6 ms·

Calca iOS - Mathematical text editor for engineers

94 points by AndreasFrom 13y ago

bigd 13y ago
interesting, but how much is this different from ipython notebooks?
- nathell 13y ago
  Or Mathematica?
- omaranto 13y ago
  This app has automatic re-evaluation when a something changes, like a spreadsheet; ipython notebooks do not.
scrumper 13y ago
Looks like an interesting halfway house between a text editor and a full-blown CAS like Mathematica (since I have a license, that's what I use as a scratchpad for this kind of thing). It also seems to overlap with Soulver, which is my go-to calculator on iOS. Cleverly, Calca appears to go a bit further than even MMA by back-filling changed definitions, almost like functional reactive programming. This is neat and something I've wanted to see for a long time. I'll be buying once I get home to my iPad, but I really want to see the Mac OS version!
- praeclarum 13y ago
  Hi I'm the author. I took a lot of inspiration from Soulver. I basically wanted a smarter Soulver with more programming constructs and better treatment of undefined variables. Hope you like it and OS X version will be out in a couple weeks.
  - scrumper 13y ago
    I do. I've had a chance to play with it on my iphone and I'm impressed: it does a lot more than I expected it to. I'll definitely be buying your OSX version. Have you settled on a price yet?
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  I continue to be baffled as to why black-box modules like this aren't more used by programmers. Code is quick to write, but it obscures structure. http://images-co-ec.native-instruments.com/php/file.php/userlibSC/userlib/picts/1255472598_pict_8810_live-audio.gif http://images-co-ec.native-instruments.com/php/file.php/user...
frsandstone 13y ago
Glad to see Soulver [1] has some competition. [1] http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/ http://www.acqualia.com/soulver/
- Osmium 13y ago
  I absolutely love Soulver, but I think it's trying to achieve a subtly different aim. Soulver is a lot more focused, and definitely more a calculator (albeit one re-designed for the modern era) than a text editor. What I'd really like to see is something like this, but with in-line typesetting. Similar to the Markdown editors where when the line is active and you're editing it you see the raw text, but when you move off to another line you see the typeset mathematics. Because at the moment, it's just so much quicker and easier to think with pen and paper when you can actually write and read correct notation, rather than a monospaced-ASCII-fascimile...
- oofabz 13y ago
  There is another similar app called MathPad, a Mac app first released twenty years ago: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwidholm/MathPad/ http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwidholm/MathPad/
- Terretta 13y ago
  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.
ori_b 13y ago
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.
- aardvark179 13y ago
  Well luckily, "(and soon OS X app)."
- praeclarum 13y ago
  Hi I'm the author. Yep Mac is done and just being submitted for review. I just couldn't resist announcing the iOS version.
  - rwissmann 13y ago
    +1 to this. Would really like to try this out on the desktop. Looks quite powerful already. With a few more standard probability/ and statistics-related functions I could see this becoming an excellent tool for finance and consulting work.
  - airlocksoftware 13y ago
    You should add an "email me when the Mac version is ready" signup form. Because I will forget about this if you don't remind me, but I'm willing to buy as long as the price isn't significantly higher. If you want to manually email me when it's done my address is in on my profile page. This looks really cool!
  - ajanuary 13y ago
    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.
    - praeclarum 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
kryten 13y ago
Looks reasonable. However you'll have to prize my HP 50g calculator out of my cold dead hands before I'll mix mathematics and a touch screen.
batbomb 13y ago
I still use my TI-89.
- nicholasreed 13y ago
  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.
muzzamike 13y ago
I bet he's excited to see what he can do with CoreText and iOS7 for this.
awt 13y ago
I like it. I'm always typing simple calculations into the search bar -- this is a great way to keep track of them.
ringmaster 13y ago
In the Introduction, under functions: f = m*a f(20) = 20a Which is ok, but then farther down: f(a) = m*a f(20) => 20a This seems incorrect, since I was expecting m*20. On a separate page, this seems to work fine, though. Otherwise, quite nice.
- praeclarum 13y ago
  Bug in the doc. :-) just ran on the device and got the expected: f(a) = m*a f(20) => 20m
stcredzero 13y ago
Is there anything like this for stats? I remember watching my then girlfriend in the throes of her thesis, having to tweak and re-run a Stata script again and again and again. Also, for seriously complicated work, maybe a desktop all in one touch screen could be useful, so long as it's oriented more horizontally than vertically.
- jowiar 13y ago
  R + RStudio + Knitr is pretty solid, but more than a bit clunky - write Markdown, intersperse R to your heart's content, and you can execute lines as you see fit. I have very high hopes for an R + LightTable integration.
  - reeses 13y ago
    R + LightTable would be lovely. As almost everyone else, I use a gross combination of the R GUI (Mac), Emacs, and Sweave. I am not a huge fan of markdown other than as a "with benefits" convention for text documents, but I see a fair amount of superiority over Sweave/LaTeX for short documents and literate programs. I see that most people use embedded LaTeX for expressions in various markdown implementations. Is this canonical or is this the result of 'improved' implementations such as Pandoc, etc.? Btw, OP, you got your $2.99 - royalty from me because I want yet another reason to tell people there is no reason for them to have their laptops open in meetings.
kyle_martin1 13y ago
It would be really neat if you could tap a number and drag it left or or right to adjust it's value. Everything would recalculate and you could have a small dialog box out to the side to adjust the increment level of the 'drag adjustment'. An iPhone screen probably wouldn't have room for the dialog box so you could putting it in settings but for iPad it would fit just fine.
- praeclarum 13y ago
  Agreed! I have this exact feature on the todo list. It just didn't make it for v1.
HCIdivision17 13y ago
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 check assumptions. The fact it allows variable names with spaces is just the sweetest syntactic sugar. It runs a smidge slow on the iPhone, but since that's the tool I have on hand, I'll gladly take a lightweight equation solver like this. (And if the slide-to-change numbers feature gets added, I'll happily buy it again. Twice.)
- praeclarum 13y ago
  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.
  - HCIdivision17 13y ago
    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.)
schreiaj 13y ago
I like it, going to have to start using this more and can't wait for the desktop app. Just a heads up, when creating a new document in ios 7 beta 3 on the ipad there is a crash. Author, what is the best way to send you the crash log? Just something to look into before ios7 releases.
shlomiw 13y ago
Any windows/web edition in your todo?
gcanyon 13y ago
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.
anifow 13y ago
Here's another take on it, albeit more for financial computations. Includes a formula preview: http://numbercanvas.com/ http://numbercanvas.com/

