PCalc 1.6 for the iPhone
June 15, 2009 at 4:00 PM by Dr. Drang
James Thomson has just released version 1.6 of PCalc for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The new version will work on iPhone OS 2.x, but was written with iPhone OS 3 in mind. As such, it will support copy and paste. Here’s the App Store link.
Apart from copy and paste, the new PCalc adds no new functions, but it does add a couple of new keyboard layouts. The one I use now is called Engineering—that’s the RPN version of it in the screenshot above1. The great thing about Engineering is that it gives me all the buttons I use in a single vertical layout. There was a horizontal Engineering layout in PCalc 1.5, but I really prefer holding my iPhone vertically.
I was a bit worried that the smaller keys of the vertical Engineering layout would cause problems, but that hasn’t been the case. I’ve been beta testing 1.6 for a few weeks2 and haven’t noticed any uptick in miskeyed entries.
I’ve written several posts about PCalc. Even though they were written about earlier versions, most of what they say is still true. If you want to know why I paid $10 for a calculator app, when a free one comes with the phone, you’ll find the answer in those posts.
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PCalc has both Algebraic and RPN entry modes, but I’m an RPN guy. ↩
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Dear Mike Arrington: I bought PCalc before becoming a beta tester. ↩
