Numi – Calculator app for Mac | Hacker News Reader

Numi – Calculator app for Mac

numi.app

406 pointscaminocorner179 comments

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!

https://soulver.app

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.

AFAIK, Soulver is only for MacOS...

Nope, I have it on iOS.

But they've pulled the old version off the iOS store for the meantime before releasing the new version.

Soulver is no longer available for iOS and iPadOS. It's been pulled until version 3 comes along: https://twitter.com/soulver/status/1375548200833146884

Wow, I did not know this! Thanks for sharing.

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.

And! the parser and calculator engine is free to use for personal projects. It is an extremely pleasant SDK to use, and super powerful.

https://github.com/soulverteam/SoulverCore

I love this model. Open source the library/SDK, then build your own paid application on top of it.

Soulver isn't open source. That repo is just a binary.

Would love to see a web version

You want your calculator to be a web page?

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 :)

On macOS, Cmd+Space and just do calculations in the Spotlight search bar.

Just a heads up that everything typed into Spotlight is sent to Apple.

Do you have a source for this?

It's in the ToS, and there was a big hoo-haa over it at the time it was introduced. Eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8473580

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.

I also use Windoze, that's why I prefer the Chrome way.

I've made fcalc [0] for myself. It's much simpler and basically glorified `eval()`, but it's good enough for me.

[0]: https://fcalc.github.io

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.

Another good one is http://calca.io, very like Soulver but also has simple graphing, runs on mac, iOS and Windows

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.

The built-in macOS calculator also has scientific and progamming modes, and even RPN.

There's also Grapher, macOS built-in equation plotter.

The calculator also has clickable bits in programming mode. Can be handy.

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.

[0]. https://keypirinha.com/

I love Alfred, also for this reason.

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.

Think Alfred may be more efficient here, since I've never noticed that issue at all.

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 always use spotlight this way (it's almost the only way I use spotlight), but it unfortunately covers up a ton of the screen while you use it.

Windows also has Powertoys Run https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/run

There are of course a bunch of third party apps and I've used many of them across multiple OS.

Chrome will do math in the URL bar.

Only if your default search engine is Google and with autocomplete turned on I think.

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.

Note well that in the default config, it transmits everything you type into this box across the network to Apple, keystroke by keystroke.

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?

My personal highlights from using it:

- 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

Interesting. Thanks for sharing it. You just re-ignited my desire to try it out again :)

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.

Some examples that you can just install without writing your own: https://www.alfredapp.com/workflows/

I've found programs such as SpeedCrunch[0] to be extremely more comfortable to use than calculators imitating "classic" designs.

[0] https://speedcrunch.org/

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.

Looks like improved version of CCalc

There's always a REPL close by for users that are technical enough.

I used `bc` for years and years

On the Commodore 64 the OS was a REPL and ? was shorthand for PRINT, therefore you could type `? 2+2` and you would get the result printed.

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).

This is why I still use bc

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.

Excel is the secret calculator app that you’ve been dreaming about.

Since others already mentioned many fantastic alternatives, let me share mine: https://bbodi.github.io/notecalc3/

How difficult would something like this be to port to Visual Studio?

P.S. looks like a great app!

author here: I have zero experience with Visual Studio API, and honestly, looking at what a giant and slow mess VS became, I would not even try it :)

But providing a standalone desktop/terminal version is on the list.

Ah, desktop/terminal would be awesome! It's just too easy to loose track of browser tabs. :-)

What would it take to have this as a desktop app?

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?

Nice one, mate

This gets posted regularly but not often discussed. Here’s one of the few prior postings with comments, from six years ago, fwiw:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837802

Wow this is awesome! I kind of want this integrated into Alfred though...

Edit: it of course already has it https://github.com/nikolaeu/numi/wiki/Alfred-Integration

wwoowow excellent find, this is amazing

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?

I suspect it means $40USD in Euro (at about .914 to the dollar) then add 8% to that amount.

5 * 8 = 40 40 * .914 = 36.56 36.56 * 1.08 = 39.48 (ish)

Thanks! That is not an obvious conversion from natural language to math to me, but it does seem like the one they must be using.

