51–60 of 169 posts
I don't think it supports as wide a range of math, but it does seem to pass the accuracy test given in the article (sin(exp(37))). It also lets you assign variables which I find handy.
On the other hand, the propagation of uncertainty in Chalk is very cool.
I definitely agree with a lot of the complaints. I truly don't understand why so many computer calculator interfaces are so awful. I've been using speedcrunch for a couple of years now and it scratches most of the itches for what I want out of a calculator. It looks fairly similar to Chalk's design as well. Very nice interface!
For anything more complex there is SageMath and Jupyter notebook.
I still use the python repl in a terminal for my desktop calculator. Its a good choice since usually im already in the terminal anyways.
My favourite desktop calculator so far is Qalculate![0] for similar reasons, and I basically never have the keypad shown. It uses libqalculate, which also provides an executable version that's usable on the console, which I also use often. It's incredible and I love it. [0] https://qalculate.github.io/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We will somewhat disagree, partly because I can't help using calculators as a scientist, so my opinion is particularly biased. However, I don't like the trend to hide everything that looks technical. On the long run, letting people play with advanced features (that won't break things) is a win-win.
MacOS is really bad abut this sort of thing. It fails on discoverability. For instance, how do you navigate to a hidden folder in the file-selection dialog? There is no option to show hidden, and there is no place to input the exact path. You must know two things to proceed: That there is a secret hotkey to allow exact path specification, and what that hotkey is. It took me years to learn that there was a hotkey -- I…
It's not just Macs. Just about everything in "modern" UIs fail discoverability.
I've currently settled on MathLab's Graphing Calculator[0] which has very similar design elements for any larger scale calculations. My second choice if the calculation requires estimates or units is obviously Wolfram Alpha, but the need for connectivity, lack of calculation history and speed leaves it lacking as a quick calculation tool.
[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=us.mathlab.and...
I still use the python repl in a terminal for my desktop calculator. Its a good choice since usually im already in the terminal anyways.
I also do the same although when I need fractions, having to type all the words to import and use the fraction module is a pain
export PYTHONSTARTUP=/home/savant_penguin/.python/startup.py
If you don't want them always loaded, but rather just for a "calculator mode," you can do something like
alias pycalc='PYTHONSTARTUP=/home/savant_penguin/.python/ipython startup_calc_mode.py'
The main thing I use Google search calculator for is natural-language unit conversions like "2 gigabytes / 128 kibibits per second in days" which is not in scope for Chalk, but there's a nice desktop calculator called Soulver that is good at that kind of thing.
$ python
>>>