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Numi – Calculator app for Mac

numi.app

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Re: Numi – Calculator app for Mac

#171

Post by KaseKun »

I just watched the demo on the landing page and am struggling to think of a target audience for this.

Most technically oriented Mac users I know use Alfred. A quick CMD+space "4 tea spoons to ml" will open a browser window with your answer from your favourite search engine.

For more complex queries, preceded your input with "Wolfram" (tab autocomplete on the "wo") and you have the entire Wolfram engine at your fingertips.

The above mechanism is exceptionally flexible to any form of question, conversion, or math,and very low friction.

For the tax percentage calculation example (or anything similar), you'll be hard pressed to find someone who has this problem often enough to want to to pay for this, AND doesnt already use anymore comprehensive and familiar spreadsheet tool.

Re: Numi – Calculator app for Mac

#172

Post by goldsteinq »

monkeydust wrote: post #74
reid wrote: post #3

Soulver is a similar app for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS with shared documents in iCloud Drive. Check it out if you’re looking for something like this to go!

Would love to see a web version

I've made fcalc [0] for myself. It's much simpler and basically glorified `eval()`, but it's good enough for me.

[0]: https://fcalc.github.io

Re: Numi – Calculator app for Mac

#173

Post by tzekid »

KaseKun wrote: post #171

I just watched the demo on the landing page and am struggling to think of a target audience for this. Most technically oriented Mac users I know use Alfred. A quick CMD+space "4 tea spoons to ml" will open a browser window with your answer from your favourite search engine. For more complex queries, preceded your input with "Wolfram" (tab autocomplete on the "wo") and you have the entire Wolfram engine at your finger…

I just started using it a bit and can see myself using it as an alternative for simple stuff I would otherwise do in Excel / Google Sheets.

Re: Numi – Calculator app for Mac

#174

Post by argvargc »

retromario wrote: post #170
argvargc wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a heads up that everything typed into Spotlight is sent to Apple.

Do you have a source for this?

It's in the ToS, and there was a big hoo-haa over it at the time it was introduced. Eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8473580

Aside from that, the most basic understanding of what Spotlight is reveals there is no other way for it to function other than to send the users input off-machine:

The user types in a value and results are returned related to that value, some, from online sources.

Re: Numi – Calculator app for Mac

#177

Post by bilalq »

coldtea wrote: post #84
bilalq wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good question. The app doesn't look fully open source, but I suspect they'd have to. Currency conversions aren't fixed, after all.

Wouldn't that just require an incoming list of up-to-date currency conversions (fetched on each run, and perhaps cached for an hour or so)? They could do those even without the user asking for any currency calculation -- so in practice no data would ever leave to show anything about actual queries (which would be the case if you e.g. wanted to calculate X euro in yen and they asked for the current euro/yen values onl…

An hourly cache may not be up-to-date enough for many use-cases. But sure, let's say you have some caching on a timed interval and those are all the requests you see. Unless you block all outbound requests from the app, you still can't guarantee it's not reporting on you.

Imagine if you saw a header on the request that looked like:

``` Authorization: Bearer A17b2C23kd231h12309 ```

That might look totally safe/normal at a glance. It's just an auth header, right? But who's to say there isn't extra info embedded in there? Maybe "A" means a conversion between USD to Euros and the number after it refers to the number of times such a query was made in the last hour. Maybe the letter after it is a signal for the order of magnitude of the largest unit amount (tens, thousands, millions, etc).

I have little hopes for end users (including myself) from ever being able to reliably confirm/disconfirm the privacy impact of closed source apps unless network access is completely cut off. Even if I monitored requests in Little Snitch, who knows what clever encoding schemes can be used to leak out data through requests that appear benign. That's not to say it's not useful to do so (many, if not most malicious apps like that would probably not bother to cover their tracks that well).

Re: Numi – Calculator app for Mac

#178

Post by ianferrel »

tcskeptic wrote: post #61
ianferrel wrote: post #49

The final example in their intro video doesn't make sense to me. Can someone explain it? Here's the text: price = $8 times 5 $40 fee = 8% 8 % fee on price in Euro 39.48 EUR What does that mean? "fee on price" should mean "fee times price", right? So 8% of $40. That's nowhere near 39.48 EUR. Could it mean "price after fee is deducted"? But if so, it must have been made during a time when EUR was worth almost 8% less t…

I suspect it means $40USD in Euro (at about .914 to the dollar) then add 8% to that amount. 5 * 8 = 40 40 * .914 = 36.56 36.56 * 1.08 = 39.48 (ish)

Thanks! That is not an obvious conversion from natural language to math to me, but it does seem like the one they must be using.

Re: Numi – Calculator app for Mac

#179

Post by speleding »

BozeWolf wrote: post #21

What is wrong with “bc” ;-) half joking, anybody else who uses bc? I am by no means an expert, just using the regular add/multiply and sometimes a variable. This looks way better though.

I use "irb" (interactive ruby), installed by default on MacOS and there is always terminal window open somewhere anyway. Will give Numi a try though.
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