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

figr.app

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

#21

Post by feifan »

armchairhacker wrote: post #7

I wish there were more apps like this which let you just type text and make/do things. Just make everything a sort of real-time coding. It's often much faster to do stuff with text and keyboard than any fancy GUI. Other examples: sequencediagram.net, SwiftUI and React to some extent, vim directory managers (e.g. some let you rename files just by editing text and delete them just by deleting lines) The only issue is,…

The hard thing about plain-text is that you quickly run into domains/problems that are too complicated to easily represent as plain-text. When that happens, you run into problems: the text representation becomes really verbose (e.g. XML) or exhaustingly terse/unergonomic (e.g. LaTeX, IMO), and you can only build anemic tooling.

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

#26

Post by for_i_in_range »

jklp wrote: post #13
awb wrote: post #3

Thanks for sharing! It looks slick. Can you address the elephant in the room: why use Figr instead of Excel?

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'…

Another thing: although I love excel, excel is slower. The startup is less snappy.

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

#27

Post by bombtrack »

I love apps like this. I currently use Numi daily for running financial-related tracking and scenarios. It has a few annoying UI quirks, so I'm super open for alternatives (especially with cloud syncing).

I played around with porting my Numi sheets over, and the only thing that's tripped me up so far is using underscores as numerical separators, eg: 1_000_000 for 1000000. All my Numi values are written this way, so that's my only feature request. I guess I could just use commas in this context.

Great work!

Edit: And dark mode :)

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

#29

Post by jklp »

feifan wrote: post #21
armchairhacker wrote: post #7

I wish there were more apps like this which let you just type text and make/do things. Just make everything a sort of real-time coding. It's often much faster to do stuff with text and keyboard than any fancy GUI. Other examples: sequencediagram.net, SwiftUI and React to some extent, vim directory managers (e.g. some let you rename files just by editing text and delete them just by deleting lines) The only issue is,…

The hard thing about plain-text is that you quickly run into domains/problems that are too complicated to easily represent as plain-text. When that happens, you run into problems: the text representation becomes really verbose (e.g. XML) or exhaustingly terse/unergonomic (e.g. LaTeX, IMO), and you can only build anemic tooling.

Oh yeah completely agree. I've been working (on and off) on some designs embedding other non-text items into the sheet e.g. tables, graphs, etc. Still in the early phases but the difficulty is balancing the complexity / simplicity.

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

#30

Post by jklp »

bombtrack wrote: post #27

I love apps like this. I currently use Numi daily for running financial-related tracking and scenarios. It has a few annoying UI quirks, so I'm super open for alternatives (especially with cloud syncing). I played around with porting my Numi sheets over, and the only thing that's tripped me up so far is using underscores as numerical separators, eg: 1_000_000 for 1000000. All my Numi values are written this way, so t…

I love Numi - it's a very beautifully designed app! Didn't realise you could use underscores as separators, will make sure to add it in!
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