What’s this app for?
Every human brain’s favourite energy saving implement. The
humble calculator is given the universal app treatment by Microsoft and comes
out of it very well. There’s little missing from this app, other than perhaps
it visually looking appealing, but this is Windows 10 apps for you! The
calculator side of things has all the standard functions, plus scientific and a
sophisticated programmer option. There’s a highly useful date calculation
option along with the extra bonus of numerous units of conversion that we all
need to work out every week when we can’t remember how many miles there are in
a kilometre.
Does it do the job it
was primarily designed for?
Yes, and very well, with bells and whistles on top.
The standard calculator has all the buttons you’d expect,
including square root, percentages, and a decent memory, which includes the
ability to go back over every calculation you’ve made. The scientific option
adds in all those things every student will need, with log, sin etc. although it
does feel a little like it possibly misses some of the functions I remember on
my school calculator. The programmer option though is pretty good, enabling
hex, oct, bin and decimal calculations of sophisticated heights.
The ability of this app doesn't stop there though, because there are 12 different units of measurement underneath it’s converter section that allows you to do what we all used to hunt down the inner pages of a diary for in years gone by, but can now do at ease. Volumes, Lengths, Weights, Temperatures, Energy, Area, Speed, Time, Power, Data, Pressure and Angles can all be converted from a variety of units at ease. Just input the number and the answers are there on view:
What’s the
alternative?
Well, there are other apps in the store, of which I imagine
might be better for more sophisticated scientific calculations, if you need
waves and graphs up on your screen. The original win32 application is of course
gone.
Hit, Miss, or Maybe?
Hit; three decent
calculators and full of extremely handy unit converters, this app easily does
the job of what you’d expect from a default app.
Am I the only one who noticed that Windows 10's calculator is much worse than previous iterations, just like everything else Microsoft does? In the previous calculator I could easily navigate through the history. With this calculator I can scarcely do that at all. 1) You have to use the mouse to do it, instead of your keyboard. 2) You have to click on a small, unintuitive part of the history that gives the right type of cursor, otherwise clicking on it will just uselessly shift focus to the text, rather than actually calling up the previous calculation into a new calculator input. 3) Worst of all, once you get that to work, instead of doing what it should do and giving you the final result of that previous calculation, so that you can do with it what you want, it gives you the whole formula, and lets you add onto that formula without any automatically added parentheses, so that your order of operations will likely get screwed up. Additionally, the history is very SHORT and can remember less than I can using my head. So the history function is right next to useless. Microsoft is a frequently horribly annoying company, and this product reflects that.
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