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Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone

tydligapp.com

71–80 of 151 posts

Re: Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone

#71
post #4

Graphing functionality on a phone reminds me of an old TI calculator. I really don't know why recent OSes (be it on PC, smartphone, tablet) always came with such feeble calculators. It's not like TI calculators are difficult to use. Sure if all you want is add/min/mul/div functionality the TI is essentially a traditional calculator, and then behind that you've got all these nifty graphing utilities. It's not like a g…

Yep, Grapher is a nice app with an interesting history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapher

Does Grapher share any source with Graphing Calculator?

I guess it might, given that Apple shipped Graphing Calculator with Mac OS before, and given Graphing Calculator's interesting early history (http://www.pacifict.com/Story/)

(I wonder how Apple negotiated that deal originally. I guess some lawyers spent quite some time arguing whose intellectual property it originally was. The programmers weren't paid by Apple, but worked at Infinite Loop)

Re: Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone

#73

This looks closer to Mathematica/Maple/MATLAB than a basic calculator, although still nowhere near the power of those. Of course 1/0 should be +Infinity, not ?... (Disclaimer: I have a Mathematica console always open on my desktop, and regularly use it for all kinds of calculations.)

Why should 1/0 be +Infinity? Think of 1/x at the limit as x->0 from the left and from the right

With IEEE floats, 0 has a sign which can be used to denote the direction of the limit; if you try 1/(-0) in any program or language with sane numerics (i.e. not Excel or other dumb calculator emulators), it should give you -Infinity.

Re: Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone

#74

Earlier 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. :(

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 actual desktop computer into exams -- it was pretty much useless. (Now, a few years later, and Mathematica running on a maxed out Mac would have been pretty darn useful.)

Re: Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone

#75
post #15

No RPN. Neckbeard status confirmed. Calculators are still an unsolved problem for me on glass devices to the point I still religiously carry around an HP50G even though its 6x the size of my phone. Also from some bad experiences, it appears that some "app" calculators are also seriously badly implemented. Even basic trig ops can return stupid values at extremes which makes them untrustworthy. Plus none are reasonably…

Frink fills in some of those holes:

http://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/

(but not RPN and trig functions are floating point)

Re: Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone

#76

Earlier 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.

Never been allowed to use a TI for exams in the UK. I've only ever been allowed to use a Casio.

Casio also has some powerful calculators, including my beloved Algebra fx2+ and the ClassPad line which slowly converges to a kind of specialised tablet.

Re: Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone

#77

Earlier 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.

Never been allowed to use a TI for exams in the UK. I've only ever been allowed to use a Casio.

Yeah, I used a Casio (non-programmable, but does integrations) for my (British) IGCSEs, a TI for the (International/Swiss) IB, and am back to using 'university approved' Casios at Cambridge.

Re: Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone

#78
post #48

This looks much worse than symcalc. SymCalc has pretty much all the functionality of a TI-89 including solving calculus and algebraic equations. Tydlig looks like it has a nice ui but it doesn't even seem to support variables....

Thanks for the recommendation for SymCalc, I've just downloaded it. I had been using TouchCalc and GraphCalc but this is much better!

Re: Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone

#79
post #4

Graphing functionality on a phone reminds me of an old TI calculator. I really don't know why recent OSes (be it on PC, smartphone, tablet) always came with such feeble calculators. It's not like TI calculators are difficult to use. Sure if all you want is add/min/mul/div functionality the TI is essentially a traditional calculator, and then behind that you've got all these nifty graphing utilities. It's not like a g…

It's depressing to me that the closest I can get to the TI-92+ I had in college is to emulate a TI-92+ on my computer or Android devices (actually on a tablet it's not too bad). My other options (Octave, Matlab, etc.) are way too heavy for what I want to do and require too much time to learn.

They don't have that sort of pickup-and-use feature my old calculators used to have. I think it's the presence of most of the buttons I'm ever going to be interested in on the keyboard rather than having to figure out how to type something that means the same as an integral or some such. The discoverability of those buttons beats most modern software hands down.

I also suspect that writing simple to use general purpose solvers and simplifiers for the things the TI calcs do (the CAS) is likely very hard. I remember putting even pretty complex physics equations with all sorts of trig functions and exponents and integrals and such in during college and it handled most of them without trouble and pretty printed the result.

Re: Tydlig – Calculator Reimagined for iPad and iPhone

#80
post #15

No RPN. Neckbeard status confirmed. Calculators are still an unsolved problem for me on glass devices to the point I still religiously carry around an HP50G even though its 6x the size of my phone. Also from some bad experiences, it appears that some "app" calculators are also seriously badly implemented. Even basic trig ops can return stupid values at extremes which makes them untrustworthy. Plus none are reasonably…

If you have an Android device, the TI and HP emulators are pretty good...especially on the larger screen phones that are popular these days.

TI calcs

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.supware.ti...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Bisha.TI89...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.natygames....

HP calcs

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ab.x48

Casio

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.developstu...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=o2s.emul.hp49g

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