Do we have the dev here?

I love the idea of a fast and tiny calculator notebook. I was a big Mathematica user (as long as my uni paid for the crazy expensive licence) for even simple calculations, and this would almost scratch my itch.

I'm saying almost because it needs a bit more work, at least some more quantities and units, like speed, voltage, power etc. And it all breaks down if you try do a calculation where the quantity/units change, i.e. the units disappear (because the app doesn't understand the formula) and you can't use the conversions anymore. I'm not saying it's a bad thing or that I absolutely need it, but the $24 price is no joke.

What I wanted was the old calculator in the sidebar to be back in Big Sur. It was the one muscle memory that I loved to reach out for something small, no matter how indifferent it makes typing it in spotlight or finely clicking on the dock icon, it will never beat sheer speed/confidence of accessing it in the sidebar

I would totally use this if it were an extension to Emacs. I keep lots of calculation results in text files, and edit them in emacs, but I don't want to use a totally separate app whenever I want to enter and calculate some math within a text file.

Check out calc (M-x calc RET). Full RPN calculator built into emacs, with matrix and symbolic solving capabilities. Best calculator I have ever used.

org-mode tables have spreadsheet-like capabilities, i.e., they support formulas.

Try https://blog.sulami.xyz/posts/literate-calc-mode/ I use it quite often, very handy

Wow cool! I'm sold! Downloading it now. :)

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?

[0]. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tydlig/id721606556

My favorite is still Calca (http://calca.io) - it hasn't been updated for a while, the developer has been working on other things, but it still works for me.

I love calca, it the best for me by a long shot.

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 looks way better though.

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.

I alias ‘clear’ to ‘c’ because I use it so often and have to immediately set it up on any new machine.

Try control-l

my favorite calculator app is emacs's calc-mode, it is probably one of the nicest RPN calculators on desktop

It's my go-to calc too but I always start 'bc -l' in case I need decimals.

I also just type bc -l in one of my iterm windows. Usually that gets me my answer quicker than launching an app or worse, using a browser.

I use bc too. Like literally every day. And it's only a terminal window away. I did install Numi now though and I like it!

I use "irb" (interactive ruby), installed by default on MacOS and there is always terminal window open somewhere anyway. Will give Numi a try though.

A lot of people mentioning Soulver as a great alternative. But after running into limitations with Soulver, I eventually discovered Magic Calculator, and I fell in love. It allows for more precise calculations, and it's way cheaper at $4: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magic-calculator/id421993158?m...

Surprised no one has mentioned https://instacalc.com yet. Not a native Mac app but genius.

Update: There is a chrome extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/instacalc/hfoojdao...

I have used Numi for several years - and versus Alfred/Google variants i have found Numi to be incredibly helpful for most back of the hand calculations.

I have yet to find an alternative that is more convenient

1) Configurable keyboard shortcut to bring this up 2) Good units/percentages/bytes support 3) Variable assignments / custom functions 4) Long History

What is it with people calling their applications "beautiful"? What's so beautiful about this?

Clean and unobtrusive design, with a focus in typography, layout, ample whitespace, and a color palette that provides context and visual information without being gaudy and flashy.

With that said, it looks exactly like it could be a random CLI application running in an Oh My Zsh theme. Not much differentiation there.

EDIT: I feel like this app could be created in a few hours by wrapping a context-aware unit/currency conversion library with Rich Python [0].

[0]: https://github.com/willmcgugan/rich

I just watched the demo on the landing page and am struggling to think of a target audience for this.

Most technically oriented Mac users I know use Alfred. A quick CMD+space "4 tea spoons to ml" will open a browser window with your answer from your favourite search engine.

For more complex queries, preceded your input with "Wolfram" (tab autocomplete on the "wo") and you have the entire Wolfram engine at your fingertips.

The above mechanism is exceptionally flexible to any form of question, conversion, or math,and very low friction.

For the tax percentage calculation example (or anything similar), you'll be hard pressed to find someone who has this problem often enough to want to to pay for this, AND doesnt already use anymore comprehensive and familiar spreadsheet tool.

