tonyonodi

I understand the point you’re making, but if this is a programme doomed to achieve nothing, that makes the risk even less acceptable.

There's a shout out to Soulver in the FAQ https://docs.numpad.io/#did-you-invent-the-notepad-calculato.... It's a great app, but Mac/iOS exclusive, and I think NumPad handles unit calculations a bit better (though I'm biased).

Yeah, you're correct, it's intentional. Though it's pretty gross to be honest.

Yeah, this was a deliberate decision, but a tough one and I can see why you might find it annoying. I think it makes date and time calculations more readable:

09:11 to 15:46

It's closed source

`200 Mbps * 2 hours in Mb` the second one works because the derived unit of the calculation works out to be exactly the same as a megabit, but that's not the case for the first one so you have to convert manually.

Yes it is, and it's on my roadmap.

Honestly, I don't mind. It's useful to know about alternative products, and I hadn't heard about this one. Thanks all the same though :)

Yes exactly, I had live multi-user editing as a feature until just before launch. In the end it needed a bit more work though, so I had to pull it.

Numpad: https://numpad.io/

It's a web-based notepad calculator, which means it's a notes app but it can evaluate inline calculations like

``` £300 in USD + 20%

09:00 to 18:30 - 45 minutes ```

I wrote the core of the calculator a few years ago, and I've just launched a big rewrite that supports

* document syncing * offline editing * markdown formatting * PDF and HTML exports * autocomplete * vim mode

Happy to hear feedback :)

When I launched a lot of people asked for an Obsidian plugin too. I'm not averse to the idea, but I'm trying to turn it into a business, and those models seem tough to make any money from.

Yeah, that was annoying. It's fixed in v2

It's not showing in the screenshot because the numbers in the doc have different units, but it does do that https://imgur.com/a/SusFZDh (bottom right hand corner).

Let me know if you'd like to be part of the beta!

Thanks! Though I can't really take credit for it, Soulver did it before me.

I launched my web-based notepad calculator, https://numpad.io/, a few years ago.

Right now I'm working on a version 2 that has user accounts, multiple documents, markdown support, and document exports. Everything is local-first and it uses CRDTs to sync documents.

It looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/Plk1DQ4.png the calculator is mostly the same for now, with a few improvements. It's unstable right now, so I don't want to publicise the dev url, but if you'd like to become a beta tester email me at contact@numpad.io

My side project NumPad https://numpad.io got me my current job at Decipad https://www.decipad.com/ (the similar naming scheme is a coincidence!).

I came across Decipad while looking for a job, and messaged the founder, highlighting my work on NumPad. They were impressed enough that the hiring process ended up being just a few interviews, I've been there for almost a year now, and it's been pretty good!

If there's a moral to this story I think it's that you should aim for work that's highly relevant to your side project experience. In my case both NumPad and Decipad have a sort of programming language that can do calculations with units.

But ignore this advice if you can't find that work, or it doesn't seem good for whatever reason. You can still highlight your side project in an application, and they might be impressed anyway.

That's a great analogy! I'd been wondering for a while whether that's a problem with this approach; to be honest I still don't know whether it is, so it would be good to see someone test it empirically.

That should be fixed now

Fixed, thanks for pointing it out :) https://numpad.io?#text/IwXgTAUMDUwARA

Thank you so much! Changes are live now :)

This is fixed now https://numpad.io?#text/JwOgHAtg9AzgBASwHZwNbQBZA

Glad you like it! Working on the bugs today

It's something I've thought about but I'm not sure I'm going to implement it for a while as it would be quite a big undertaking. The same is true of complex numbers unfortunately.

That's a very enjoyable calculation!

Oops, didn't realise I'd left source maps in, thanks for pointing it out!

Your project sounds really interesting, I'm following you on twitter now, so tweet about it if you ever finish it and hopefully I'll see.

Having CRDT-based syncing/collaboration is a direction I'd like to take NumPad in eventually, and if I have time. But I definitely think that ignoring that part completely has allowed me to get it to an MVP state.

I'm very glad you asked. I wrote my own parser combinator library in TypeScript partly based on eulalie[0], so it doesn't have a separate lexer and parser and doesn't rely heavily on regexes (though it does use them to do things like match a single alphanumeric character). I plan on open sourcing this library one day once I can tidy up the API because I think it would be useful to other people.

But to give you an idea of what that all looks like this is the code for the parser that parses the "as a % of" operator:

  append(
    string("as"),
    oneOrMore(space),
    optional(append(string("a"), oneOrMore(space))),
    percentSymbol,
    oneOrMore(space),
    string("of")
  )

[0] https://github.com/bodil/eulalie

This is really cool, you're a braver person than I for tackling the English representation of numbers stuff!

Impressed you found that. I don't have anything set up to automatically update it currently, but I do have an intention to have something set up to automatically update it.

I am truly sorry

Thanks for clearing that up, I'm not distributing the source code so I think I'm good.