I don’t understand.It says press = to get result,but that is how every calculator works.There may be something else that is not explained,but should be.
You need to reread the article, more carefully. It doesn't say what you think it said:
AI said:
Once an equals sign is written, the application will auto-complete the expression for the user, and the results change whenever the expression is modified in any way.
Most calculators give you results as you enter each process, a running total. The iPad calculator apparently lets you write (with the Pencil) an entire expression and doesn't solve until the equals sign is drawn. You seem to have missed everything before that. Watch the keynote if you're interested.
Thank you for the response.What is the advantage of that?Speed?
It's more natural? I mean, when you are writing out an expression, do you generally "solve" each part as you go or after you finish writing out the entire expression?
Also, where would it display the solution that wouldn't be in the way before you indicate you are finished with '='?
Without having used the new iPad calculator, if they provide a result stack or memory register/buffer save and recall it should be easy enough to solve a complex formula incrementally by rolling the result from one sub-expression into the next.
Unfortunately I don't have a spare iPad that is compatible with the new iPadOS so I will just have to wait. If Apple released a new version of their Magic Trackpad that was compatible with Apple Pencil, getting this running on Apple Silicon Macs seems like it would be very straightforward.
It seems like the Magic Trackpad and Apple Pencil would be an awesome pairing.
I don’t understand.It says press = to get result,but that is how every calculator works.There may be something else that is not explained,but should be.
You need to reread the article, more carefully. It doesn't say what you think it said:
AI said:
Once an equals sign is written, the application will auto-complete the expression for the user, and the results change whenever the expression is modified in any way.
Most calculators give you results as you enter each process, a running total. The iPad calculator apparently lets you write (with the Pencil) an entire expression and doesn't solve until the equals sign is drawn. You seem to have missed everything before that. Watch the keynote if you're interested.
Thank you for the response.What is the advantage of that?Speed?
It's more natural? I mean, when you are writing out an expression, do you generally "solve" each part as you go or after you finish writing out the entire expression?
Also, where would it display the solution that wouldn't be in the way before you indicate you are finished with '='?
Without having used the new iPad calculator, if they provide a result stack or memory register/buffer save and recall it should be easy enough to solve a complex formula incrementally by rolling the result from one sub-expression into the next.
Uhm, you realize we are talking about the Math Notes mode of the calculator, right? It's going to work like a piece of paper, except that it solves it for you.
I don’t understand.It says press = to get result,but that is how every calculator works.There may be something else that is not explained,but should be.
You need to reread the article, more carefully. It doesn't say what you think it said:
AI said:
Once an equals sign is written, the application will auto-complete the expression for the user, and the results change whenever the expression is modified in any way.
Most calculators give you results as you enter each process, a running total. The iPad calculator apparently lets you write (with the Pencil) an entire expression and doesn't solve until the equals sign is drawn. You seem to have missed everything before that. Watch the keynote if you're interested.
Thank you for the response.What is the advantage of that?Speed?
It's more natural? I mean, when you are writing out an expression, do you generally "solve" each part as you go or after you finish writing out the entire expression?
Also, where would it display the solution that wouldn't be in the way before you indicate you are finished with '='?
Without having used the new iPad calculator, if they provide a result stack or memory register/buffer save and recall it should be easy enough to solve a complex formula incrementally by rolling the result from one sub-expression into the next.
Uhm, you realize we are talking about the Math Notes mode of the calculator, right? It's going to work like a piece of paper, except that it solves it for you.
I guess I read too much into this statement:
"Math Notes supports the same functions as Apple's scientific calculator view, as well as variables. This means that users can write out an expression with different variables, and the application will complete it or adjust the result if variables are changed."
That led me to believe that Math Notes was just an alternative front end to the calculator. My bad.
