All Articles Tagged pcalc

PCalc [$9.99 - iTunes link] has 30 promo codes to give away to TiPb readers willing to help them out with a little survey. Here’s the thing: since “free apps no longer have to stay free”, and in-app purchases are now available to everyone, they’re interested in knowing just which in-app purchasable features interest YOU.

Ready? Here’s what you need to do:

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UPDATE: Just so everyone is clear, the developer did this as a parody, Apple didn’t censor anything. B’okay? Read the full 8008135 story on Three Letter Acronym…

PCalc RPN Calculator [$9.99 - iTunes link] for iPhone has just updated to version 1.8, and the update is… rather unique:

Have you, or somebody close to you, ever turned your calculator upside down and accidentally seen a mildly suggestive word? Have you ever been in a maths class, and had to put up with groups of giggling boys performing elaborate calculations that are not part of the lesson?

Yes, it’s one of the main problems affecting the calculator industry today, the so-called “calculator words”. These otherwise harmless devices can be made to display smut at the press of a few buttons. Added to that, the iPhone App Store is very strict about having inappropriate content in apps. Nobody wants their app to get a 17+ rating, or worse, to be rejected entirely.

Which is why we are happy to announce that the latest version of our PCalc scientific calculator for the iPhone contains a new patent-worthy profanity filter.

Simply enter a number such as “5318008″, turn the calculator upside down, and the offending word will be discreetly censored. Many common calculator words have been included as standard, and we plan to increase this over time via software updates.

The new version also comes, you know, calculator features, and a $9 off coupon for the Mac version (which doesn’t seem to change when you turn your Mac upside down… hmmm… feature parity?!)

James Thomson wrote in to tell us about PCalc 1.7 [$9.99 - iTunes link], and as usual, the prose is almost as good as the app. Almost.

One year ago, as the doors of the iPhone App Store first opened to the public, PCalc was there. One of only four hundred applications available, and a mere handful of calculators. Now, there are more than sixty-five thousand applications in the store, and calculators are second only to Twitter clients in terms of near-pestilential ubiquitousness.

Metaphorgeddon aside, while we mentioned the new version already, after using it for the day, it was obvious it deserved a closer look. Here are the updates again:

• Faster startup!
• Three and four-line display modes, including complete control over what appears on each line.
• Multiple-memory support.
• Optional HP48-style RPN behaviour.
• Much nicer number display with the “Easier To Read” digits option. It’s now actually easier to read!

It is indeed. I’m not a mathmagician like Leanna, but this really is the built-in calculator on Hulk-serum. Check out the screenshots after the break, and if you give PCalc 1.7 a try, let us know what you think!

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Tapped open App Store and what did I see? Five fresh new iPhone 3.0 feature packed app updates just waiting for me! (Okay, four, I already updated Fring…)

Jaadu VNC [$24.99 - iTunes link] adds support for cut, copy, and paste, remote copy support, and full screen view.

AutoStitch [$1.99 - iTunes link] includes cropping and support for higher resolution out for iPhone 3GS

PCalc [$9.99 - iTunes link] highlights include 3 and 4 line display modes, more memories, option to prevent rotation (Apple needs to add this system wide!), HP48-like mode, copy tape to clipboard, “easier to read” now even easier. to. read. and button easier to press.

QuickOffice [$12.99 on sale - iTunes link] now supports iPhone 3.0 cut, copy, and paste and shake to undo/redo, access email attachments, text wrapping, aligned overflow, and user-friendly indent and align control for docs.

Fring [Free - iTunes link] now offers Push Notification.

PCalc developer James Thomson is one of our favorites because he not only makes great apps, but he seems to love doing it, and always figures out new, positive, and productive ways to get our attention.

This time around it isn’t just the release of an iPhone 3.0 compatible version of PCalc for iPhone ($9.99 – iTunes link) that includes support for copy and paste (and a couple of new vertical button layouts, one for engineers, one for programmers), it’s how he built one version of the app that supports both iPhone 2.2.1 and iPhone 3.0 at the same time. An iPhone version of Apple’s “universal binary” concept, as it were.

We’re not sure he’s the first to do this — and according to Twitter he isn’t either — but we hope he does write up the process when the 3.0 SDK NDA (non-disclosure agreement) lifts so other developers can do it as well. It’s an elegant solution to say the least.

Now to see if we can not only paste some complex calculations… but understand them!

Ok, not many applications currently in the App Store worthy of our Apps for Less. Although, the ones we did end up finding are not bad deals.

First up we have Terminator Salvation [iTunes Link], if you have not checked out the trailer we post two weeks ago what are you waiting for? This is one of the top games in the App Store and it seems like Gameloft has gotten the hang of programming games for the iPhones hardware. The best thing about this game now is it’s price – it has dropped from $9.99 to $5.99. People complained about the higher price and Gameloft has listened. I feel bad for the early adapters as we always get the short end of the stick in terms of price but that’s to be expected.

Next up we have PCalc [iTunes Link], now on sale for $4.99 An excellent app for anyone who needs a feature-rich calculator that the stock app on the iPhone simply can not match. Features are as follows:

• Switchable button layouts – choose from many different horizontal and vertical layouts to suit your needs.
• Calculator themes – pick your look, all the way from minimalist to striking.
• An RPN mode with one button access to the stack and optional two-line display.
• Hexadecimal, octal and binary modes, complete with a variety of bitwise operators.
• All the extensive unit conversions and constants from the desktop PCalc.
• A simulated paper tape to keep track of your calculations.
• Multiple undo and redo. Just flick the LCD to the right and left to reveal the past and future.
• Stylish, consistent user interface.
• Shake to clear! Two shakes to clear, three shakes to clear all.

