Calca

I first got Calca when it originally came out (and way before I did for real 🥲), over 10 years ago. I was in college and I had an iPhone 4s, I think. It had apps, most of them not very useful. Calca was *something else*. Calca could do math, and Calca made it convenient to do math that involved more than just punching in two numbers to get a single result. No longer did I need to break out a spreadsheet (which are still awkward on a phone, even in 2024, even on our now massive smartphone screens). I could calculate the rent split for my college roommates. I could calculate the total cost of a trip for me and my friends, with a bunch of flight tickets, accommodations, and whatever else, with the total cost split between all of us. I could estimate fuel costs given the fuel efficiency of a car. I could calculate means, standard deviations, and other arbitrary statistics on some data I was thinking about (don't you hate not having an app on your phone for figuring out stats for some random piece of data?). I could plot things. And I could annotate it all with Markdown, which I had then only just discovered. All on my phone. It was probably the first app I ever got on my phone that made it very real that this thing I always have on me is actually a legit computer, and having a computer that is always on me is actually useful. (Except for when it's the opposite of useful, but that's not Calca's fault). Calca is not perfect. Over the years, I have encountered a fair amount of weird behavior, and anything really-really complex can still be awkward and error-prone. Calca's unit-aware calculations, while really cool, have also sometimes caused bizarre results. But when it has worked — and most of the time, it has — it has been magical. I only have weird behavior to complain about because I still come back to it and use it, a decade and who knows how many smartphone generations later. I wont deny that I'd appreciate it if the developer came back to this app to give it some love. But also... I get it. 11 years is a *long* time, and I only paid for Calca once (that was nice, by the way, to be able to pay for an app just once, and have it keep working for over a decade). Even if it's flawed, even if it's maybe abandoned, even if I now have a full-blown Python interpreter on my phone, with a whole host of numerical computation and data analysis libraries (imagine that, college me from 11 years ago), I still keep coming back to Calca. If I could give Calca

This app is unique and there is nothing else quite like it. I use it in place of Excel when multiple calculations are required along with extensive text. That said, it’s been several years since it’s been updated so I’m concerned the developer may have abandoned the project. Calca is among my core apps so I’d be open to a subscription offering to compensate the developer and ensure it remains sustainable.

I really dig the approach this app takes to text + free-form calculations. I use Markdown all the time, so that's a bonus, but the app really shines in the way it interprets text and functions in-place. It has far more power under the hood than I could ever use so I only have a few surface-level nitpicks: * Document management on iOS/iPadOs is clunky. * I still hit occasional crasher bugs. * I wish the iOS/iPadOS versions were updated more frequently. I don't think it needs to roll in all the latest platform features, but some bug fixes and polish would be nice.

When you're using the Magic Keyboard, you can't type in numbers anymore. Once you type a number, it switches into this weird overwrite mode, where every number you type overwrites the current number. For example, let's say you want to type 1234. You'll type 1, which will appear. Then 2 overwrites 1. And then 3 overwrites 2. And then 4 overwrites 3. So instead of 1234, you just get 4. Useless.

This is such a useful app, with text documents coming alive as computational documents. Like a spreadsheet in a way, but in a different medium. Truly wonderful

Calca is one of my favorite apps. I use it regularly on my phone, laptop, etc. I desperately wish I could use it on the iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard folio. Unfortunately, in that context, I'm usually trying to total line items under a 'total +=' line. For every line item, when I start typing digits, the app highlights the entry as though I'm cutting / pasting and does not permit me to enter amount normally. I can work around it -- to a degree -- by separating each digit with a non-numeric character, but I usually just give up and go to a different machine. Hoping the developer will see this and determine what causes / resolves the problem. Huge fan, otherwise, and leaving 5 star review because it works on every other device perfectly.

I left a 1-star review a few years ago because I couldn’t create new sheets (“calculations”) in it. But now it’s the only calculator app I use. Functions. Graphs. Units and unit conversions. Markdown for comments. And all with a pretty intuitive syntax that’s easy to get used to. Now that my kids are doing high-school level math, it’s invaluable for checking their work.

This is really too bad because I have been using Calca for years, and there still isn’t anything that compares. You can work around the input bugs by changing your calculations to text with a #, but it’s a pretty bad experience.

I’ve used Calca for years on iOS and Mac, and I love it for all sorts of computation. I did run into one issue: I recently got an iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard, and it seems to have troubles with the focus system, making numeric entry very, very cumbersome with the Magic Keyboard.

Has not worked with the iPad magic keyboard for more than 12 months.