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Calca iOS - Mathematical text editor for engineers

praeclarum.org

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Re: Calca iOS - Mathematical text editor for engineers

#31

Post by HCIdivision17 »

praeclarum wrote: post #27
HCIdivision17 wrote: post #25

I certainly can't speak for others, but my typical use case is projected to be in meetings. Imagine sitting in a room with a bunch of engineers and managers, and someone says something worth checking the math on. If you're not the lucky dude at the conference room's computer and just happens to have IPython Notebook/LightTable/Excel/`w/e`, then this will be handy. Be the guy who keeps up with the conversation and can…

Glad you like the spaces in names! It's not hard to implement without too much ambiguity. :) There are a few tricks I need to pull to make things like: `if x then y else z` be interpreted correctly. Fun fact: The slowness is bottlenecked by how fast I can update the text editor - the calculations themselves usually only take 10% of the update time. It's a big area that can be improved.

Interesting. I really had just assumed the iPhone was under-powered (having no idea what the device is really doing in the background). If it can go faster, that would certainly be icing. But over all, I think I'll largely be using it to sketch an idea here or there, and it is plenty fast for that. The slowdown is only noticeable for the included big reference documents. (Which are great - being able to twiddle with the features inside the definitions is now my favorite way to learn.)

Re: Calca iOS - Mathematical text editor for engineers

#34

Post by nicholasreed »

batbomb wrote: post #9

I still use my TI-89.

Can you embellish a bit, perhaps enlighten us as to why you continue to use your TI-89? How do you think it compares to this, decidedly different, option? My apologies if you accidentally posted that comment before finishing your thought, but I'm generally used to seeing more effort being put into posts on HN.

Re: Calca iOS - Mathematical text editor for engineers

#35

Post by ajanuary »

praeclarum wrote: post #13
ori_b wrote: post #6

This looks interesting, but I can't see myself using it on an ipad or phone. This is something I'd want to use on a desktop, with a keyboard, while multitasking with other programs. Edit: I'll keep it in the back of my head, and I might try it later.

Hi I'm the author. Yep Mac is done and just being submitted for review. I just couldn't resist announcing the iOS version.

Will the desktop version have the ability to use functions from third party libraries?

We have a bunch of complicated maths in a java library. At the moment I've got a jruby wrapper around it and using the jruby repl, but it would be awesome if I could use this with it.

Re: Calca iOS - Mathematical text editor for engineers

#36

Post by gcanyon »

A few suggestions, since the author seems to be hanging around in this thread:

It would be good if plurals for variable names were the same as the singular, so that

light speed = 299,792,458 meters/second

Would be compatible with

time to earth=> 499.242173411seconds

Also, it would be nice if "per" was equivalent to /

Also, it would be nice if definitions didn't have to be

Single item on the left = many things on the right. For example, this would be nice:

Miles per gallon = 34 Gas tank = 13 gallons Range = miles per gas tank

So far I'm having a lot of fun and already posted it to Facebook.

Re: Calca iOS - Mathematical text editor for engineers

#37

Post by Terretta »

frsandstone wrote: post #5

Glad to see Soulver [1] has some competition. [1] http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/

Soulver groks magnitudes of bits and bytes, and carries units or denominations over, making it invaluable for quick scalability planning or bandwidth estimates and sharing the templates with teams via Dropbox. Love this tool.

Re: Calca iOS - Mathematical text editor for engineers

#39

Post by praeclarum »

ajanuary wrote: post #35
praeclarum wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi I'm the author. Yep Mac is done and just being submitted for review. I just couldn't resist announcing the iOS version.

Will the desktop version have the ability to use functions from third party libraries? We have a bunch of complicated maths in a java library. At the moment I've got a jruby wrapper around it and using the jruby repl, but it would be awesome if I could use this with it.

Oh interesting. No support for that now, but it should be possible to add. Perhaps shelling out and just reading stdout? Binary interfaces would be harder.
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