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!
Soulver is so good. I use it almost every single day. It's just a great app and isn't that expensive. One of those apps I completely miss when it's not installed on a new device.
Why not. I use Chrome to make quick calculations all the time. Just Ctrl+N and 1+1, and the answer is posted. Then Ctrl+W, and/or Alt+Tab to Sublime or whatever. Then I continue with my life :)
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.
Periodic reminder that iCloud Drive is not end to end encrypted, permitting both Apple and the US federal government to read all of your calculations at any time
without a warrant.
For simple sums, about the same, but 20% cheaper. Soulver is a fair bit more powerful, but I own Soulver (albeit the old v2) and haven't used much from the extended feature set.
Yes I'm aware. The comment referred to widget removal in Big Sur though, and the only "widgets" I can think of that were removed were Dashboard widgets.
Big Sur/iOS 14 widgets don't support interactivity beyond single clicks, so I don't see any way a Numi widget would be of any benefit.
The calculator widget is no more. IIRC (I haven't looked into how widgets are built) there's no way for a calculator widget to work. They work in a way where the developer just gets to update some data on a schedule.
Yes, you are right about that. Apple doesn't allow it to work as a mini app. I suspect, they will unlock more APIs to make Widget more interactive on later versions.
It's easy to make something multi-platform, but as many lone developers on all OS's have experienced, it quickly becomes a nightmare to maintain more than one platform.
Given the ease of macOS GUI development to begin with, there are more small-time, lone developers making full GUI apps there, versus other platforms.
Other platforms have a higher barrier of entry in that regard, so the landscape is more conducive to having already started out as a team and so developing a more significant app worthy of that kind of investment.
macOS is just a joy to develop with, unix like environment, beautiful desktop, easy to use frameworks
the environment is clean and enables people to do what they want, even if XCode is a piece of garbage shit, it gets the job done
the overall quality of Apple apps encourages devs to apply the same principles, easy to use and beautifully designed apps
in comparison, when you see official Windows metro/fluent apps looking so boring, it doesn't encourage people to develop natively
then you have the details that kills it, lack of proper windows store, lack of people native way of distributing apps (exe? msi? vsx? appbundle? zip my 100's dotnet dlls?) it makes you not want to even start
Not a macOS dev, just a customer. The thing I value about the platform is that there are lots of these so called "boutique" apps. Apps that do a single thing and do it extremely well, with a great, native UI, with Mac keyboard shortcuts and all the behavior you'd expect on a Mac. And since your average Mac user cares a bit more about the experience and aesthetics and is, let's face it, usually a bit more affluent than your average PC user, there has always been a market for those and it's become a bit of a self-fulfilling marketing. Mac users expect apps to be focused and good looking and Mac devs know that even smaller apps are viable on the platform if done well, so the platform is actually full of those nice little apps and people come to the Mac for the experience.
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 is what I do. I do it so frequently that I have a small script `b` so that I can `b 'l(156)'` or just type `b` to get a shell with the match library loaded. Seems funny to alias a 2 char command but I often prefer passing the expression on the command line.
Does anyone have thoughts on how natural it feels to use ‘:’ instead ‘=‘ for variable creation? From a distance it has a nice elegance, but it is interesting how few programming languages make this choice.
I've always felt similarly. Obviously using "=" comes from math ("let x = 1"), but I've always felt it was such a barrier to a newcomer. Both because of variable creation (it looks more like the answer to a problem, rather than the initial premise) and because then we have to add ungainly new symbols such as "==" and "===" to test for equality.
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 only).
Plus, you can add it to Little Snitch or some free such, and it wont be able to do any talking anywhere.
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).
I use a lot and tried to build a simple version for the browser (to use on windows). Not even remotely close to feature set but still works on basic stuffs.
I think Numi's more oriented towards a general calculator, whereas CalcuLaTeX is more for longer form problems or documents, although I know that at least a few people use it like a scratchpad. I'll definitely take some inspiration from Numi though.
I find that calculators remain weirdly unergonomic on most Operating Systems. There are so many times where I want to do some quick math but feel hobbled by the insistence of calculator software writers to ape physical calculator design -- Numi seems like a cool step in the right direction
I didn’t even know there’s a calculator app on macOS. I simply write formulas into Spotlight, and if I need history or variables or anything serious I launch an Octave prompt.
If you're using OS X, try using Spotlight or Alfred directly (Keypirinha[0] is a reasonable Windows alternative) - just type in `1 + 2` and you get the answer without launching a special app. There are plugins for conversions as well.
