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Soulver – Notepad, meet calculator

soulver.app

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Re: Soulver – Notepad, meet calculator

#81

Post by pkamb »

Soulver is great, but there's one feature that seriously makes me hate using it.

I often open up "scratchpad" text documents. I Paste some text, edit it, Select All, then Cut. I press CMD-W to close the window. Because the document is blank, I'm not prompted to save the unsaved File.

If I try to do the same thing with Soulver, when I close the (blank) window the app pops up a modal dialog asking me where I want to save the (blank, never-saved, scratchpad-only) File. So annoying.

It seriously prevents me from quickly opening up or using Soulver just because I don't want to deal with clicking through that modal once I'm done. I'll just use a Text document instead or put the math equation into the Chrome omnibox.

Re: Soulver – Notepad, meet calculator

#82

Post by kragen »

I'm using a thing called microMath+ on Android (available on F-Droid) but it's kind of clumsy. I haven't tried hacking on it yet to improve the UI, but I'm wondering if there might be something else out there that's already better. (Not proprietary software, obviously.)

Re: Soulver – Notepad, meet calculator

#83

Post by TimTheTinker »

fghorow wrote: post #71

Slightly off topic: Back in the early days of the Newton, there was an app that let you manipulate algebraic expressions by dragging and dropping individual elements of the expression. Think factoring out a common factor represented by the expression sprouting parentheses with the factor out front. There was a later effort called MathDrag'n but that seemed to run out of steam. Does anyone know if a similar thing exis…

The old (pre-OS X) Macintosh app Graphing Calculator did this. I really miss it.

Re: Soulver – Notepad, meet calculator

#84

Post by tsieling »

jonstaab wrote: post #52
zwily wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soulver has iOS apps too.

Sadly, I am Android-only. Is there any difference in functionality, or it a pure clone (edit: or, is Numi the clone? Sound like Soulver has been around a while)?

Pretty much identical to the desktop apps, all docs sync nicely.

Re: Soulver – Notepad, meet calculator

#85

Post by jraph »

vjeux wrote: post #14

I reimplemented a simplified version of it 7 years ago (wow, time flies) and open sourced it, if people are interested. https://github.com/vjeux/soulver.js

Watch out:

> $22 for lunch + 10% sales tax

Displays $32.00 instead of $24.20 or something. Other issues: it does not support units on the right nor euros (€).

Nice anyway :-)

Re: Soulver – Notepad, meet calculator

#86

Post by gumby »

I've used Soulver for several years and just upgraded so I guess I like it. I have to confess I originally bought it simply because I was delighted someone was reimagining the calculator interface and I wanted to support that. But I do use it every day.

It's not my automatic go-to calculator (that's either dc or RPN pcalc). But if I want to do any slightly complicated calculation but don't need the overhead of Excel/Numbers or Mathmatica (or am on my phone!) it's really nice to lay out some variables (cost/m2, length width, blah blah) and be able to tweak them. And I can fiddle on my computer and then see the model on my phone where it's also easy to edit.

Not a tool for everyone, but surprisingly good as both a programmer and general purpose calculator.

Re: Soulver – Notepad, meet calculator

#87

Post by kragen »

fourier_mode wrote: post #5

UI is impressive! But, how is the functionality provided better than tons of free spreadsheet apps out there?

If you're only concerned about functionality and not UI, you can always write your calculations in hexadecimal machine code, at least if you don't have the misfortune to be on iOS or some similar game console platform where users aren't allowed to write code. But I think it's more practical to use a better UI.

Re: Soulver – Notepad, meet calculator

#88

Post by gumby »

ancorevard wrote: post #44
kennethfriedman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And another FYI: Soulver 2 is still available on the Mac App Store for $9. Whereas Soulver 3 is on their website for $30.

Why would anyone buy Soulver outside the Mac App Store? Any compelling new features that warrants the higher price and risk?

> Why would anyone buy [any app] outside the Mac App Store?

I almost never buy an app from the Mac App Store when it's also available directly. I'd rather that the developer gets to keep the extra 30%.

Free apps I typically get from the store when available for the convenience of the updating system (though sparkle has made non-app store app updating pretty painless).

I don't find v3 a compelling upgrade for me but will upgrade anyway once syncing to iOS works again (important feature for me) just to support the dev.

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