Thanks for the clarification. This sounds like it will be easy enough to break down a complex formula or proof into separate parts by using the variables from one or more sub-expressions to calculate the final result, with each of the saved variables holding the intermediate results. This would be interesting for writing a document that has a textual description of a problem and then using the hand drawn math formulas for each step along the solution to make the results come to life within the document itself. Truth be told, this sort of capability implemented as an embedded component would be equally at home in Pages, if there was a way to embed handwritten formulas on a Mac.
If the controversy was all about the need to enter an equals sign to see everything come together in one step, I don't think that's something that fits what Apple is doing here. You can do it yourself if you really want to by decomposing the formula into multiple steps.
I wonder how portable these Math Notes will be? Will there be an export to PDF or something similar so I can share the entire text + math worksheet with others?
I don’t understand.It says press = to get result,but that is how every calculator works.There may be something else that is not explained,but should be.
You need to reread the article, more carefully. It doesn't say what you think it said:
AI said:
Once an equals sign is written, the application will auto-complete the expression for the user, and the results change whenever the expression is modified in any way.
Most calculators give you results as you enter each process, a running total. The iPad calculator apparently lets you write (with the Pencil) an entire expression and doesn't solve until the equals sign is drawn. You seem to have missed everything before that. Watch the keynote if you're interested.
Thank you for the response.What is the advantage of that?Speed?
It's more natural? I mean, when you are writing out an expression, do you generally "solve" each part as you go or after you finish writing out the entire expression?
Also, where would it display the solution that wouldn't be in the way before you indicate you are finished with '='?
Without having used the new iPad calculator, if they provide a result stack or memory register/buffer save and recall it should be easy enough to solve a complex formula incrementally by rolling the result from one sub-expression into the next.
Uhm, you realize we are talking about the Math Notes mode of the calculator, right? It's going to work like a piece of paper, except that it solves it for you.
I guess I read too much into this statement:
"Math Notes supports the same functions as Apple's scientific calculator view, as well as variables. This means that users can write out an expression with different variables, and the application will complete it or adjust the result if variables are changed."
That led me to believe that Math Notes was just an alternative front end to the calculator. My bad.
Thanks for the clarification. This sounds like it will be easy enough to break down a complex formula or proof into separate parts by using the variables from one or more sub-expressions to calculate the final result, with each of the saved variables holding the intermediate results. This would be interesting for writing a document that has a textual description of a problem and then using the hand drawn math formulas for each step along the solution to make the results come to life within the document itself. Truth be told, this sort of capability implemented as an embedded component would be equally at home in Pages, if there was a way to embed handwritten formulas on a Mac.
If the controversy was all about the need to enter an equals sign to see everything come together in one step, I don't think that's something that fits what Apple is doing here. You can do it yourself if you really want to by decomposing the formula into multiple steps.
I wonder how portable these Math Notes will be? Will there be an export to PDF or something similar so I can share the entire text + math worksheet with others?
I think you're confusing math problems with user interface problems. Math Notes displays the solution when you draw an equal sign or draw a line under a column of numbers. What it's doing behind the scenes before that, or exactly how they are calculating the solution isn't relevant to the discussion.
The solution is displayed after you draw an equal sign because how would they know where to display it before you draw the equal sign? If they simply display it to the right of whatever you are writing out, then it will end up in the way of you writing more if you need to. To avoid that, they just don't display the solution until you indicate, by drawing an equal sign after an equation or a line under a column of numbers, that you are done, that there is no more to come, that the equation is complete and now the solution can be displayed in the appropriate place. It's not that complicated.
I’m kinda bewildered (more than usual) about what took so long.
Well, I think the under pinning engine of the iPad calculator which also supports the "Math Notes" feature is really much more than some people realize. It is probably in its infancy at this release but will become much much more. It is a new innovative kind of spreadsheet.
The fact that the engine can handle variables and formulas and graphing from hand writing is actually mind blowing. I predict that future releases will feature derivative and integral calculus, linear algebra, differential equations etc...
Imagine animating the girl hitting the ping pong ball and seeing all the variables change in real time. This is why the iPad Pros have such powerful CPU and GPU and so much RAM.