These days, DuckDuckGo is my go to calculator. I can type math and conversions and get the answer. And if I don’t, I do the !wa bang and let Wolfram Alpha handle it.
Spotlight correctly interprets numerical expressions, but it also treats them as search queries for the entire filesystem, resulting in an expensive retrieval process after every keystroke. It's the most convenient, so I use it anyways, but the end result is that cpu starts to overheat for a query as simple as 1 + 2.
Using Alfred (with powerpack) is like having gills while living underwater. It's hard to get the scuba divers of the world to switch since they are so invested in their myriad gear and it's so difficult to convey the value prop when you haven't experienced it.
I turn everything except calculator (and settings menu) off, so this problem goes away.
I never really want to use spotlight to browse to some random directory or file on my filesystem, for me it's strictly for calculator and opening the Bluetooth settings...
I wish you could paste from history when doing math with alfred (where the pasting is also fro alfred). That's my only complaint with alfred's calculation capabilities.
I keep hearing about Alfred, and frankly I don't know why but I'm missing the reasons why so many people rave about it. I've tried it only once, a while ago, and perhaps I wasn't in the right mood to appreciate it.
Does anyone here uses it, and can ELI5 to me why Alfred is so good?
- you can control your whole machine with it, so I don't have to use mouse anymore for - sleep/shut down/volume/
- extra indexing for folders/documents/images
- web search in different sites (gmail/wiki/amazon,....)
- clipboard history
- snippets (ascii art for luls ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, but most importantly I use this for script snippets I need to use in some UIs/ when I'm remote in some vim session in some server
- workflow - MS ToDo implementation, quick little things like switch off wifi, set dns to 1.1.1.1/unset, ...
- least but not last, never had a problem with db update beeing stuck on indexing and taking 150% CPU like with spotlight
Mainly the fact it's extensible. If you have something you do commonly do you can set up a shortcut for it. I use it a lot at work for quickly jumping to specific pages of internal websites, or converting hex codes to decimal. It also replaces spotlight.
Speedcrunch is one of the apps that I always keep open. I just alt+ab to it when I need something and do some quick operations with the numerical keyboard and it's able to handle stuff for programming and CS in general.
I used to have an amazing calculator in Windows XP/7 called powertoy calc. It was so simple to use and had amazing powerful features too. Huge help while I was in engineering college.
Not the app author, but I built a Mac app recently and found node-appdmg to be a pretty simple way to create the .dmg: https://github.com/LinusU/node-appdmg
This is really neat. Google does a pretty good job at providing similar answers, but it doesn't support things like summing up past queries and needs copy/pasting for more advanced use-cases.
I love the UX here. The simple interface and even the coloring go a long way in making it easy to use.
It actually does support summing up. I've discovered - it work in a groups. If you have set of queries divided by space, keyword 'total' or 'sum' would result in a sum of previous group
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 than dollars? Did that ever happen?
With Soulver 2 for iOS is not longer available, I wish Numi have a paid version for iOS so it could use iCloud Sync between all devices.
Edit: And one of the thing I dont understand is all these Notes Calculator dont have B for Billion and T for Trillion. Some of them has M for million, but most dont.
Numi looks awesome! My favorite calculator app so far is Tydlig[0], too bad it's has not been updated in a couple years. I remember a really good talk by the creator (Andreas Karlsson), but I can't seem to find it, anyone has any idea what I'm talking about?
As I see it it is rust and wasm. It would be nice to have some note about the architecture in the docs, maybe someone would pick it up to make a desktop app from it too.
Hi, it would not be hard at all, at the moment for me it would be like 1 day of work.
Honestly, I just don't see its benefit, you can always open it on a dedicated browser and use it as it would be a desktop app.
However, in the next release I might provide a desktop version.
Well, I prefer to use browsers as, well browsers instead of app hosts..., to many tabs, too many distractions, and not that fast )the whole browser, not a given page).
Just using an app that I can open and close anytime is much preferable to me. Currently using speedcrunch for this, but your solution looks a bit more feature full and maybe a good middle-ground between a calculator and just firing up ipython or similar.
All in all a desktop version would be much appreciated, but I understand if it's not a focus for you.
For the technical part: what do you think, what would you use in rust to turn this intu a regular gui app?
185 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadEdit: it of course already has it https://github.com/nikolaeu/numi/wiki/Alfred-Integration
But they've pulled the old version off the iOS store for the meantime before releasing the new version.
Looks like there is a TestFlight link to get Soulver 2 for iOS and iPadOS if anyone is interested in it: https://twitter.com/soulver/status/1375368313774215171
I use Soulver 2 on my iPhone and iPad at least once a week and couldn't imagine going without it.
https://github.com/soulverteam/SoulverCore
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.
