It's easy to make something multi-platform, but as many lone developers on all OS's have experienced, it quickly becomes a nightmare to maintain more than one platform.

Given the ease of macOS GUI development to begin with, there are more small-time, lone developers making full GUI apps there, versus other platforms.

Other platforms have a higher barrier of entry in that regard, so the landscape is more conducive to having already started out as a team and so developing a more significant app worthy of that kind of investment.

Not a macOS dev, just a customer. The thing I value about the platform is that there are lots of these so called "boutique" apps. Apps that do a single thing and do it extremely well, with a great, native UI, with Mac keyboard shortcuts and all the behavior you'd expect on a Mac. And since your average Mac user cares a bit more about the experience and aesthetics and is, let's face it, usually a bit more affluent than your average PC user, there has always been a market for those and it's become a bit of a self-fulfilling marketing. Mac users expect apps to be focused and good looking and Mac devs know that even smaller apps are viable on the platform if done well, so the platform is actually full of those nice little apps and people come to the Mac for the experience.

Pretty easy as in... the Electron stuff that everyone complains about?

macOS is just a joy to develop with, unix like environment, beautiful desktop, easy to use frameworks

the environment is clean and enables people to do what they want, even if XCode is a piece of garbage shit, it gets the job done

the overall quality of Apple apps encourages devs to apply the same principles, easy to use and beautifully designed apps

in comparison, when you see official Windows metro/fluent apps looking so boring, it doesn't encourage people to develop natively

then you have the details that kills it, lack of proper windows store, lack of people native way of distributing apps (exe? msi? vsx? appbundle? zip my 100's dotnet dlls?) it makes you not want to even start

even Microsoft is ditching all that crap and rewriting their native apps with electron, wich says a lot about the windows ecosystem (https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/4/22213300/microsoft-one-out...)

The macOS market is generally rich, with a tradition of niche, paid software.

One or two developers working and testing on their own machines will have an awful experience trying to make their app work multi-platform.

This type of app is going to be valued higher by Mac users.

To be fair, Windows enjoys many other little/medium/big apps that are not available on macOS.

Dev preference, time and Cocoa.

Because Mac'ers pay

Soulver is a similar app for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS with shared documents in iCloud Drive. Check it out if you’re looking for something like this to go!

I find that calculators remain weirdly unergonomic on most Operating Systems. There are so many times where I want to do some quick math but feel hobbled by the insistence of calculator software writers to ape physical calculator design -- Numi seems like a cool step in the right direction

Since others already mentioned many fantastic alternatives, let me share mine: https://bbodi.github.io/notecalc3/

This gets posted regularly but not often discussed. Here’s one of the few prior postings with comments, from six years ago, fwiw:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837802

Wow this is awesome! I kind of want this integrated into Alfred though...

Edit: it of course already has it https://github.com/nikolaeu/numi/wiki/Alfred-Integration

The final example in their intro video doesn't make sense to me. Can someone explain it?

Here's the text: price = $8 times 5 $40 fee = 8% 8 % fee on price in Euro 39.48 EUR

What does that mean? "fee on price" should mean "fee times price", right? So 8% of $40. That's nowhere near 39.48 EUR. Could it mean "price after fee is deducted"? But if so, it must have been made during a time when EUR was worth almost 8% less than dollars? Did that ever happen?

Do we have the dev here?

I love the idea of a fast and tiny calculator notebook. I was a big Mathematica user (as long as my uni paid for the crazy expensive licence) for even simple calculations, and this would almost scratch my itch.

I'm saying almost because it needs a bit more work, at least some more quantities and units, like speed, voltage, power etc. And it all breaks down if you try do a calculation where the quantity/units change, i.e. the units disappear (because the app doesn't understand the formula) and you can't use the conversions anymore. I'm not saying it's a bad thing or that I absolutely need it, but the $24 price is no joke.

What I wanted was the old calculator in the sidebar to be back in Big Sur. It was the one muscle memory that I loved to reach out for something small, no matter how indifferent it makes typing it in spotlight or finely clicking on the dock icon, it will never beat sheer speed/confidence of accessing it in the sidebar

I would totally use this if it were an extension to Emacs. I keep lots of calculation results in text files, and edit them in emacs, but I don't want to use a totally separate app whenever I want to enter and calculate some math within a text file.