I think "Math Notes" in the long run, will be a key selling point for the iPad to mathematicians, engineers and scientists, not to mention economists in the financial industry.
Clearly Apple has created a calculator app that has more capabilities than just a scientific calculator. I'm glad it's finally here. The question still remains, why did they not have even a basic calculator app for the first 14 years of its existence. 14 years! yes, there were plenty of 3rd party apps but it's still pretty inexcusable, especially when they're marketing the iPad as a laptop replacement.
It looks like the iPad calculator doesn’t support RPN (Reverse Polish Notation), a non-starter for me (PCalc does). Are there any settings for the iPad calculator that allow a switch to what is the “RPN Mode” in macOS? If not, there should be.
Realistically, the number of people who actually care about RPN is a very very tiny (but vocal) minority, so I'm not surprised it wasn't at the top of the feature list.
I spent 7 years in engineering using my HP 32S RPN calculator and after a short learning curve I quickly grew to love it. I found it much more efficient and in many ways easier to use than standard notation. You are probably correct, though - RPN is a bit of a niche market. (of course, Apple has other features that appeal to niche markets, so why not this?) Fortunately, PCalc is still available and is an excellent product.
Unfortunately, as currently implemented, Math Notes is just a toy. It might be useful at some points for grade school and high school math, but not always. Pretty useless at a college level and later. But I have some hope that it will grow a lot - the groundwork is done! Tacking on a much more capable backend is almost trivial, in that it's a problem that's already been solved multiple times. The front end would still need some work, but I think most if not all the hard problems are solved, or well on their way.
At the moment, it understands arbitrary variables, but it's not clear how smart it's going to be about them. It *doesn't* understand subscripted vars - or rather, it does, but it refuses to work with them! It's also not clear how it will handle ambiguity, like, what if you declare n, m, and p, and then declare np? How does it calculate "3np"? That's obviously a user error, so hopefully it will have a smart way to help the user fix it.
It has no idea what matrices are, AFAICT. Much more problematic, it doesn't support function declarations.
Part of me feels optimistic about this - it could be an AMAZING showcase for useful AI tech supporting a general-purpose tool. But part of me remembers the Mac graphing calc app sitting in the utilities folder for so many years without getting any love.
Can you write a second order polynomial and have it give you the roots using the quadratic equation?
...sort of. You can write a a second-degree poly as y=... and it will offer to graph it for you. Look at the intersections of the X axis and you have your solutions. No actual application of the formula though. And certainly no factoring. It will graph higher-degree polys but it does not support 3-d graphs, or generally any of the cool stuff that's in the graphing calculator on the Mac. I really hope that they will merge the two codebases, or at least borrow a lot.
Without having used the new iPad calculator, if they provide a result stack or memory register/buffer save and recall it should be easy enough to solve a complex formula incrementally by rolling the result from one sub-expression into the next. [...] It seems like the Magic Trackpad and Apple Pencil would be an awesome pairing.
Variables are better than a stack. The trackpad is useless. ThePencil is great if your handwriting is decent. It's semistupid about bad writing- not terrible, but not good.
[...] This sounds like it will be easy enough to break down a complex formula or proof into separate parts by using the variables from one or more sub-expressions to calculate the final result, with each of the saved variables holding the intermediate results. This would be interesting for writing a document that has a textual description of a problem and then using the hand drawn math formulas for each step along the solution to make the results come to life within the document itself. Truth be told, this sort of capability implemented as an embedded component would be equally at home in Pages, if there was a way to embed handwritten formulas on a Mac.
Yes, this would be great for writing out long-form high school algebra problems. Trig too. I expect this will work well with Pages but I haven't tried it.
I wonder how portable these Math Notes will be? Will there be an export to PDF or something similar so I can share the entire text + math worksheet with others?
Since it's in Notes, which allows exporting to PDF (and others), the answer is it'll be fine, though if you want shared editing, you'll have to stay inside Apple's ecosystem.