[0]: https://fcalc.github.io
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837802
If you were still using it I'm interested to know why – I stopped because it felt clunky to use and there weren't many widgets.
I'm not sure it's much of a criticism of an app if they don't have a Dashboard widget.
Big Sur/iOS 14 widgets don't support interactivity beyond single clicks, so I don't see any way a Numi widget would be of any benefit.
I wish it supported multiple windows, though.
This type of app is going to be valued higher by Mac users.
Given the ease of macOS GUI development to begin with, there are more small-time, lone developers making full GUI apps there, versus other platforms.
Other platforms have a higher barrier of entry in that regard, so the landscape is more conducive to having already started out as a team and so developing a more significant app worthy of that kind of investment.
the environment is clean and enables people to do what they want, even if XCode is a piece of garbage shit, it gets the job done
the overall quality of Apple apps encourages devs to apply the same principles, easy to use and beautifully designed apps
in comparison, when you see official Windows metro/fluent apps looking so boring, it doesn't encourage people to develop natively
then you have the details that kills it, lack of proper windows store, lack of people native way of distributing apps (exe? msi? vsx? appbundle? zip my 100's dotnet dlls?) it makes you not want to even start
even Microsoft is ditching all that crap and rewriting their native apps with electron, wich says a lot about the windows ecosystem (https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/4/22213300/microsoft-one-out...)
This looks way better though.
https://apps.apple.com/qa/app/rpn-30/id1451413517
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 only).
Plus, you can add it to Little Snitch or some free such, and it wont be able to do any talking anywhere.
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).
They all seem to be riddled with ads or obnoxious "cute" features to justify the price
It also works for iOS and WatchOS.
http://calca.io/
It doesn't get more $2 Casio than that.
https://imaginamundo.github.io/math-notes/
I think Numi's more oriented towards a general calculator, whereas CalcuLaTeX is more for longer form problems or documents, although I know that at least a few people use it like a scratchpad. I'll definitely take some inspiration from Numi though.
By the way, the new website for CalcuLaTeX is https://calcula.tech
There's also Grapher, macOS built-in equation plotter.
[0]. https://keypirinha.com/
These days, DuckDuckGo is my go to calculator. I can type math and conversions and get the answer. And if I don’t, I do the !wa bang and let Wolfram Alpha handle it.
I never really want to use spotlight to browse to some random directory or file on my filesystem, for me it's strictly for calculator and opening the Bluetooth settings...
There are of course a bunch of third party apps and I've used many of them across multiple OS.
Does anyone here uses it, and can ELI5 to me why Alfred is so good?
- you can control your whole machine with it, so I don't have to use mouse anymore for - sleep/shut down/volume/
- extra indexing for folders/documents/images
- web search in different sites (gmail/wiki/amazon,....)
- clipboard history
- snippets (ascii art for luls ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, but most importantly I use this for script snippets I need to use in some UIs/ when I'm remote in some vim session in some server
- workflow - MS ToDo implementation, quick little things like switch off wifi, set dns to 1.1.1.1/unset, ...
- least but not last, never had a problem with db update beeing stuck on indexing and taking 150% CPU like with spotlight
Some examples that you can just install without writing your own: https://www.alfredapp.com/workflows/
[0] https://speedcrunch.org/
This felt so intuitive to me that ever since, I’ve ensured my machines had ? do calculations in the shell (by aliasing it to whatever could do math).
I love the UX here. The simple interface and even the coloring go a long way in making it easy to use.
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 than dollars? Did that ever happen?
5 * 8 = 40 40 * .914 = 36.56 36.56 * 1.08 = 39.48 (ish)
Edit: And one of the thing I dont understand is all these Notes Calculator dont have B for Billion and T for Trillion. Some of them has M for million, but most dont.
Most people aren't Jeff Bezos!
[0]. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tydlig/id721606556
;-)
P.S. looks like a great app!
But providing a standalone desktop/terminal version is on the list.
As I see it it is rust and wasm. It would be nice to have some note about the architecture in the docs, maybe someone would pick it up to make a desktop app from it too.
However, in the next release I might provide a desktop version.
Just using an app that I can open and close anytime is much preferable to me. Currently using speedcrunch for this, but your solution looks a bit more feature full and maybe a good middle-ground between a calculator and just firing up ipython or similar.
All in all a desktop version would be much appreciated, but I understand if it's not a focus for you. For the technical part: what do you think, what would you use in rust to turn this intu a regular gui app?