PCalc: More Than Apple Will Ever Give You

On the Mac, we are very lucky to have a great built-in calculator. It works for a lot of things, but sometimes, it is not powerful enough. Sure, it has most of the features you could want, and it has vastly improved through the years, but there are still some things that are tedious to do. For it’s ease-of-use and amazing interface, I suggest PCalc.

When you first open PCalc, you will probably think that its features look a lot like Mac OS X’s built in calculator’s. Well, it has a lot of the same, but there are a few extra buttons in the main interface, namely the top row of buttons. The Tape button shows you a drawer with the history: all the calculations you’ve made since you turned it on. It can be nice for printing out calculations, or showing them to others. To clear it, press the Clear button on the drawer, and to save the current tape, press the Save… button, and it will save to a plain text file. The next button is the Info button. This shows you a drawer with a lot of information about the current number (shown on the screen). It gives you the decimal, hex value, octal value, binary value and the character value. This drawer is very helpful if you’re a programmer or id you do other work with numbers.

Now, one of the most important buttons, the RPN button. This switches you into RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) mode and shows you a depth drawer. RPN is a notation used for calculators; all HP calculators use it, and some others do too. Instead of inputing something like, “2 [+] 2 [=]“, you input it like, “2 [Enter] 2 [+].” RPN mode is great when you just need to put in many calculations very fast. Most of us, though, might not want to switch, because regular notation is just fine for us, and you don’t have to. This feature is only included because there are many people who like RPN. If you want it off, you just click on the RPN button again.

The Deg and Rad buttons just switch you from degrees to radians (if you don’t know what a radian is, I suggest you stay in degree mode). The only things this will really affect are the Sin, Cosine, etc commands, so you shouldn’t worry about it unless you use them. The last four buttons, Dec, Hex, Oct and Bin are also mode switchers. These are short for: Decimal, Hexadecimal, Octal and Binary. Decimal is what the average person will always want to use. The others are different notations for numbers. The others are for much more advanced uses, which include programming (this really is a very programmer-friendly calculator).

Now that I’ve talked about the buttons, there are a couple more very notable features. The first one is Constants. These are extremely helpful if there are certain numbers you use all the time, such as Avogadro’s number or the speed of sound (in mph). PCalc comes built-in with tons of these; there are at least 30 of them! You can access these either by going to the Constants menu item, or showing the toolbar, and clicking on the Constants toolbar item. Along with the built-in ones, you can define your own constants. To define your constants, go to Constants>User>Edit User Constants… You may want to take a constant from the built-in ones and put it in your user constants, because user constants have shortcuts. If you use Avogadro’s number every day, put it in your constants for easy access. Although this seems like such a basic feature, it can be extremely useful when you need it.

The last feature I will tell you about in PCalc is its Conversion tool. You heard me right, a conversion tool built-in to a calculator! Well, with PCalc’s conversion tool, you can have a number inputed, hit a keyboard shortcut, select what to convert to, and it will show you the new value. To do a conversion, either click on the Conversions toolbar item, go to the Conversions menu item, or hit a shortcut (Option-Command-[a number from 0 to 9, or a letter from A to C]). All of the shortcuts are in the menu item, so that is where you can learn them for quick access. Once you have chosen what type of conversion to do (Temperature, Size, etc) a panel will pop up. This is where you can choose the from and to values (or switch to another type of conversion). Once you have chosen these two values, Just click Convert, and the converted number will appear! It’s just that simple! This feature makes PCalc not only a calculator, but a great conversion tool too!

PCalc is not only available for the Mac, it is also available for the the iPhone and iPod Touch. This version has all the same features as the Mac version and even a few more display styles. In this version, you access the constants by clicking on the [42] button. Conversions can be accessed from the [a->b] button. Both of these features work in the same way, so if you know how to do it on the Mac, you can do it on the iPhone too. Turning on RPN takes a little more effort in this version; you have to click the [i] button, and then change the value of the RPN Mode switch. In this settings window (the [i] button), you can customize the interface for both vertical mode and horizontal mode. There are 4 themes and 4 horizontal layouts and 5 vertical layouts. Just like in Apple’s calculator, you just flip the phone to get from vertical to horizontal mode, and vice versa.

PCalc for the mac is amazing and the iPhone version is definitely no exception; you can really see the time put in to making this app. The Mac version retails for $19, and the iPhone/iPod Touch version is $9.99. You can download a trial of the Mac version, but, there are no App Store trials yet. If you need more from your calculator than Apple gives you, then PCalc is definitely the way to go.

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