Show HN: Figr.app – a multi-user, notepad style calculator (desktop app)

This is great, I love local-first [1] software.

Are you using OT or CRDTs for real-time editing?

Are you using any specific cross-desktop platform? (Electron?)

[1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

Thanks! I'm not the best designer (my background is dev) though am happy people seem to like it!

Why Excel? I feel there's a gap between a "desktop calculator" (like the default calculator in most OSes) and Excel.

E.g. Desktop calculators I can say, "calculate tax for a single item", but sometimes I need to calculate tax or multiple sums in a list. You can probably break out Excel at this point - though I feel there's a bit of inertia in this. I.e. Thinking of how to structure the sheet, where to put values / formulas / etc.

I feel with a notepad calculator, it's a bit closer to how my brain thinks and I can get simple calcs out quicker. I may be biased too, but I find it easier to read my results the next time I load the sheet in Figr vs Excel.

Btw I'm not saying this is an Excel replacement - there's always going to be a place for that, though I think this is a nice middle ground.

Ahh yeah not at the moment. I intentionally only released on app stores as I didn't want to complicate my deployment, as well as host binaries / handle auto-updates. Signing is also a real pain and (in the case of Windows) quite expensive, and I'm unsure of the demand at the moment to warrant that.

Just out of curiosity, what's the aversion to app stores? I know for paid apps there's a large commission to Apple / Microsoft (I try to download direct when I can) though for free apps I'm a bit more forgiving.

Agree about the "just type in text" paradigm though I feel they suffer from the "empty state" problem. You can see I tried to mitigate with the "blank sheet" placeholder text, and on web there're templates available. Unfortunately it appears only a fraction of users use the templates, and of course users never read the placeholder text!

I haven't heard of immediate / retained mode before - interesting concept! Figr is more straight forward and evaluates a line as "0" if there's an error (the opposite of "be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept"!) so they are problems where entire calculations are "wiped out" if there's an error on a line, but I think that's the trade of to having accurate results.

As for a custom text view completely agree! I did do that initially though switched over to draftjs later and (despite it's lack of good guides) has been a huge time saver!

Ah yeah I've had requests to support other characters though unfortunately quite a few of the calculations are passed through to mathjs, which has trouble supporting non latin characters.

It's on the list though but unfortunately due to how integral mathjs is to the app it might not be an easy change to make!