Acqualia’s Soulver is a very unique calculator tool for Mac OS X. Say goodbye to the keypad and screen: this app uses a keyboard and two boxes. The idea is that Soulver is a calculator designed to work like a word processor. The screen shows two sections. On the left section, you type your query, and as you type, the right side will instantly update. If you type “21/3″ on the left side, without quotes, “7″ will appear on the right side. You can then go onto a new line to make a new calculation, but the previous calculation is still there, and you can go back and change this. This is SO much more useful than the paper tape of the traditional calculator.

However, Soulver even lets you forget the traditional style of numbers for calculations, because it works with English expressions. Type “half a million” on the left-hand side, and Soulver will correctly return 500,000. Type “My house is 5 ft by 4 ft”, and Soulver will return 20, which is the number of square feet your house is. Soulver even lets your set constants for a long drawn out question. If, for example, I write “cookies = $500 a cookie” on one line and “How much does 5 cookies cost?” on the next line, Soulver will return $2,500. It’s really intelligent!

Soulver also contains some additional features. It has an Answers palette, which floats so that you can see not just the decimal answer of the active line, but also the answer expressed in Root, Fraction, Degrees, Hex, and Binary. A statistics palette is also available which displays stats on all the numbers on the right-hand side, including their Total, Average, Median, Range, Minimum, and Maximum. Soulver also lets you save the current sheet of calculations you’re working on as a document that you can open again later, as well.

Soulver is, without a doubt, the definition of what a computer calculator should be. If you’ve ever been frustrated with Apple’s Calculator.app, give Soulver a try.

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Tags: calculator, Mac, math, review, Software