Calculators exist to make numbers easier for us. Calculations are a part of our day-to-day lives, be it adding up the items in your grocery bill or performing heavy number calculations for your college or other projects. We’ve worked with physical calculators for a long time before smartphones came along and made them obsolete. Today, almost every smartphone comes bundled with a Calculator app and the respective app stores carry apps from 3rd party developers as well. I’ve tried a few different iOS calculator apps that improve the basic idea and are designed well, but none could manage to impress me as well as Sumhold did.
Sumhold claims to be the first calculator “designed for humans”. Let’s leave aside the Samsung-y tagline for a bit and focus on what Sumhold really excels at — Simplicity. Sumhold is gorgeous to look at. It features a stark white and red color scheme with big bold numbers and buttons. There’s no unnecessary chrome cluttering your view. As you tap on the numbers, the buttons have a pressed state that I especially liked. The numbers are in grey, while the operators are in red so it’s easy to distinguish them. The calculations you do appear in a single line at the top, with your answer just under it. Calculations happen on the fly, so there’s no ‘=’ button.
But Sumhold’s nicest feature is its implementation of memory save. I have never understood the concept of the MR/MC buttons on the calculator, so Sumhold’s implementation was doubly awesome for me. If you swipe down on the calculated answer, Sumhold saves it into a bubble just above the numbers. So if you want to reuse it in another calculation, tap on it. To clear it, hit the little ‘x’. This is super nifty and just visually works out well. You’ve got to try it. You can, of course, copy/paste in the app.
Sumhold is a lovely calculator app for iPhone and is available for just $0.99 on the App Store.