Great 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.
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 the number crunching (where applicable), and intelligently recognise variables and a lot of different mathematical functions (I just don't like the whole process of going back and forth between my TI and my legal pad). That'd be a mathematician's (or just mine) wet dream.
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.
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 programmable.
My use cases are base conversions, simple CAS stuff, basic engineering calculations, unit conversions, financial (TVM etc) and generic math. I also canned a lot of knowledge in RPL programs over the years from fuel calculations to diagnostic tools and dice rollers etc.
Please can someone solve all these problems (without doing half arsed HP calc emulation).
Yes. I really want a decent, pretty, RPN calc on all the platforms I use. Which rules out any HP emulator. I've got several amazing HP calcs gather dust in a drawer; I want something better than that.
I've been pleasantly surprised with the built in calculator that ships with OSX; it's got a decent RPN mode, good keyboard support, and a nice stack display. Not brilliant, but better than what I've found for Windows or Android. :-/
In same boat as you. Don't laugh too loud but most of my "math" work is done via ssh (and ssh app on phone) and running octave or R on gigantic datasets.
I went thru the same annoyance on my phone/tablet and although I have droid48, free42, and hc-16C on my android devices I mostly just ssh into a real machine.
I have toyed with the idea of graphical environments like mathematica/maple on a real machine via rdesktop/vnc on my tablet, but I don't do CAS so much as stats where I stick with R anyway. And those apps cost lots of money for something I don't do much of anyway.
Eventually with any problem, either you solve it or reach an event horizon where the UI is too horrific to use anymore. So when I can no longer handle the touch screen keyboard I just disconnect from the screen session (yeah, yeah, I know kids these days use tmux) and reconnect on a real computer complete with keyboard and big display.
For medium sized arithmetic problems (as opposed to math problems), just use google drive's spreadsheet and then I can access it anywhere in the world on any kind of machine I have access to. So that's where "total of this column vs total of that column" level of problems live.
An add on android keyboard built specifically for math, or more specifically for R or octave, would be interesting.
I use an HP-41CX app for my iPhone. I don't use 90% of its capabilities and it doesn't have the keyboard feel (obviously) of the original but it's pretty good for my purposes. I've used RPN since the late seventies when I got an HP-55 my sophomore year in college so I'm pretty wedded to it.
Couldn't agree more. I regularly use a HP12c, HP48 and HP50G. However, the emulators for all of those are really quite good (for hp12c, get the one from RLM Tools), especially when ran full-size on an iPad.
I am glad to see this effort because we really need some innovation in the world of calculators. The science of making them has stagnated in the late 1990s. HP50G isn't really different from HP48, first introduced in 1990.
I think there is a widespread perception that calculators are no longer needed, because we have all those computers around us. But that simply isn't true. Many people still need to calculate things quickly, and that requires a good tool: a calculator with a well designed user interface. This is where most devices and programs fail. HP worked on this for more than 20 years and got really good at it, until the unfortunate reorganizations that got rid of the calculator division.
I can't think of any other tool that will let me equally easily multiply numbers, convert hex to decimal, work with complex numbers, and compute a Laplace transform.
And even if you are in front of a computer and have a powerful mathematical package available, there remains the problem of the user interface. For example: I use Mathematica for lots of things. But just try entering numbers using engineering/scientific notation: 4.7*^-6 and you'll see this isn't good at all for rapid calculations.
I hope that someone will start where HP left off and design a better calculator using the huge computational power that we now have at our disposal. Without throwing away all the experience we already have.
I just replaced the batteries in my 48GX. I think in stacks and RPN is a better system for how I think. I have 48GX emulators for my phone and still use them over more modern calculator apps.
That being said, I appreciate the design considerations they've applied to this. I wish they'd make an Android version, because I might have been interested in trying this out.
I'm working on an RPN calculator (with some pretty sweet gestural functionality) which solves approximately half of those problems. Wait, no, more like a quarter. Welp.
It does return the correct value for sin(π) though (you gotta call __sinpi(x / M_PI) if you don't want to return -8.74e-8 or some ridiculous value).
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 graphing calculator app is going to be that difficult to program, or going to be large in size. But no, in 2013, vanilla OS installations are stuck with a calculator app that has less features than that of a computer a few million times less powerful.
(Now I feel bad; bitching and complaining is against the Open Source Spirit).
Edit: I do recall that OSX comes with something similar, except that not many people actually know of it (as far as I can tell, from my friends with OSX).
