Google Calculator Service

Christopher Biagini created a system-wide Services menu item wrapping Google’s calculator feature. Select some text containing some math to solve, invoke, and the text is replaced by the result. Sounds a little silly to go out over the web to compute math, when you’ve got a nice fast processor right there on your Mac, but the magic is in Google natural language parsing. And it doesn’t just do math, it does unit conversion, too — pass in “2kg + 2lbs” and you’ll get “2.90718474 kilograms”.

★ Friday, 9 March 2007