![]() Nevertheless, once a week we’d get together to work through a series of video lectures on C, bit-by-bit becoming more competent and confident programmers. This was real software engineering, and not something that seemed designed for amateur teenage coders like ourselves. First we would need to learn a notoriously low-level programming language called C, followed by yet another language called Objective-C, along with o bject-oriented programming concepts, and finally the Cocoa framework. Nik was confident we’d be able to teach ourselves Cocoa, and rewrite Soulver as a native Mac app. It turned out that REALbasic was using a transitional Apple technology called Carbon under the hood, instead of the Mac OS X native framework Cocoa which produced the most beautiful apps. The problem was (we thought) that as a piece of Mac software, it didn’t feel completely native. We were disappointed to only get a few hundred downloads of the app, and less than 50 sales but we still felt we were on to something good. Me, demoing the first version of Soulver to my classmates & teachers, May 2005 It would be like a calculator, a pencil and a notepad rolled into a single tool! I drove over to Nik’s house to share my idea with him: what if the calculator was actually part of “the page”? Instead of duplicating work (first writing your expression on a pad, punching it into a calculator, and going back to the pad to write in the answer), we could stick an “answer column” to the right of a standard text editor, which would calculate line-by-line as you typed. The solution to “the calculator on computers” problem came to me in a flash of insight one morning in January. It seemed to me like the traditional calculator design that had been copied on computers just didn’t take advantage of all the power of a Mac’s graphical interface with its powerful text processing features. I couldn’t understand why it only displayed a single number at a time, and why it wouldn’t evaluate an entire mathematical expression like you’d see written out on paper. My friend Nik had built a classic calculator app over the summer as a hobby project, but I wasn’t particularly impressed. The standard Mac OS X calculator app in 2005, mimicking a physical calculator ![]()
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