slow on the iPhone, but since that&#x27;s the tool I have on hand, I&#x27;ll gladly take a lightweight equation solver like this. (And if the slide-to-change numbers feature gets added, I&#x27;ll <i>happily</i> buy it again. Twice.)
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krytenalmost 12 years ago
Looks reasonable.<p>However you&#x27;ll have to prize my HP 50g calculator out of my cold dead hands before I&#x27;ll mix mathematics and a touch screen.
gcanyonalmost 12 years ago
A few suggestions, since the author seems to be hanging around in this thread:<p>It would be good if plurals for variable names were the same as the singular, so that<p>light speed = 299,792,458 meters&#x2F;second<p>Would be compatible with<p>time to earth=&gt; 499.242173411seconds<p>Also, it would be nice if &quot;per&quot; was equivalent to &#x2F;<p>Also, it would be nice if definitions didn&#x27;t have to be<p>Single item on the left = many things on the right. For example, this would be nice:<p>Miles per gallon = 34 Gas tank = 13 gallons Range = miles per gas tank<p>So far I&#x27;m having a lot of fun and already posted it to Facebook.
stcredzeroalmost 12 years ago
Is there anything like this for stats? I remember watching my then girlfriend in the throes of her thesis, having to tweak and re-run a Stata script again and again and again.<p>Also, for seriously complicated work, maybe a desktop all in one touch screen could be useful, so long as it&#x27;s oriented more horizontally than vertically.
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awtalmost 12 years ago
I like it. I&#x27;m always typing simple calculations into the search bar -- this is a great way to keep track of them.
ringmasteralmost 12 years ago
In the Introduction, under functions:<p><pre><code> f = m*a f(20) = 20a </code></pre> Which is ok, but then farther down:<p><pre><code> f(a) = m*a f(20) =&gt; 20a </code></pre> This seems incorrect, since I was expecting m*20. On a separate page, this seems to work fine, though.<p>Otherwise, quite nice.
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schreiajalmost 12 years ago
I like it, going to have to start using this more and can&#x27;t wait for the desktop app.<p>Just a heads up, when creating a new document in ios 7 beta 3 on the ipad there is a crash. Author, what is the best way to send you the crash log?<p>Just something to look into before ios7 releases.
anifowalmost 12 years ago
Here&#x27;s another take on it, albeit more for financial computations.<p>Includes a formula preview: <a href="http://numbercanvas.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;numbercanvas.com&#x2F;</a>
muzzamikealmost 12 years ago
I bet he&#x27;s excited to see what he can do with CoreText and iOS7 for this.
shlomiwalmost 12 years ago
Any windows&#x2F;web edition in your todo?
bigdalmost 12 years ago
interesting, but how much is this different from ipython notebooks?
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batbombalmost 12 years ago
I still use my TI-89.
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