Productivity 101: Soulver, a calculator done right

For most people, the default calculator for the iPhone does what you wanted to do. For me, I look at it and throw up a little bit in my mouth. Since I can’t delete it, I put it in an iOS folder called “Never”. Don’t worry, he won’t get bored since it has plenty of company in Notes, Stocks, Voice Memos, Compass and Reminders. Apps that I never use and rub me the wrong way.

I don’t understand why most calculator apps look like a real calculator. I know we complain much about Apple’s skeuomorphic design in some of the iOS apps (notes, reminders, find my friends), but calculator apps are the worst offenders. We don’t need to “feel” we are using a calculator, I just want to do some math. So spare me the glass looking screen, the calculator buttons and the fake “tape”.

This is why I have found a gem in Soulver. This is an app that is very powerful, but yet, remains simple in its look and feel. There’s no skeuomorphism here. It’s just a white text field, with your results shown on the right hand of the screen. In addition to numbers, you can also use words as well as symbols.

Just yesterday, I was playing the board game “Life” with my two children and after we finished, we had to compute our worth. I opened Soulver, put in the initials of each of us in plain text and started adding up the money, real estate, Life cards and more to find the value of each player. This was an eye opener for me and one that I was very happy to have. The app summarized everything for me perfectly.

Soulver is considered a “plain language” calculator. It’s simple to use, efficient and powerful. If you make any mistakes, you don’t have to start from scratch, you just delete the parts that you are not happy with. The app can also save your work automatically into files if you so desire. You can sync with Dropbox and email your calculations from within the app.

Screens Below:

Soulver is available on the App Store for $2.99