I just started using it a bit and can see myself using it as an alternative for simple stuff I would otherwise do in Excel / Google Sheets.

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.

>And one of the thing I dont understand is all these Notes Calculator dont have B for Billion and T for Trillion

Most people aren't Jeff Bezos!

Cool. Has anyone tried to enter 1 barn-megaparsec [1] ?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_meas...

My favourite IOS calculator app (for those who are RPN minded). Love this little free gem!

https://apps.apple.com/qa/app/rpn-30/id1451413517

Also Free42, https://apps.apple.com/us/app/free42/id337692629 - free reimplementation of the best RPN calculator ever, and with niceties such as tactile feedback.

I like Numi. It’s a handy, unobtrusive math scratch pad. I dislike the two computer license limit that isn’t disclosed prior to purchase, and the need to contact the developer in order to get that license reset if I crash my Mac mini or my MacBook Pro.

Does it have a widget? The most annoying thing about Big Sur is they removed the widget

Do you mean dashboard widgets? Dashboard hasn't been actively developed in maybe 10 years now.

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.

Widgets in Big Sur are not the same as the old Dashboard: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211789

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.

It has a status bar mode where it opens in a "pop-up" beneath the status bar icon.

What do you mean? You can use widgets in Big Sur, WidgetKit it's an unified API across all devices (iOS and MacOS).

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.

I removed the widget "feature" on El Capitan years ago. It was useless and better solutions are available.

Took a long time to start, crashed on first save (~losing all my work in that session~ it's back! weird bugs). Some glitches with the parsing. But it is so lovely! We should build an open source version.

So that's $25 for Spotlight, or am I missing something?

For how I use it, it lives inbetween Spotlight and Numbers. Here's examples of the types of things I can recall using Numi for in the recent past: https://i.imgur.com/u4EdGbr.png

It's list of features is quite extensive: https://github.com/nikolaeu/numi/wiki/Documentation

Plus I don't mind paying for a simple, high-quality tool that I use all the time!

It is nice but it could not beat the power of Wolfram Alpha. The way I use it is from Firefox: 1. Add Search Engine via https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wolfram-alpha... 2. Type = followed by expression in your address bar

I'll add to this—because WA is awesome—that if you're on Mac you can use Alfred (https://www.alfredapp.com) and Ask WA directly from your desktop and it will open the result on your default browser.

There's also NaSC on Linux: https://parnold-x.github.io/nasc/

And CalcNote on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.burton999....

I installed NaSC on Linux (Pop!_OS) but it was basically unreadable on a dark theme - units were dark grey on black and output was very light grey on white. No preferences button etc to switch styles etc.

Been using Numi on Mac for quite some time, and I love it for filling the gap between Spotlight and a Spreadsheet for doing off-the-cuff budgeting/analysis. Once I move from one-off calculations to needing to see the moving pieces, I move to Numi—Just works the way my mind does.

Things I like: quick/easy variable creation/updating, running sum, easy/flexible commenting/labeling, one-click line result copy

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.

https://imaginamundo.github.io/math-notes/

Another similar web app is CalcuLaTeX https://mkhan45.github.io/CalcuLaTeX-Web/

Hey, that's me.

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

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

Oh that's cool.

You can change the precision in the setting and when you do currency conversions like 1€ to ETH, it can get to wei-precision (18 decimals).

Example: https://imgur.com/a/pdNukwV

Nice app. Based on the source code (https://github.com/nikolaeu/numi) it's not clear to me how the .dmg is built. Is it explained somewhere?

It doesn't look like it's fully open source. I'm just seeing community extensions and the Alfred plugin on the github page.

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

Hm. This looks cool, but doesn't solve my most common use case - percentage increases. Example - https://i.imgur.com/LrnUwnB.png

Few weeks ago on HN there was a post about RPN calculator so I decided to get (both as an apps in form of Free42 and physical device) and learn one (for fun and giggles). It’s one of the best gadget I got in a very long time. I absolutely love it and every single time I see a calculation problem I make a simple program for it.

