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Show HN: Figr.app – a multi-user, notepad style calculator (desktop app)

by jklp on 9/19/22, 11:57 PM with 87 comments

Hi all, just posting an update to my previous Show HN, where I announced a side-project I worked on which was a (web version) of a multi-user, notepad style calculator:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31817997

After a couple of user requests (and having a good think about it) I decided to migrate the web UI to create a Mac and Windows desktop app. After using it a little bit, I feel this is a much better experience than the webapp, and reduces a lot of the friction if I wanted to run a few small calculations.

You can find the download links below:

https://www.figr.app/download

For context, Figr was a side project I worked on to get back into coding after being in management for the last few years. It's kind of a cross between popular notepad style calculators (like Soulver, Numi, etc), but also has multi-user editing (like Google Docs). I've got some example templates below which hopefully show what it can do, and hopefully is relevant to the community:

- https://www.figr.app/s/RUNWAY - An example to work out your burn rate / runway

- https://www.figr.app/s/LTVCAC - An LTV/CAC calculator

- https://www.figr.app/s/CONTRACTOR - Hourly rate calculator for contractors

Opened to feedback, or technical questions if others are in the process of moving, or thinking about moving their webapps to desktop apps, as it's been quite a journey!

Thanks!

  • by armchairhacker on 9/20/22, 12:31 AM

    I wish there were more apps like this which let you just type text and make/do things. Just make everything a sort of real-time coding. It's often much faster to do stuff with text and keyboard than any fancy GUI.

    Other examples: sequencediagram.net, SwiftUI and React to some extent, vim directory managers (e.g. some let you rename files just by editing text and delete them just by deleting lines)

    The only issue is, I've worked on building these, and it's a lot harder than it looks. You can either do immediate mode, which requires fast parsing and rendering and supporting all sorts of illegal values; or you can try to do retained mode, but there are insane #s of edge cases and the effort to compute diff usually makes it slower anyways. Furthermore if you want a really fancy text view, you need to build it yourself, which is a huge project on its own.

  • by easygenes on 9/20/22, 5:18 AM

    Ooh. I have used Soulver on iOS for nearly a decade now. Sadly, the developer has pulled it from the App Store for a long time, so I can’t point others to it. For me, Soulver has the ideal UI for a phone screen. The one thing I really feel it is missing is a cross-platform sync. I used the iCloud integration and Mac app, but if I could access my worksheets from Linux and Windows just as easily I would be totally happy.

    Figr, ignoring the lack of mobile apps, doesn’t really scratch this itch either though, as I want to self host my sync.

  • by bombtrack on 9/20/22, 3:02 AM

    I love apps like this. I currently use Numi daily for running financial-related tracking and scenarios. It has a few annoying UI quirks, so I'm super open for alternatives (especially with cloud syncing).

    I played around with porting my Numi sheets over, and the only thing that's tripped me up so far is using underscores as numerical separators, eg: 1_000_000 for 1000000. All my Numi values are written this way, so that's my only feature request. I guess I could just use commas in this context.

    Great work!

    Edit: And dark mode :)

  • by gurupanguji on 9/20/22, 12:22 AM

    This reminds me of Soulver

    https://soulver.app/

  • by jaredreich on 9/20/22, 2:48 AM

    Very cool! Built something similar recently called Calcutext: https://calcutext.com/ https://github.com/jaredreich/calcutext

  • by vinaypai on 9/20/22, 1:36 PM

    Congrats on building and launching your app.

    However, in my opinion, you need different examples to show the strengths of this app. A lot of the examples on your page look kinda clunky and error-prone to me, and better solved with a spreadsheet.

    Take the "personal finance" one. The "total expenses" row lists out all the expenses adding them out one at a time. In a spreadsheet you'd just type =sum(A1:A5). Imagine it wasn't just 5 but 20 items. Now your sum gets pretty unweildy. How confident can you be from looking at that sum that you haven't missed one of the expense items? In a spreadsheet you know pretty clearly that =sum(A1:A20) has all those rows. Better still, if you insert a row to add another item, it'll update the sum for you.

