![]() What has always worked is making a deeper app with lots of options. I’ve always competed in busy spaces Apple is already doing something in. What most sets your app apart from Apple’s built-in calculator? You could make the buttons small in the simulator and click them with a mouse, but they were tricky to hit when you were wielding real fingers! That became clear when I had an iPhone in my hands. ![]() From a code perspective, it was fine, but there was very limited screen space. The biggest challenge was figuring out how to get all the functionality on to the device. It felt like the most natural place for the app to be, and I think that’s why sales took off after this point. On iPhone, the whole device became a calculator, with you directly tapping buttons. On Mac, PCalc was like an emulation of a physical calculator, with on-screen buttons that you could click. I enjoyed the challenge of squeezing everything in – something I did again with the iPhone widget and Apple Watch versions. People forget the original iPhone was sluggish and had limited memory. So, at the eleventh hour, I rewrote all the interface code to be more efficient. When I got the real device a month before the App Store was due to go live, I realized my approach was slow – it took about ten seconds to launch the app. It was self-contained, so I got it running with almost no changes and then added a simple interface.Īt this point, I didn’t have an iPhone – I did everything in the iPhone Simulator on my Mac. In fact, I ported the code that powered PCalc’s Mac Dashboard Widget. Like the Mac version, it started from a point of learning: I wanted to make my first iPhone app, and I knew it would be relatively easy to move the core logic from Mac to iPhone. What were you trying to achieve with the iPhone version of PCalc? What I enjoy most in software development is coming up with the user interface for an app, and so I drew an initial prototype in SuperPaint and spent the summer of 1992 figuring out how to turn it into a functioning bit of code. I had a physical calculator, but it seemed like I should be able to do everything on my computer. ![]() I wanted something that handled hex and binary calculations to help with my university coursework. What you feel Apple’s built-in calculator lacked? Visit the PCalc website or get PCalc ($9.99/£8.99) or PCalc Lite from the App Store. (A must-install on iPad, which lacks a calculator of its own.) Entertainingly, PCalc’s playful ‘about’ screen, which started life as an icon you could throw bananas at and evolved into a surreal 3D graphics sandbox, has now been spun off as its own app. PCalc remains on the App Store – as does freebie version PCalc Lite. It was long one of those apps where if you wondered whether it could do something – at least within the realm of calculations – chances are it probably could. It took the bones of a traditional desktop calculator and then smartly expanded the feature set. (Seriously: there’s now even a version for Apple TV.) Why was it a classic? It started out as an app for Mac, long ago (it’ll turn 30 this year), but made the leap to Apple’s touchscreen devices – at which point, nothing could stop it. In this entry in our series on classic apps, we explore a calculator app that’s stood the test of time, interviewing its creator about the app’s origins and how it became such an enduring presence on iPhone. Others are core parts of the iPhone’s history. A calculator app for iPhone that truly adds up
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