Pi Cubed, the iPhone app

Just a little post on an awesome app I found on the twitter.

The application is called Pi cubed, and it's basically a calculator on iPhone that utilizes the touch interface. The description I'm giving here sounds depressingly simple, but you need to see this application in person in order to understand how cool it is, and how relatively mundane act of calculation can be made fun and interactive simply through some interface change.

Here is a video of the application in action via http://theapppodcast.com site.



As you can see, this isn't the kind of calculator designed to help you out with your pocket change. The support for formatting the equations of increasingly complex form to pdf or text output through email means that the application is aimed at students and possibly professional who might have some great ideas for equations on the go (though in that case the absence of LaTeX formatting is a little jarring). This application is obviously aiming to be a type of mobile Mathematica.

I'm a huge supporter of scientific apps on mobile platforms. I think the market for scientific applications on the increasingly sophisticated mobile handsets is a huge opportunity and is one of the things that might actually help in changing the world for the better by bringing the lab out of the universities and corporations. So the whole Mathematica-mobile aspect of this application, and inevitable coming of even more sophisticated mathematics/sciences packages for mobile platforms is exciting to me.

I just have one problem with this though. Why iPhone? iPhone isn't open. If you want to develop for an iPhone you need to clunk down for a computer capable of running OS X natively, and you use Apple proprietary toolset that no one else in the industry uses. The draconian app approval process and anti-competitive behavior at Apple had been making the headlines in tech communities lately. I guess this is just a market issue, but I find myself keep hoping for a decent Android based replacement for iPhones that developers can distribute their work for.