94 points by AndreasFrom 13y ago

bigd 13y ago

interesting, but how much is this different from ipython notebooks?

nathell 13y ago
Or Mathematica?
omaranto 13y ago
This app has automatic re-evaluation when a something changes, like a spreadsheet; ipython notebooks do not.

scrumper 13y ago

Looks like an interesting halfway house between a text editor and a full-blown CAS like Mathematica (since I have a license, that's what I use as a scratchpad for this kind of thing). It also seems to overlap with Soulver, which is my go-to calculator on iOS. Cleverly, Calca appears to go a bit further than even MMA by back-filling changed definitions, almost like functional reactive programming. This is neat and something I've wanted to see for a long time. I'll be buying once I get home to my iPad, but I really want to see the Mac OS version!

praeclarum 13y ago
Hi I'm the author. I took a lot of inspiration from Soulver. I basically wanted a smarter Soulver with more programming constructs and better treatment of undefined variables. Hope you like it and OS X version will be out in a couple weeks.
- scrumper 13y ago
  I do. I've had a chance to play with it on my iphone and I'm impressed: it does a lot more than I expected it to. I'll definitely be buying your OSX version. Have you settled on a price yet?
anigbrowl 13y ago
I continue to be baffled as to why black-box modules like this aren't more used by programmers. Code is quick to write, but it obscures structure. http://images-co-ec.native-instruments.com/php/file.php/userlibSC/userlib/picts/1255472598_pict_8810_live-audio.gif http://images-co-ec.native-instruments.com/php/file.php/user...

frsandstone 13y ago

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

Osmium 13y ago
I absolutely love Soulver, but I think it's trying to achieve a subtly different aim. Soulver is a lot more focused, and definitely more a calculator (albeit one re-designed for the modern era) than a text editor. What I'd really like to see is something like this, but with in-line typesetting. Similar to the Markdown editors where when the line is active and you're editing it you see the raw text, but when you move off to another line you see the typeset mathematics. Because at the moment, it's just so much quicker and easier to think with pen and paper when you can actually write and read correct notation, rather than a monospaced-ASCII-fascimile...
oofabz 13y ago
There is another similar app called MathPad, a Mac app first released twenty years ago: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwidholm/MathPad/ http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwidholm/MathPad/
Terretta 13y ago
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.