Numi looks awesome! My favorite calculator app so far is Tydlig[0], too bad it's has not been updated in a couple years. I remember a really good talk by the creator (Andreas Karlsson), but I can't seem to find it, anyone has any idea what I'm talking about?

[0]. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tydlig/id721606556

My favorite is still Calca (http://calca.io) - it hasn't been updated for a while, the developer has been working on other things, but it still works for me.

What is wrong with “bc” ;-) half joking, anybody else who uses bc? I am by no means an expert, just using the regular add/multiply and sometimes a variable.

This looks way better though.

A lot of people mentioning Soulver as a great alternative. But after running into limitations with Soulver, I eventually discovered Magic Calculator, and I fell in love. It allows for more precise calculations, and it's way cheaper at $4: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magic-calculator/id421993158?m...

Surprised no one has mentioned https://instacalc.com yet. Not a native Mac app but genius.

Update: There is a chrome extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/instacalc/hfoojdao...

I have used Numi for several years - and versus Alfred/Google variants i have found Numi to be incredibly helpful for most back of the hand calculations.

I have yet to find an alternative that is more convenient

1) Configurable keyboard shortcut to bring this up 2) Good units/percentages/bytes support 3) Variable assignments / custom functions 4) Long History

What is it with people calling their applications "beautiful"? What's so beautiful about this?

I just watched the demo on the landing page and am struggling to think of a target audience for this.

Most technically oriented Mac users I know use Alfred. A quick CMD+space "4 tea spoons to ml" will open a browser window with your answer from your favourite search engine.

For more complex queries, preceded your input with "Wolfram" (tab autocomplete on the "wo") and you have the entire Wolfram engine at your fingertips.

The above mechanism is exceptionally flexible to any form of question, conversion, or math,and very low friction.

For the tax percentage calculation example (or anything similar), you'll be hard pressed to find someone who has this problem often enough to want to to pay for this, AND doesnt already use anymore comprehensive and familiar spreadsheet tool.

With Soulver 2 for iOS is not longer available, I wish Numi have a paid version for iOS so it could use iCloud Sync between all devices.

Edit: And one of the thing I dont understand is all these Notes Calculator dont have B for Billion and T for Trillion. Some of them has M for million, but most dont.

Cool. Has anyone tried to enter 1 barn-megaparsec [1] ?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_meas...

My favourite IOS calculator app (for those who are RPN minded). Love this little free gem!

https://apps.apple.com/qa/app/rpn-30/id1451413517

I like Numi. It’s a handy, unobtrusive math scratch pad. I dislike the two computer license limit that isn’t disclosed prior to purchase, and the need to contact the developer in order to get that license reset if I crash my Mac mini or my MacBook Pro.

Does it have a widget? The most annoying thing about Big Sur is they removed the widget

Took a long time to start, crashed on first save (~losing all my work in that session~ it's back! weird bugs). Some glitches with the parsing. But it is so lovely! We should build an open source version.

So that's $25 for Spotlight, or am I missing something?

It is nice but it could not beat the power of Wolfram Alpha. The way I use it is from Firefox: 1. Add Search Engine via https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wolfram-alpha... 2. Type = followed by expression in your address bar

If you're using OS X, try using Spotlight or Alfred directly (Keypirinha[0] is a reasonable Windows alternative) - just type in `1 + 2` and you get the answer without launching a special app. There are plugins for conversions as well.

[0]. https://keypirinha.com/

I've found programs such as SpeedCrunch[0] to be extremely more comfortable to use than calculators imitating "classic" designs.

[0] https://speedcrunch.org/

Excel is the secret calculator app that you’ve been dreaming about.

There's always a REPL close by for users that are technical enough.

I didn’t even know there’s a calculator app on macOS. I simply write formulas into Spotlight, and if I need history or variables or anything serious I launch an Octave prompt.

I used to have an amazing calculator in Windows XP/7 called powertoy calc. It was so simple to use and had amazing powerful features too. Huge help while I was in engineering college.

This is why I still use bc