#Soulver alfred pdf#
#Soulver alfred mac#

However, it lacks a custom plugin system. It has been on the market since 2005 and, thus, is a very polished product. Soulver is possibly the best notepad-based calculator out there. I do not consider my app to be the best and I encourage everyone to try all of the options below. Try it out.Disclaimer: I’m the creator of Parsify Desktop. That is an insanely low price for something so incredibly useful. There also is an iOS version available for $2.99 (universal iPhone and iPad).

#Soulver alfred mac#

Go buy itĬalca is $4.99 on the Mac App Store. That is the highest praise I can give software. But Excel has never felt natural to me.Ĭalca is (another) simple idea done well. One of the guys on the mobile team at LivingSocial was in finance before joining HungryAcademy and it is amazing to watch him use Excel. Excel is an extremely powerful piece of software. So while I liked Soulver, I still found myself slipping back to my old ways of writing Markdown in a text editor and doing calculations in another program.Įxcel is another common choice for this type of ad hoc calculation. If I wanted to paste the calculations into a Markdown file-which I almost always did-I’d lose the dynamic benefits of Soulver. The biggest problem was that Soulver still added a different file to edit. Soulver was a big improvement over my previous “system”, but I still found myself fighting with it. Alternativesįor the last couple of months I’ve been using Soulver for this type of calculation (based on Marco Arment’s near constant recommendations for it). Now I just write in Calca and the calculations happen as I type. In the past, I would write Markdown in a text editor and either do the calculation in my head (which is embarrassingly error prone), open up irb (more specifically a rails console from one of the applications I’m working on), or use the calculator function in Alfred. Weekly revenue lift(conversion improvement) = number of customers who abandoned cart last week * conversion improvement * average order value

Number of customers who abandoned cart last week = 1,395

I might write something like this:įor instance, if we were able to reduce cart abandonments by a small number we'll see a meaningful revenue lift I may be writing a story for an engineer to implement a new feature and need to justify why I’m asking them to do this work. Here’s where Calca becomes useful: while writing I often want to do some basic math. This interview with Jason Brennan is an interesting look into Frank’s goals in building Calca. I imagine most people who would read my blog do too. As a fellow engineer I have similar problems. Markdown + Math = CalcaĪn engineer named Frank Krueger made Calca to solve his own problem. Because Markdown is plaintext it plays nice with version control you can use whatever text editor you prefer. There is no fiddling with fonts when writing something in Markdown. Markdown is great because it lets you organize and lightly format your thoughts, but by only providing very simple formatting you’re forced to focus on what you’re writing. My friend Dave Copeland wrote his entire book in Markdown. It was a much better writing experience than using a word processor and I was very pleased with quality of the output.

#Soulver alfred pdf#

I wrote in Markdown, then converted to LaTex using Pandoc, and then generated a PDF by applying the open source tufte-latex class. Recently, I wrote a fairly formal 20-page report. I compose notes and emails in markdown in TextMate 2. It is an “easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format” that converts to HTML.Īny writing I do longer than a paragraph is generally done in Markdown. It’s awesome.įirst I should explain a few things about Markdown.

Calca is a hybrid Markdown editor and calculator.