ori_b 13y ago

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.

aardvark179 13y ago
Well luckily, "(and soon OS X app)."
praeclarum 13y ago
Hi I'm the author. Yep Mac is done and just being submitted for review. I just couldn't resist announcing the iOS version.
- rwissmann 13y ago
  +1 to this. Would really like to try this out on the desktop. Looks quite powerful already. With a few more standard probability/ and statistics-related functions I could see this becoming an excellent tool for finance and consulting work.
- airlocksoftware 13y ago
  You should add an "email me when the Mac version is ready" signup form. Because I will forget about this if you don't remind me, but I'm willing to buy as long as the price isn't significantly higher. If you want to manually email me when it's done my address is in on my profile page. This looks really cool!
- ajanuary 13y ago
  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.
  - praeclarum 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

kryten 13y ago

Looks reasonable. However you'll have to prize my HP 50g calculator out of my cold dead hands before I'll mix mathematics and a touch screen.

batbomb 13y ago

I still use my TI-89.

nicholasreed 13y ago
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.

muzzamike 13y ago

I bet he's excited to see what he can do with CoreText and iOS7 for this.

awt 13y ago

I like it. I'm always typing simple calculations into the search bar -- this is a great way to keep track of them.

ringmaster 13y ago

In the Introduction, under functions: f = m*a f(20) = 20a Which is ok, but then farther down: f(a) = m*a f(20) => 20a This seems incorrect, since I was expecting m*20. On a separate page, this seems to work fine, though. Otherwise, quite nice.

praeclarum 13y ago
Bug in the doc. :-) just ran on the device and got the expected: f(a) = m*a f(20) => 20m

stcredzero 13y ago

Is there anything like this for stats? I remember watching my then girlfriend in the throes of her thesis, having to tweak and re-run a Stata script again and again and again. Also, for seriously complicated work, maybe a desktop all in one touch screen could be useful, so long as it's oriented more horizontally than vertically.

jowiar 13y ago
R + RStudio + Knitr is pretty solid, but more than a bit clunky - write Markdown, intersperse R to your heart's content, and you can execute lines as you see fit. I have very high hopes for an R + LightTable integration.
- reeses 13y ago
  R + LightTable would be lovely. As almost everyone else, I use a gross combination of the R GUI (Mac), Emacs, and Sweave. I am not a huge fan of markdown other than as a "with benefits" convention for text documents, but I see a fair amount of superiority over Sweave/LaTeX for short documents and literate programs. I see that most people use embedded LaTeX for expressions in various markdown implementations. Is this canonical or is this the result of 'improved' implementations such as Pandoc, etc.? Btw, OP, you got your $2.99 - royalty from me because I want yet another reason to tell people there is no reason for them to have their laptops open in meetings.

kyle_martin1 13y ago

It would be really neat if you could tap a number and drag it left or or right to adjust it's value. Everything would recalculate and you could have a small dialog box out to the side to adjust the increment level of the 'drag adjustment'. An iPhone screen probably wouldn't have room for the dialog box so you could putting it in settings but for iPad it would fit just fine.

praeclarum 13y ago
Agreed! I have this exact feature on the todo list. It just didn't make it for v1.

HCIdivision17 13y ago

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 check assumptions. The fact it allows variable names with spaces is just the sweetest syntactic sugar. It runs a smidge slow on the iPhone, but since that's the tool I have on hand, I'll gladly take a lightweight equation solver like this. (And if the slide-to-change numbers feature gets added, I'll happily buy it again. Twice.)

praeclarum 13y ago
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.
- HCIdivision17 13y ago
  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.)

schreiaj 13y ago

I like it, going to have to start using this more and can't wait for the desktop app. Just a heads up, when creating a new document in ios 7 beta 3 on the ipad there is a crash. Author, what is the best way to send you the crash log? Just something to look into before ios7 releases.

shlomiw 13y ago

Any windows/web edition in your todo?

gcanyon 13y ago

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.

anifow 13y ago

Here's another take on it, albeit more for financial computations. Includes a formula preview: http://numbercanvas.com/ http://numbercanvas.com/