"It's not like a graphing calculator app is going to be that difficult to program"
It is surprisingly hard to get something that produces reliable plots. It starts with getting something as simple as sin(1/x) or x/(x^2 + 5x + 1) to plot reasonably well, and gets harder from there soon (edit: if you want to complicate things, pick a function that is only defined on some numbers, such as sqrt(x^2 * sin(x^3 - x). Adding a pair of || around subexpressions also complicates things)
For example, at https://www.desmos.com/calculator (one of the top results from a google search) zooming in on sin(1/x) shows a plot that sometimes doesn't go up to 1.0 for values of x close to zero. Its plot is decent, but deceiving.
And you will have to do those well, as the target audience of students encounters such functions every day.
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.
This really seems much more like a freeform spreadsheet than a calculator to me. Which is also a cool idea, obviously, but I find it interesting no one else has made the same observation.
Great work. A few thoughts from the initial experience:
I like the linked numbers design. As it reminded me of Bret Victor's work, I was expecting scrubbing to work directly with numbers, which caused occasionally a bit of havoc, but I think you did a right choice of putting linking as the main action - touch design is hard.
The free-form infinite layout gives a mindmap vibe: it's potentially great when you are trying to understand pieces of a problem that you need. The downside is that the canvas becomes a bit of mess quickly.
The other alternative could be a Mathematica style, free-form document, with more restricted flow of equations (and text).
Because the organization becomes a bit of problem, undo is a must and solves a bunch of other problems. I'd implement area selection of equations (initiate with long tap?) to quickly move things around.
Y-axis could auto adjust by default or quick slider scrubbing should work directly for axis max-min values.
You probably want a simple document model as this is something between calculator and full featured computation software. Maybe just save every canvas when user clears/starts new one
The linked numbers are brilliant. Lacking the "in my head" math skills I should probably have, I regularly whip out Excel to solve the kind of use cases you can imagine from the linked numbers in the video.
I love this app, and it's interesting to see the innovation in this familiar space. Oovium for iPad is a great example of fresh thinking. And coming soon, apparently, is the Wolfram Calculator for iPad, featuring user-programmable functions:
Tydlig supports external Bluetooth keyboards or numpads for really quick entry
It's been a while since i did any ios development and this was never a requirement for me. Can someone explain why an external keyboard is something that had to be explicitly supported at an individual app level? Surely this should be an OS-level thing?
I 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.
[+] [-] smikhanov|12 years ago|reply
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 luck!
[+] [-] rooster8|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jckt|12 years ago|reply
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 the number crunching (where applicable), and intelligently recognise variables and a lot of different mathematical functions (I just don't like the whole process of going back and forth between my TI and my legal pad). That'd be a mathematician's (or just mine) wet dream.
[+] [-] jamesaguilar|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silverlake|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csmuk|12 years ago|reply
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 programmable.
My use cases are base conversions, simple CAS stuff, basic engineering calculations, unit conversions, financial (TVM etc) and generic math. I also canned a lot of knowledge in RPL programs over the years from fuel calculations to diagnostic tools and dice rollers etc.
Please can someone solve all these problems (without doing half arsed HP calc emulation).
[+] [-] Lazare|12 years ago|reply
I've been pleasantly surprised with the built in calculator that ships with OSX; it's got a decent RPN mode, good keyboard support, and a nice stack display. Not brilliant, but better than what I've found for Windows or Android. :-/
[+] [-] VLM|12 years ago|reply
I went thru the same annoyance on my phone/tablet and although I have droid48, free42, and hc-16C on my android devices I mostly just ssh into a real machine.
I have toyed with the idea of graphical environments like mathematica/maple on a real machine via rdesktop/vnc on my tablet, but I don't do CAS so much as stats where I stick with R anyway. And those apps cost lots of money for something I don't do much of anyway.
Eventually with any problem, either you solve it or reach an event horizon where the UI is too horrific to use anymore. So when I can no longer handle the touch screen keyboard I just disconnect from the screen session (yeah, yeah, I know kids these days use tmux) and reconnect on a real computer complete with keyboard and big display.
For medium sized arithmetic problems (as opposed to math problems), just use google drive's spreadsheet and then I can access it anywhere in the world on any kind of machine I have access to. So that's where "total of this column vs total of that column" level of problems live.
An add on android keyboard built specifically for math, or more specifically for R or octave, would be interesting.
[+] [-] ronaldx|12 years ago|reply
It's surprising: when smartphones came out I said calculators would be first against the wall.
[+] [-] diziet|12 years ago|reply
Ie: https://sensortower.com/ios/us/incpt-dot-mobis/app/calculato... https://sensortower.com/ios/us/vicinno-soft-llc/app/12e-fina... https://sensortower.com/ios/us/tla-systems-ltd/app/pcalc-the...
