Calca for Android

One of the best gems on the app store - deserves to be better known. Handing tool to give life to my notes. Love it

Some features seem to be broken without any new updates (11 months ago last update). Dark mode does not work, rendering the app useless if your Android is set to auto-switch at night. Black text on black screen tends to be hard to see. Google searches fail every time too. And I have just barely started using the app. Great concept, but quickly falling out of love.

I use this app regularly and it's a joy to use. I don't use a many of it's features and it's still worth it. Well done.

2020 Update: It's officially completely unusable in "dark mode" and clearly abandonware. Avoid. The worst thing about developers relying upon the App Store as their sole distribution channel has to be the fact that it is now impossible to try anything out before you buy it. Granted, the price is not extravagant in any way, but if I had to do it over again, I probably wouldn’t buy Calca. It works well enough for its intended purpose, and I generally find it more intuitive than a spreadsheet, but given the fact that it’s chosen to present its entire UI through a text editor, it’s an absolutely miserable one. The goofy font changes that happen as you type make it extremely difficult to concentrate on anything and are a rather poor substitute for actual syntax highlighting. If you don’t like the font in general, too bad; all you can change the size. Prefer something other than a garish white field to stare at? Sorry, no deal. Tab stops? It’s anybody’s guess where they’ll fall. Who needs to align anything? Crazy people, apparently. But hey, it supports Markdown, so John Gruber’s going to plug it no matter what. Obviously it makes no sense to even try to mimic anyone’s favorite text editor since their feature sets can be quite voluminous, but at the very least, make it possible to edit a text file open in Calca in something else that actually works and have it pick up the changes for re-rendering. This doesn’t work at all, so don’t bother trying. I like the idea, but it should probably be implemented as a plugin of some sort rather than an anemic application.

I like that this is the more full-featured of the notepad calculator apps when compared with Soulver/Numi/Speedcrunch. My only complaint is the syntax is a bit more intrusive so it doesn't quite have the magic feeling of writing plain english that Soulver/Numi do.