Visual design is great, but I’ve seen better calculator apps

I can definitely say I wasn’t expecting to see this be the next app that Tapbots released. And I don’t mean that in a flattering way; it really makes no sense; the Mac has plenty of good calculator apps and Calcbot for iOS, which Tapbots has left to fester and rot, hasn’t seen an update in years (and no iPad version to boot, which is really sad because iPad needs a good calculator app).

But all that bitterness aside, they nailed it on the visuals of this app. It’s a really brilliant exploration of the new design language Yosemite is bringing us. It’s beautiful and colorful, and looks great on my screen. The only big fail I see here is that the dots on the division symbol are really light (looks like just one pixel on my non-Retina screen) and easily mistaken with a minus sign. One piece of whimsy I’m sad to see go away: the lack of all the aural feedback most of the -bot apps Tapbot is so well known for.

The app has some serious issues, though. When interacting with it with my keyboard I see the calculator register strokes on screen but they don’t get added to my expression, which is kind of a “you had ONE job” type of failure.

And the expression I can enter has the unnecessary limitation in that I don’t have a cursor, preventing me from going back and correcting my mistakes in the expression. If I need to surround something in parentheses, I better remember up front to have them, because I can’t go back and add them later. That limitation is logical on a physical calculator, but on a computer it’s just needlessly constraining.

For most of my calculating needs I’ll probably just keep using Alfred, which just lets me type a mathematical expression into it (cursor and all) and it’ll give me live feedback which I can copy to clipboard easily.

Aaron Harpole about Calcbot - The Smart Calculator