![]() I refer to Soulver most frequently for units. (You can also put in comments for that purpose, but since this isn’t a review, I won’t explore Soulver’s features exhaustively.) I focus here on the OS X version, which has more features than the iOS release the mobile version lacks stock tickers, for instance. And when you return to it later, you don’t have to sift out its meaning. Rather, Soulver has a lot of built-in terms, units, and other options that let you type something that resembles an incomplete phrase, but makes sense when read aloud. Such tools try to extract meaning from what you type and give you what they think you need. Soulver isn’t a true natural-language system. To moving among different units, finding conversion units, and performing currency calculations, Soulver is my first choice. I use PCalc when I need to tabulate numbers with a keypad or perform calculations. While I love James Thomson’s PCalc and own it on all platforms (including tvOS), PCalc is a calculator, not an interpreter (see “ PCalc 4,” 10 April 2014, and “ Apps that Reveal the Apple TV’s Potential,” 9 November 2015). Soulver for X in Both Mac and iOS - I discovered Soulver via a colleague years ago, when it was a less sophisticated program, and other options were slim. (Try typing “16 mm” or “$1.25” into Spotlight and see what it says.) ![]() This article is an introduction to these four options for those who haven’t discovered them yet, though Google and Spotlight lend themselves to happening across results accidentally. Along the way, Google, Wolfram Alpha, and even Spotlight in OS X 10.11 El Capitan have improved so much in parsing and anticipating what I want, that between those four resources, all my math bases appear covered. I’ve been using the Soulver app for Mac ( $11.99) and iOS ( $2.99) for years now, and have fallen so far under its spell of allowing me to perform calculations using natural language that I often forget how to do them the old-fashioned way. How many minutes will it take to transfer one terabyte at 10 megabits per second? If Voyager 1 is 16,381,324,013 kilometers away from the sun, how many astronomical units (AU) is that? How much wood could a woodchuck chuck, if it could chuck at a rate of 10 units of wood per second for a week? (13,333 minutes 109.5 AU 6,048,000 wood units.) If only I could remember the details!Īdd to that the routine conversions I need to perform constantly. I never made it through calculus in college - though I suspect the decades of writing code since and general mental maturity would let me grasp it now - but there’s plenty from algebra, geometry, and trigonometry I could still put to use. I used to love math and math used to love me.
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