It looks like the iPad calculator doesn’t support RPN (Reverse Polish Notation), a non-starter for me (PCalc does). Are there any settings for the iPad calculator that allow a switch to what is the “RPN Mode” in macOS? If not, there should be.
Realistically, the number of people who actually care about RPN is a very very tiny (but vocal) minority, so I'm not surprised it
And a lot of those same folks are still running vi/vim as their primary text editor on their latest Macs. Once you’re comfortable with a tool it becomes second nature so there is little motivation to change. It’s analogous to comparing the standard keyboard/typewriter layout that was originally designed to slow typists down to reduce mechanical jams vs the Dvorak keyboard that is based more on frequent letter combinations and reduced reach.
I use RPN calculators and emacs not vi, for whatever it’s worth. After you learn how to use it, RPN is faster and more efficient, but I suppose most people are never exposed to it and would not learn it on their own.
It looks like the iPad calculator doesn’t support RPN (Reverse Polish Notation), a non-starter for me (PCalc does). Are there any settings for the iPad calculator that allow a switch to what is the “RPN Mode” in macOS? If not, there should be.
Realistically, the number of people who actually care about RPN is a very very tiny (but vocal) minority, so I'm not surprised it
And a lot of those same folks are still running vi/vim as their primary text editor on their latest Macs. Once you’re comfortable with a tool it becomes second nature so there is little motivation to change. It’s analogous to comparing the standard keyboard/typewriter layout that was originally designed to slow typists down to reduce mechanical jams vs the Dvorak keyboard that is based more on frequent letter combinations and reduced reach.
I use RPN calculators and emacs not vi, for whatever it’s worth. After you learn how to use it, RPN is faster and more efficient, but I suppose most people are never exposed to it and would not learn it on their own.
Comments
The Haters wanted a iPad Calculator you got it (Digits has finally been Sherlocked on the iPhone/iPad after 10-12 years? Due to Geek public outcry)
Unfortunately I don't have a spare iPad that is compatible with the new iPadOS so I will just have to wait. If Apple released a new version of their Magic Trackpad that was compatible with Apple Pencil, getting this running on Apple Silicon Macs seems like it would be very straightforward.
It seems like the Magic Trackpad and Apple Pencil would be an awesome pairing.
"Math Notes supports the same functions as Apple's scientific calculator view, as well as variables. This means that users can write out an expression with different variables, and the application will complete it or adjust the result if variables are changed."
That led me to believe that Math Notes was just an alternative front end to the calculator. My bad.
Thanks for the clarification. This sounds like it will be easy enough to break down a complex formula or proof into separate parts by using the variables from one or more sub-expressions to calculate the final result, with each of the saved variables holding the intermediate results. This would be interesting for writing a document that has a textual description of a problem and then using the hand drawn math formulas for each step along the solution to make the results come to life within the document itself. Truth be told, this sort of capability implemented as an embedded component would be equally at home in Pages, if there was a way to embed handwritten formulas on a Mac.
If the controversy was all about the need to enter an equals sign to see everything come together in one step, I don't think that's something that fits what Apple is doing here. You can do it yourself if you really want to by decomposing the formula into multiple steps.
I wonder how portable these Math Notes will be? Will there be an export to PDF or something similar so I can share the entire text + math worksheet with others?
The solution is displayed after you draw an equal sign because how would they know where to display it before you draw the equal sign? If they simply display it to the right of whatever you are writing out, then it will end up in the way of you writing more if you need to. To avoid that, they just don't display the solution until you indicate, by drawing an equal sign after an equation or a line under a column of numbers, that you are done, that there is no more to come, that the equation is complete and now the solution can be displayed in the appropriate place. It's not that complicated.
I spent 7 years in engineering using my HP 32S RPN calculator and after a short learning curve I quickly grew to love it. I found it much more efficient and in many ways easier to use than standard notation. You are probably correct, though - RPN is a bit of a niche market. (of course, Apple has other features that appeal to niche markets, so why not this?) Fortunately, PCalc is still available and is an excellent product.
https://www.swissmicros.com/