Soulver 3 is currently 50% off.
In the past I have purchased Soulver 2 for macOS & iOS, but I did not end up using it much.
Yesterday I installed the version 3 trial and I like the new (to me?) functionality (currency/timezone conversion, Alfred integration) so far. Yet, I’m in doubt whether this will really increase my daily usage. Maybe I need some inspiration…
What do you use Soulver for? (Instead of a spreadsheet/calculator?)
It’s not my everyday calculator, but I like to use it for things where I want to jot down more than just numbers, just so my brain can keep track of what the numbers mean. I kind of use it more like a notebook than a real calculator.
Here are three actual examples of how I use it:
Example 1: Even though it’s just simple addition, I wanted to add up how much I got for a bunch of old Ninja Turtle toys I sold on eBay, so it was helpful for me to note what I got for each one.
Example 2: In figuring out what we should pay the babysitter, it was helpful to just be able to write it out as a sentence:
Example 3: Four families were renting a house for a vacation. 2 families were staying all 5 nights and 2 families were staying just 4 nights. We needed to figure out how much each family owed. It was helpful for me to write it out like this:
(It carried over the “per night” rate in the “payments per family” totals… but I knew those were totals so I didn’t bother looking into how to change that)
Hope those real-world examples were useful.
If you didn’t use Soulver 2, I doubt you’ll use version 3 much more.
For my part, I find it quite useful. I even use it to grade my student’s essays 
I’ve replaced Soulver with Jupyter notebooks. I use Juno in iPhone/iPad and straight up Jupyter on the Mac.
I’m the inverse. It’s been my go-to calculator for a decade. For one, instead of a single number field, it’s literally a napkin for math. Makes lists, comparing figures, and working through calculations that require multiple steps, super easy. For another thing the natural language interpretation is great accessibility. Things like “X as a % of Y” instead of “X/Y*100”. The former takes less brain compute to read; less brain compute to write; total win.
It’s still around on i(Pad)OS for the faithful! It currently lives on in perpetual TestFlight. No idea how you get on that if you aren’t already, however…
As far as my use of Soulver goes: I’ve flirted with Calca and a couple of other similar apps (like Numerously), but Soulver’s the one I always come back to for quick calculations, napkin math etc. No grand, specific uses— anything more involved ends up in a Numbers sheet.
I use it for monthly bill pay calculations. Also, I got a new job in September, and used Soulver to calculate benefits selection.
Today I used Soulver for comparing my 2023 health insurance options. Nice experience, but could have done the same in Numbers I think…
Does the main App need to run for QuickSoulver to work?
(For me that seems to be the case, but that’s maybe because I run the trial and have to press “Continue” in the nag screen?)
Definitely an excellent scratchpad. I also use its Alfred integration and the Terminal version.
Lots of my Soulver documents start as a one or two line inquiry and build up as I realize what the problem is. I can turn them into real programs or spreadsheets, but usually don’t need to.
Screenshots look good when sent to other people. Export/sharing options don’t need to be Drafts-level, but could be better.
@jcarucci 's suggestion is a good one, too. Practicing Python/matplotlib and Jupyter formatting will pay off more than practicing Soulver.
I use it to write down what I needed to pay, buy or spend on a given payday. Helps me plan ahead and move money around before I start touching my pay.
I know it can be done on a spreedsheet but I love how I can just select a result on the right side pane and create different variations. I can add additional comments, context, headlines. My head doesn’t really work in tables so a notepad approach works for me.
I use Soulver when I’m balancing my banking app (Debit & Credit) against what’s actually in my bank account. Besides that, it’s just my go-to calculator.
I will often open it and use siri to dictate a long string of numbers I need to quickly add.
“121+42+31”
It’s super fast and I can see visually if I’ve made a mistake or missed a number.
I use it like that to add up tax reciepts and for work purposes.
Probably one of the more esoteric uses…I manage a data archive which uses tape. At different times we’ve had different generations and densities of tape storage. I’ve used Soulver to do calculations to figure out when we’re going to run out of tape and having data sizes as builit-ins like TB/GB/PB/TiB/GiB/PiB makes it so much easier. My boss wants to put it in a Google spreadsheet (I’ve never gotten on with spreadsheets) but if we do that I will lament the ability to define a tape size with “T2max = 7.637TiB” and later after I’ve added up a bunch of data say “dataSize / T2max” to know how many tapes I’ll need for that data.
I always get mixed up between Soulver and Numi , are they similar but different? Which one is better?
I’m a non-profit administrator, and I use Soulver daily for calculations, in part so I can leave myself breadcrumbs to remember what I was doing and why. Extremely handy!
Soulver is feature richer, Numi is better looking.
I’ve used both. To me Numi’s font is better, colors are better, UI is designed better.
But all these can be subjective.
I did buy it, but did not use it very much yet.
Today I found out that their existing v2 TestFlight users (like me) can now also test Soulver 3 for iPad, but I’m not sure we are allowed to share the URL.
I don’t actually use Soulver, I use a free app called Numi that works in a very similar way. It’s very helpful when working through problems in university. Variables are great and let me quickly do calculations without typing the same constants over and over again…
Neither Numi nor Soulver have variable autocomplete, right? That’s one feature I’d like added. There’s a little too much reliance on not making typos, and on having to retype variable names, in long documents that build layers of calculations on top of premises.
