Hi! NumWorks founder here. Thank you so much for the mention! We’re trying our best to make a great calculator, so it’s always a pleasure to get this kind of feedback!
As a note to the HN crowd: we’re facing an intersecting UX challenge. The vast majority of our users aren’t very technical - they’re high schoolers really. But we also want to cater to a more advanced audience such as engineers.
Initially we thought it would be really hard to please everyone. But it turns out it’s actually possible to create a simple interface that still lets you do more advanced functions. And even better, designing for the “newcomers first” turned out to be a great guidance when designing our software. Judging from the feedback we get, assuming the user won’t ever read any manual or doc is actually quite a good starting point!
I think the only thing I would do differently would be a 'dark theme' case option as I find the yellow on white lettering to be nearly impossible to see (older eyes I guess).
In the category of "all different", my all time favorite calculator is the TI-92+ which was a landscape style calculator with a qwerty keyboard. Building something like that with the 5" 800 x 480 IPS screen that STM has on the STM32F469i-Disco board would be heaven. It is on my long list of things which I will likely not get around to before I die :-). You could swap the STM32F769 for the 'F469 if you wanted more mips. I'd pay $300 for one of those, if you're wondering.
Good to hear from you, and I really like what you were doing with numworks. Did you ever get past the license issue? To appeal to tinkerers and get a community of hackers enthused it would be preferable to have an open source license.
Also, have you seen the DM42? It's not a graphing calculator, but since similarities exist with numworks.
As a note to the HN crowd: we’re facing an intersecting UX challenge. The vast majority of our users aren’t very technical - they’re high schoolers really. But we also want to cater to a more advanced audience such as engineers.
Initially we thought it would be really hard to please everyone. But it turns out it’s actually possible to create a simple interface that still lets you do more advanced functions. And even better, designing for the “newcomers first” turned out to be a great guidance when designing our software. Judging from the feedback we get, assuming the user won’t ever read any manual or doc is actually quite a good starting point!