    The "Investment returns" sheet is another example. What if I wanted to extend that to 30 years? In a spreadsheet I'd just copy the last row and past it in the the next 10 cells and I'm done. Here's I have to paste it 10 times, and then manually update each row and hope I didn't make a typo anywhere. What if I didn't want my savings to be constant but assume that I'm going to increase savings a year over time?

    The unit conversion is somewhat neat though, so maybe examples that use that a bit more?

  • by wellpast on 9/20/22, 12:52 AM

    This is great, I love local-first [1] software.

    Are you using OT or CRDTs for real-time editing?

    Are you using any specific cross-desktop platform? (Electron?)

    [1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

  • by fatih-erikli on 9/20/22, 10:03 AM

    I use Python program for that It works pretty fine

    Example

      $ python
  >>> weeklyprice=4000
  >>> dailyprice=weeklyprice/7
  >>> februaryprice=dailyprice\*28
  >>> februaryprice
  15988

  • by geesejuggler on 9/20/22, 12:28 PM

    Cool! Looks promising!

    Some UI/UX remarks...

    - I would expect to find the 'new sheet' option near the sheet list (on top or on the bottom perhaps?).

    - Creating a new sheet does not give an empty sheet (instead it presents the same info as in the preloaded example).

    - How do you deal with different notations for numbers? Can I switch somewhere from #,###.## to #.###,##?

    - Operators and currency is now displayed in gray, just like the comments. This hurts legibility more than it helps focus.

    - When you can detect unit indicators, maybe allow users to click on them to change the unit to another (compatible variant). For example change kilometers to yards.

    - Header and sub-header styles are quite similar, makes them hard to discern.

  • by awb on 9/20/22, 12:20 AM

    Thanks for sharing! It looks slick.

    Can you address the elephant in the room: why use Figr instead of Excel?

  • by ksec on 9/20/22, 12:37 PM

    There is a few things I wanted but mostly missing in these type of calculators. More Units.

    K for Thousands, M for Million, B for Billion and T for Trillion.

    Some Calculators either dont offer these, or they do but with different Letters representation because M, B and T are used for something else. IMO this seems backwards because those are the most common unit in analysis.

    Other Units including PB for Petabytes, TB. GB, MB, KB, as well as Mbps to Gbps unit conversion. us, ms, ns, for Latency calculation.

    Getting Market Cap, P/E data etc from Yahoo Finance.

  • by krstffr on 9/20/22, 8:06 AM

    Hi, looks super cool!

    Just some quick feedback from the first things I tried in the app (which did not work). It has to do with currency conversion: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/93975/191202587-9b...

  • by russianGuy83829 on 9/20/22, 12:17 AM

    How hard would it be to create a Linux version?

  • by medv on 9/20/22, 9:32 AM

    Same as a Chrome Extension: https://numbr.dev

  • by twarge on 9/20/22, 1:35 AM

    This seems to be a shadow of Calca.

    https://calca.io

  • by nordicio on 9/20/22, 10:10 AM

    Looks great!

    If you are looking for an iOS/iPadOS app my own Kalkyl 3 includes support for shared documents with real-time collaboration.

    You don’t input text (but there’s of course keyboard support), instead you input tokens so that e.g sin is one token just like the digits. WYSIWYG editing with raised exponents, root-overbars. Arbitrarily complex unit conversions (e.g USD/ft^2 to EUR/m^2 is a single conversion) and dimensional analysis.

    The app is free, but the document features are for pay (with a free trial):

    https://apps.apple.com/se/app/kalkyl/id519933025?l=en

  • by SimplGy on 9/24/22, 7:30 AM

    Respectfully, might need to rename it if you’re going for broad adoption.

    Just imagine speaking the name of your product to a family member who asks what you’re working on, or the cashier at the grocery store asks what your startup is.