So for your most common use case that would be:

  00 { 18-Byte Prgm }
  01▸LBL "%INC"
  02 X<>Y
  03 ÷
  04 1
  05 -
  06 100
  07 ×
  08 END

If you do calculations often (or just are a geek who likes new toys) I thoroughly recommend one.

Here, I use this for Numi:

    buy = 20
    sell = 219
    gain = sell - buy
    performance = gain / buy * 100
    amount = 500
    capital_invested = amount * buy
    capital_returned = amount * sell
    capital_gain = amount * gain

There are at least two super quick ways I always do calculations on a Mac first by pressing CMD+Space for Spotlight search and just typing in the math expression and in Chrome address bar without having to press the enter key.

This also works in Win10: Windows Key + S, type your query, immediate results in the start menu window.

Support fuzzy terms as well. ex. 100ml in cups

What about privacy/tracking? Do queries ever leave the machine, in any form?

It's a good question. The app doesn't look fully open source, but I suspect they'd have to. Currency conversions aren't fixed, after all.

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).

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.

My personal favorite calculator app for macOS, for at least the last 6 years: https://julialang.org/downloads/

;-)

I'm sure this is great for people in certain fields, but personally when I want to do nontrivial calculations (which isn't very often, to be fair) I just open the JS console

(2015)

Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837802

I love the design & minimalism of the website and the App.

Hijacking the thread. Does anyone know of a simple paid calculator app for iPad?

They all seem to be riddled with ads or obnoxious "cute" features to justify the price

I like Tydlig

I love PCalc. It's not "simple" by default, but you can make it into what you want.

I've used PCalc for years (I'm pretty sure that I started using it when MacOS 9 was still the main operating system).

It also works for iOS and WatchOS.

There's a port of the Windows calculator on the Uno Platform that's ad free, although not paid. https://github.com/unoplatform/calculator

Love Calca on iOS.

http://calca.io/

Adore Calca on macOS and windows.

Try this for simplicity: https://apps.apple.com/app/grandma-calculator/id1546631829

It doesn't get more $2 Casio than that.

Here is a side project of mine, which was inspired by Numi: https://useparsr.com

Very great but as I kept watching the demo video on the homepage, I felt like I was watching to learn python. Is there an ubuntu version of this?

Why is it that OSX gets so many of these nice little apps that seem pretty easy to make multiplatform but they just... aren't?

The macOS market is generally rich, with a tradition of niche, paid software.

Dev preference, time and Cocoa.

Pretty easy as in... the Electron stuff that everyone complains about?

One or two developers working and testing on their own machines will have an awful experience trying to make their app work multi-platform.

This type of app is going to be valued higher by Mac users.

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.

To be fair, Windows enjoys many other little/medium/big apps that are not available on macOS.

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

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...)

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.

Because Mac'ers pay

Any know of something similar in the terminal?

I like spotlight for simple things, my Swissmicro DM42 for more complex things.

That said Numi and some of the alternatives do look nice.

Is this part of the next YC batch? Just saying because I find it much better than some of the previous candidates!

It's a very nice app. I have to ask though: why doesn't it quit when I close the window??

That's pretty standard behavior on MacOS for many apps.

How does this compare to Soulver?

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.

It's one of the view apps always running on my Mac.

I wish it supported multiple windows, though.

Thanks. This is sooo pleasurable. Now add a wolfram and a GPT-3 plugin

To do what?

Definitely has a programming language kind of syntax to it, very nice

Are calculator apps the new To-do list apps for app devs?

I use it for many years and I have to say I love it

I’d so pay for this if it was a plugin for Bear.

Does bear do plugins? Genuine ask, I'm not seeing anything on the goog, but would also pay for this in bear too.

Don’t think so.

I like numi but I already own Soulver.

Hmm when I need to calculate something I just run python in the terminal, using the underscore to access previous results in the prompt

This is not all that groundbreaking as a calculator, but would be a cool parsing addition to a Spreadsheet.

1500 * 25% = 375

25% * 1500 = 37.500 %

25% * 1500$ = $37.500

eh i use rstudio. overkill? idk but it makes math fun and i like it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com