from the blog:
overheard recently in #moose
Soulver
After 30 years of the pocket style calculator interface it is time for an evolution to something far more elegant and efficient.
Suppose you wanted to see or edit previous calculations or calculate a number to a colossal degree of accuracy? A typical pocket style calculator such as the hundreds of software calculators like Apple's default calculator are unable to do this elegantly.
Soulver strives to wean you off physical calculators and into the 21st century in which, employing the full power of Mac OS X, so much more is possible...
Tags: calculator , productivity , shareware , math , numbers
Opinions:
I use as default calculator as well. I find that it's a great alternative to Excel for calculating simple stuff. I frequently save files, which is handy.
I got this as part of a bundle, and didn't use it for almost a year, never really getting into it.
Then, I found myself needing a calculator with support for more complicated equations than the standard calc that comes with OSX. When dealing with a large amount of numbers, it's easy to follow along in Soulver, and extremely easy to test other solutions (Use variables in the equation, and go back and change their value at any time!).
Basically, it's a very good calculator, and it has support for large degrees of accuracy (to 100 digits). The interface is a bit different than other calculators, but in general noticeably superior. And not having buttons for numbers and whatnot is definitely a good thing, as you aren't forced to find the button you need, and has support for a fair number of trig, log, etc functions.
All in all a very good app... but honestly, I'm hoping either something better will come along, or the functionality of this will be increased dramatically.
Soulver is cool! It's my default calculator as well.
However, it's not as good as Google Calc at parsing english.
Always a good idea to sanity check the answers, but for "back of the envelope" calculations this can sure come in handy.
It's great. My default calculator as well. You can set up standard sheets and save them. Excellent.
After using Soulver almost daily for about a month, it deserves the <3 I gave it. Life isn't all numbers, so why does a calculator have to be? Soulver understands natural English and picks out the necessary information to perform calculations. It even uses English words as constants for subsequent calculations. Results are displayed automatically without hitting the return key, and conversions to decimals, fractions, and even hex and binary happen on the fly.
Definitely watch the videos on the website to see just how intuitive and efficient Soulver is.
Same as frost, never heard of it before the mystery MacZOT deal. Seems cool but haven't needed it yet.
I got this as part of a MacZOT deal before I had even heard of it. Now it's my default calculator. Great stuff.