If you are a developer and have a great app in the App Store at a great price, we want to hear about it!

The App Store, even with 25,000 applications, is still a new market and one we’re all, developers, users, and media alike, trying to figure out. Developer James Thomson recently did an experiment to see how Twitkitteh, a fun little app, would compare in terms of sales and earnings, to his acclaimed PCalc in the App Store.

The results? Thomson talks about them in a blog post entitled Where Did it All Go Wrong?

Since Twitkitteh released about a week ago, we have sold exactly a hundred and one copies, at roughly 99c each. That makes it about £50 in terms of income at current exchange rates after Apple’s 30% cut. About 14 quid of that went on the domain name for a year, and about another 11 quid on hosting the domain on our existing server.

That leaves us £25 profit for three week’s work. Oh, and minus the 120 or so engineer-hours spent designing, writing, and promoting it that could have been spent on something else. So, depending on exactly how much you rate iPhone engineers at on an hourly basis, you can calculate exactly how much we lost on the whole project.

The good news is, with his grand Twitkitteh experiment completed (for now?), PCalc and PCalc Lite have received updates:

PCalc [iTunes link] gets a brand new engineering layout, with hyperbolic trig functions, hypotenuse, leg, gamma, delta percent and more. You also get a classic theme taken from PCalc on Mac OS X, and six new key click sounds you can choose from too.

PCalc Lite [iTunes link] gets just two of the click sounds, and some other small improvements. PCalc Lite remains completely free however, and completely awesome. If you want to get a feel for how the full PCalc works on the iPhone, just try it out.

Here’s hoping quality apps like PCalc and others will sell well enough that developers won’t have to spend their limited time working on the next great fart app to makes ends meet.

TiPb has been exploring issues surrounding the App Store, especially how developers can earn a living, the various attempts to market apps in a sporting manner, as well the gaming and foul play going on.

In the bright lights category, developer James Thomson (ha! spelled it right that time!) has taken a decidedly humorous approach with the launch of his updated PCalc 1.2 (iTunes link) calculator app:

I think we got off to a bad start last time with version 1.1. It was my fault entirely. I came out with this big release I’d spent months on, sent out my press releases, and not a soul ran a story with the exception of that nice Mr Gruber fellow [Although TiPb did run an interview -- thanks again, James!]. Sales were quite poor and we both said some things we regretted in the morning.

But I understand, don’t worry. You’re tired of the deluge of iPhone press releases, and everything you see just starts to look the same after a while. I didn’t do anything to make it an interesting read and, let’s face it, I’m kind of fighting a losing battle with a calculator which – I’ll be the first to admit – is next to the flashlights and to-do list apps in terms of reaching saturation point on the store.

Not quite. I rock PCalc on my iPhone, with narry a flashlight in sight!

While PCalc chose humor, some others have gone decidedly darker…

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James Thomson is the acclaimed developer behind DragThing for Mac OS X and PCalc RPN Calculator for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Following up on his recent blog postings about the challenges involved navigating the still-nascent App Store business model for developers, and TiPb’s own look at whether or not there’s a “long tail” potential for the market, James was gracious enough to sit down (virtually) and share his thoughts with us about the issues facing 3rd party iPhone developers going forward.

TiPb: James, you recently blogged about PCalc in the context of a “postmortem”. What was the reaction like to that article, and did it bring about any changes in your current thinking or how you plan to proceed with PCalc going forward?

James Thomson: Reaction was interesting. Many iPhone developers contacted me privately, and via the blog, to say they had encountered similar problems with sales after the recent changes to the App Store.
Some pointed out the “Availability Trick” to change the App Store release date for your software when you do an update, to make it sort higher up in the listings. I talked about that a bit in a follow-up post here. It’s unclear whether it really is a trick, or just what you are supposed to do, but it does seem to work.

I’ve also tried a few other suggestions, like renaming the app to “PCalc RPN Calculator” to make sure it appears during searches for the word “calculator” which it didn’t before. So far, there has been a relatively small boost to sales, but I’m not sure how much of that is due to my changes, and how much is just down to the overall publicity that the article generated.

I’m working on a small 1.1.1 update at the moment to fix a few things, and I’ll likely add some more layouts and themes. The real question is what will happen to sales then. If they remain flat, with all the other changes, then I’m going to have to try some more traditional marketing beyond the Google AdWords adverts we are already running. To a certain extent, the blog itself /is/ a form of marketing – I don’t think I can really deny that, given it is raising the profile of our software.

Read the rest of the interview after the jump…

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(“Unique” by Hamed Masoumi, licensed under Creative Commons)

On Monday, TiPb Senior Editor Dieter Bohn debuted his new bi-weekly feature, TiPb of the Avalanche, by asking about the iPhone App Store and the “Long Tail” business model.

Looks like he’s not alone. PCalc developer James Thomson (via Daring Fireball) recounted his struggles with Apple’s new policy of listing Apps by original release dates, ignoring update dates, and forcing older Apps to the frozen hinterlands of the last few pages in a list growing well past 5500. Under the old model:

Sales started to slow down over time, but with each of the 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 updates they went back up into the stratosphere as PCalc moved to the front page of the Utilities section again.

And now?

As it stands, the App Store is too crowded to find anything if you don’t know exactly what you are looking for by name.

So while, according to Apple Insider, the App Store may still be climbing faster than iTunes Music did, GigaOm is pishing the posh on the iPhone bump in general.

During Apple’s Q4 conference call, Steve Jobs said that the App Store would reach 200 million downloads today spanning over 5500 Apps in 62 countries. How will Apple’s (continuing?) tweaks on App Store organization help or hinder developers moving forward? And will they, as Dieter is suggesting, have to start putting as much time, money, and effort into marketing as they do coding? Or are there no easy answers?