@ Chris Wellons:

Yeah, a lot of what I do does not require arbitrary precision and serious engineering but you are making a an excellent point. There are actually quite a few software calculators out there that are fit for engineering needs. My biggest pet peeve was getting away from sekumorphism and trying to do something different with the age-old idea, but there are other criteria with which to judge calculators as well. :)

@ Ethan Coldren:

$30 for an app is mind boggling, but I guess I wouldn’t expect any less of the good old Texas Instruments. :P

@ Non-Player Character:

Yeah, it’s kinda funny but Google and Wolfram are actually excellent calculators. In fact you can actually tell Siri to “Wolfram” you a calculation these days and it will do it. :P

@ Dr. Azrael Tod:

Yeah, well said. I have done my share of complaining against our current “pictures under glass” IO philosophy a while ago. Haptic feedback is something that is being worked on, but not here yet. That said I recently saw a video of Disney installing a big haptic table screen somewhere witch allowed people to actually feel the texture of the displayed objects by alternating the current behind the screen. So chances are we might get something like that into the phones at some point.

@ agn0sis:

I think there is a glitter vacuum attachment and anti-rainbow goggles you can buy as a bundle for only $999.99 :P

[…] – I wrote about it in my calculator post so I’m not going to repeat it here, but I really dig the approach they are doing. It is a […]

I haven’t had the necessity of performing complex math calculations in a while, so I usually use bc. I have used Arity on android, and while not perfect, it has been useful. After reading this post, I thought that there could be an android version of Octave, and yes, it exists. I’ll give it a try later. While I agree that calcucorn is fucking amazing, I hate the fact that I have to clean a lot of glitter each time I used it. Last time I solved a triple integral with it, I spent the next few hours cleaning all the mess the calculator left. The blinding rainbows coming from its eyes when it finishes an operation are also annoying.

I found the biggest problem on a current smartphone isn’t output or even calculation.
it has a bright full-color screen with gigapixels and can show me sound and even vibration pretty fine.
But input… input is where phone-calculators have some problems still. Some tend to implement an own on-screen-keyboard, others try to implement new languages and most just don’t include additional functionality you would have on engineering calculators.

The 3 Calculators i use most are:
* that android-client of wolfram alpha (great example of what’s possible, perfect to draw graphs or calculate currencies)
* RealCalc – It looks like my old, trustworthy Casio FX82, it works pretty much like it, but it knows one or two things more. GREAT!
* bc – yes, you read correctly! I use bc on my server, over ssh via IRSSI-ConnectBot. I use it on my big PC, its powers are the tool i choose there. it works on my phone. Why should i settle for something less?

One thing all of your selections have in common is the move away from skeuomorphs.

Wrong ecosystem; but you did motivate search for a better solution. Currently my calculator is the default android calculator 3.0.35; crude, but good enough for quick spacial computations. Falling back to a browser for google or wolframalpha. I’ve added qPython recently to gain more options.

I’ve neglected the search for a better calculator; because of being within 50 yards of a computer that has a decent keyboard. But even then the tendency to fall back to windows calc.exe (media key), powertoy calc, or excel (to dump data and organize my thoughts spatially) for anything more complex than order of operations.

You’ve prompted a research project for tomorrow, see whats out there for android.@ Non-Player Character:

Personally, I still use a handheld graphing calculator. It is just easier to get things done, for me. There s a time and a place for everything, and I feel that I personally like a handheld graphing calculator due to the physical buttons. However, TI has their own calculator app for iOS (search for “ti nspire cas”). It is really expensive ($30), but I sustect it would be able to do everything you could possibly want. I have not tried it, though.

Judging these at a glance from your article, I think Calca is the only calculator decent enough for engineering problems. But it could still be better.

First, a computer algebra system is essential. It serves as context in the calculator history because you can put units to your numbers — they’re just undefined variables. Even better, if it recognizes units it can automatically convert and simplify. Performing calculus or even computing Laplace transforms would be a nice bonus, but neither is absolutely essential.

On the other hand it looks like Calca doesn’t support arbitrary precision, just the standard ints and IEEE floats. I could be wrong but the website makes no mention of it, and if they had this it should be advertised. Bigints are essential for an engineering calculator, and other forms of arbitrary precision (ratios, etc.) are almost as important.

Basically I’d want something along the lines of the Emacs calculator, which is the calculator I use at work.