PCalc for iPhone

James Thomson’s $10 PCalc is one of the iPhone apps I’ve been lucky enough to be beta testing for a few weeks, and, while I’ve seen a few iPhone apps that are really good, PCalc is the best so far. The iPhone’s built-in Calculator app is much improved over the 1.0 version, but it’s got nothing on PCalc, which offers: unit conversions, paper tape, hex/oct/bin modes, and more. UI cleverness includes a very intuitive visualization of parenthesis stacking when you use the “(” and “)” keys — the only other calculator app that’s this nice is PCalc for the Mac.

And speaking of keys, PCalc’s work just like the iPhone’s keyboard — you not only get sound when you tap them (the built-in Calculator 2.0 finally has sound now too), but also get the large-type pop-up showing exactly which key you hit. The keys feel perfect.

★ Thursday, 10 July 2008