This looks very nice, and I'll probably buy it and Scalar this week, but it did get me to wondering. It would be interesting to see how an APL app would fair these days.
Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone
101–110 of 151 posts
Re: Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone
#102I love it! Great design and should be very flexible to create simple functions through linked numbers. Is it really a good idea to allow 96 + 15% though (at 0:45)? Might cause some problems for people learning maths, as it won't work on normal calculators and doesn't really make it obvious what percentages actually are.
The New Old Thing has an article on this topic [1]. Personally, I avoid ever using the percent button simply because I can never remember exactly how it will behave.
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2008/01/10/70474...
Re: Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Never been allowed to use a TI for exams in the UK. I've only ever been allowed to use a Casio.
I am currently in Year 13 in London. You are definitely allowed TI in the mathematics exams (A-Levels). TI-89 is one of the only that is banned because of its CAS. Friends in the French system are allowed the TI 89 though.
Just an hint, you can swap the guts of a TI-89 into the body of a TI-83. Don't ask me how I know :)
Re: Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone
#104It would be fun to build this as a webapp in JS + canvas/SVG.
Re: Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone
#105Great to see more people attacking the underserved math app segment on the iOS. I'm the author of Scalar ( http://scalarapp.com ), another calculator replacement for iPhone / iPad. Just tested both versions of Tydlig very heavily, looks like the author ran into lots of the similar math/UI problems as I did when I was working on my app. :) Some approaches he has chosen look similar, some are unique. Great work, good l…
This looks rather good (sadly no iDevice). Looks as if Apple came up with it, if they weren't so silly with the way they applied their skeumorphism. I always imagined that if you were aiming for the mathematician market (huge market!!1 /s) you could have an app like that except on a tablet you'd use with a pen. Then you'd just write down calculations and OCR would figure out what you are trying to calculate and do th…
Something like that exists(for android): MyScript Calculator. It's probably not powerful enough for a matematician, but works for me.
Re: Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just a musing: perhaps its considered not as valuable an investment to program since a (the?) primary market is students, and students are probably not allowed to use phones on tests for obvious reasons (internet connectivity, texting questions to each other, overall distraction). However, TI's are state approved or whatever.
It's so sad that kids with iphones aren't allowed to use phones on tests. They're being tested in an archaic context for archaic purposes. Under what circumstances are people going to be working without internet access? School has a lot of catching up to do with the real world. :(
In my experience, if you are really prepared for an exam, you know the formulas by heart anyway. I myself passed tests designed in a way that calculators could be disallowed.
Some of them even had a reminder section with all the needed formulas. But unprepared students still failed them, because they were simply not used to use them and they therefore ran out of time.
This translates in the real world: knowing things by heart and their mechanic is the difference between the guy that spends one hour on a problem ans the guy who spends 10 minutes on it.
Re: Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone
#107Great to see more people attacking the underserved math app segment on the iOS. I'm the author of Scalar ( http://scalarapp.com ), another calculator replacement for iPhone / iPad. Just tested both versions of Tydlig very heavily, looks like the author ran into lots of the similar math/UI problems as I did when I was working on my app. :) Some approaches he has chosen look similar, some are unique. Great work, good l…
I'd love to hear you highlight a few of the unexpected challenges.
For example:
1. When someone enters "1 / 3" how many decimal places you display in the result? My approach: use MAX(4, MAX(decimal_places(entered_values))). His approach: use 3 everywhere.
- Bonus 1: how many decimal places you display when someone enters "sin(3.14)"? What about "sin(1 / 3)"? My approach: use as much space you have on the screen.
- Bonus 2: how do decimal places propagate when you're using refs?
2. What to do when someone taps "=" on the expression where we already have a result? Chinese $2 hardware calculator approach: redo the last operation. My approach: do nothing. Tydlig's approach: insert last result as a ref.
3. What to do when someone enters huge numbers? My approach: trim them to the width of the screen, clearly displaying that, but keep the full figure when doing copy/paste or export to text. His approach: start using E-notation somewhere around 16th figure.
4. In an app like this there's a temptation to stop using cursor because calculators don't have it and you want to be backwards compatible with them. When you create a ref, how to make sure the destination of the ref is at the right position in the expression without introducing a cursor? I.e. how to make sure you're not getting "2 + 3 [ref] + 12" (you need an operator before "[ref]")? My approach: use a semi-rigid table, where operators are separated from operands. Tydlig's approach: use a little cursor, a part of the app I don't like, because your finger normally would block the cursor.
I can go on and on. Math-related stuff is hard.
Re: Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone
#108Great to see more people attacking the underserved math app segment on the iOS. I'm the author of Scalar ( http://scalarapp.com ), another calculator replacement for iPhone / iPad. Just tested both versions of Tydlig very heavily, looks like the author ran into lots of the similar math/UI problems as I did when I was working on my app. :) Some approaches he has chosen look similar, some are unique. Great work, good l…
This looks rather good (sadly no iDevice). Looks as if Apple came up with it, if they weren't so silly with the way they applied their skeumorphism. I always imagined that if you were aiming for the mathematician market (huge market!!1 /s) you could have an app like that except on a tablet you'd use with a pen. Then you'd just write down calculations and OCR would figure out what you are trying to calculate and do th…
There is a Windows / Office component called "Math Input Panel" for writing equations with a pen and OCR'ing them, and Surface Pro is a tablet you can use with a pen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZKjc4Rzm2Y
But it doesn't do any of the number crunching, mathematical work.
Re: Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone
#109Great to see more people attacking the underserved math app segment on the iOS. I'm the author of Scalar ( http://scalarapp.com ), another calculator replacement for iPhone / iPad. Just tested both versions of Tydlig very heavily, looks like the author ran into lots of the similar math/UI problems as I did when I was working on my app. :) Some approaches he has chosen look similar, some are unique. Great work, good l…
Some of the copy on your page is not quite right. "Each value could be . . ." -> "Each value can be . . .". There are one or two other places with this improper word usage. Just a heads up.
Thanks! It's hard to be a non-native speaker!
Re: Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's so sad that kids with iphones aren't allowed to use phones on tests. They're being tested in an archaic context for archaic purposes. Under what circumstances are people going to be working without internet access? School has a lot of catching up to do with the real world. :(
When I was in college in the 80s there was an explosion of creativity in the calculator market (kind of like the TV and camera markets today -- they're all going broke and trying to come up with new killer products). One of the things that became very popular was calculators with 32kB or 64kB of RAM, a QWERTY keyboard, that ran BASIC. Anyway, I was pure math major and we could bring pretty much anything short of an a…
We were actually allowed to use Mathematica on our Linear Algebra exams this semester. I think it made the tests a lot more effective because you didn't have to go through the algebraic trouble of finding eigenvalues and eigenvectors, so the professor could focus more of the testing time on applications of those values.
Having a computer in class opens the door for cheating, but in smaller classes it would be easy to tell if a student were browsing the Internet rather than finding a determinant.