[+] [-] ghaff|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwr|12 years ago|reply
I am glad to see this effort because we really need some innovation in the world of calculators. The science of making them has stagnated in the late 1990s. HP50G isn't really different from HP48, first introduced in 1990.
I think there is a widespread perception that calculators are no longer needed, because we have all those computers around us. But that simply isn't true. Many people still need to calculate things quickly, and that requires a good tool: a calculator with a well designed user interface. This is where most devices and programs fail. HP worked on this for more than 20 years and got really good at it, until the unfortunate reorganizations that got rid of the calculator division.
I can't think of any other tool that will let me equally easily multiply numbers, convert hex to decimal, work with complex numbers, and compute a Laplace transform.
And even if you are in front of a computer and have a powerful mathematical package available, there remains the problem of the user interface. For example: I use Mathematica for lots of things. But just try entering numbers using engineering/scientific notation: 4.7*^-6 and you'll see this isn't good at all for rapid calculations.
I hope that someone will start where HP left off and design a better calculator using the huge computational power that we now have at our disposal. Without throwing away all the experience we already have.
[+] [-] bane|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] garthdog|12 years ago|reply
HP RPN can't be beaten for serious number crunching. It's not pretty, but by god, it is EFFECTIVE!
[+] [-] chinpokomon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melloclello|12 years ago|reply
It does return the correct value for sin(π) though (you gotta call __sinpi(x / M_PI) if you don't want to return -8.74e-8 or some ridiculous value).
[+] [-] maxerickson|12 years ago|reply
http://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/
(but not RPN and trig functions are floating point)
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jckt|12 years ago|reply
(Now I feel bad; bitching and complaining is against the Open Source Spirit).
Edit: I do recall that OSX comes with something similar, except that not many people actually know of it (as far as I can tell, from my friends with OSX).
[+] [-] Someone|12 years ago|reply
It is surprisingly hard to get something that produces reliable plots. It starts with getting something as simple as sin(1/x) or x/(x^2 + 5x + 1) to plot reasonably well, and gets harder from there soon (edit: if you want to complicate things, pick a function that is only defined on some numbers, such as sqrt(x^2 * sin(x^3 - x). Adding a pair of || around subexpressions also complicates things)
For example, at https://www.desmos.com/calculator (one of the top results from a google search) zooming in on sin(1/x) shows a plot that sometimes doesn't go up to 1.0 for values of x close to zero. Its plot is decent, but deceiving.
And you will have to do those well, as the target audience of students encounters such functions every day.
And the Mac OS X one is Grapher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapher)
[+] [-] tolmasky|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stormbrew|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zarify|12 years ago|reply
That said the graphing in this looks quite nice.
[+] [-] Lazare|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ketralnis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dirtyaura|12 years ago|reply
I like the linked numbers design. As it reminded me of Bret Victor's work, I was expecting scrubbing to work directly with numbers, which caused occasionally a bit of havoc, but I think you did a right choice of putting linking as the main action - touch design is hard.
The free-form infinite layout gives a mindmap vibe: it's potentially great when you are trying to understand pieces of a problem that you need. The downside is that the canvas becomes a bit of mess quickly.
The other alternative could be a Mathematica style, free-form document, with more restricted flow of equations (and text).
Because the organization becomes a bit of problem, undo is a must and solves a bunch of other problems. I'd implement area selection of equations (initiate with long tap?) to quickly move things around.
Y-axis could auto adjust by default or quick slider scrubbing should work directly for axis max-min values.
You probably want a simple document model as this is something between calculator and full featured computation software. Maybe just save every canvas when user clears/starts new one
All in all, great work!
[+] [-] lajospajtek|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wsr|12 years ago|reply
Good job guys, I have high hope for this in the future!
[+] [-] mwc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] airtonix|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diziet|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ra3|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wingerlang|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sorenvrist|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josteink|12 years ago|reply
Tydlig at least means something in a real language ;)
[+] [-] pfisch|12 years ago|reply
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....
[+] [-] jamesjguthrie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cormullion|12 years ago|reply
http://mvid.wolfram.com/mobile/dannewman_teachconceptsnotkey...
[+] [-] gcanyon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ricardobeat|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notpg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ketralnis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edoloughlin|12 years ago|reply
It's been a while since i did any ios development and this was never a requirement for me. Can someone explain why an external keyboard is something that had to be explicitly supported at an individual app level? Surely this should be an OS-level thing?
[+] [-] oliwary|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] HCIdivision17|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2008/01/10/70474...
[+] [-] bukka|12 years ago|reply
It really is true that at any moment there is probably 4 other teams working on a similar idea as you are.
Well I will not give up. Good luck to you too!
[+] [-] melloclello|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimmytidey|12 years ago|reply