    I know you don’t know me and it’s none of my business. I just thought better to rebrand sooner than later. Maybe ask someone you trust wrt marketing kinds of questions?

  • by KierPrev on 9/20/22, 3:40 AM

    Hi! For science, you should allow showing output for small calculations. (Think of the order of e-34, like the Planck's constant.)

    Thanks for the work! Waiting for a Linux version :) (Flathub autoupdates, if you were thinking of appimages)

  • by webmobdev on 9/20/22, 12:49 AM

    Is it available for download somewhere other than the OS "app stores"?

  • by ernestipark on 9/20/22, 12:19 PM

    I've wanted to build something like this for a long time because I tend to use normal notes for a lot of basic calculations (e.g. personal finances, budgeting, etc) that don't require a spreadsheet, so this is really cool. But I probably wouldn't use this because there's a lot of intertia to just continue using my existing notes apps (Mac Notes mostly) because of the ease of syncing and integration into rest of the ecosystem. I wish this could be just a plugin to stuff I already have so its not another app I have to use.

  • by fulafel on 9/20/22, 5:36 AM

    Click saver: Windows & Mac only

  • by smusamashah on 9/20/22, 10:37 AM

    There are a few more calculators in the similar spirit shared on HN before.

    - https://bbodi.github.io/notecalc3/notecalc

    - https://dedo.io/

    - https://notepadcalculator.com/

  • by gman83 on 9/20/22, 6:07 AM

    What language did you use to build this? What about the UI? Also, I tried to login to the application with Google and got "Authorization Error -- Error 403: access_denied -- The developer hasn’t given you access to this app. It’s currently being tested and it hasn’t been verified by Google. If you think you should have access, contact the developer"

  • by 88840-8855 on 9/20/22, 10:42 AM

    It looks great. So far I have been using Numi and I can see a few advantages and disadvantages in both apps.

    Numi:

    + lightweight

    + very fast start

    - tabs are a paid feature

    Figr:

    + variables

    + tabs

    - slow start compared to Numi

    - cannot customize the icon bar

    What both apps dont have and what I am looking for: A super lightweight excel-like tables app to do basic calculations with formulas behind the cells. Do you know anything like that, guys?

  • by g-camargo on 9/20/22, 1:11 PM

    This is really cool. We're building something similar at Decipad (https://www.decipad.com) would love to hear what you think.

  • by pgt on 9/20/22, 1:03 PM

    Good job! I spent a while working on a more flexible & real-time version of Frink. Needs to exist.

    https://frinklang.org/

  • by derekhsu on 9/20/22, 1:13 AM

    Interesting idea and I like it. However, I just tried it and found it does not support Chinese. Would you like to add it as a new feature?

  • by sc970 on 9/20/22, 12:22 PM

    Seems like by default every new sheet I create it shares with 3 people from @figr.app and I am unable to remove them.

  • by sc970 on 9/20/22, 12:13 PM

    Nice!! Loving it so far, would be nice to hide the side sheets pane and also allow multiple instances!

  • by metadat on 9/20/22, 3:18 PM

    Is there a mobile version in the plan? It'd be cool to have a notepad style TI-89 on steroids.

  • by Dave3of5 on 9/20/22, 8:31 AM

    Looks interesting, what makes this different from using a Google Sheet ?

  • by craig on 9/20/22, 1:01 PM

    Looks really neat. Anyone know of a similar neovim/vim plugin?

  • by felipelalli on 9/20/22, 3:13 PM

    ASK HN: Is there a similar mode to Emacs? I didn't find it.

  • by renewiltord on 9/20/22, 1:59 AM

    Cool app. Thank you!

  • by davidork on 9/20/22, 3:02 PM

    so, speedcrunch, but on the web. got it.

  • by jeffreportmill1 on 9/20/22, 2:31 AM

    How do you save figr docs to the cloud?

  • by gardenhedge on 9/21/22, 7:35 PM

    How will Figr make money?

  • by lovetocode on 9/20/22, 2:22 PM

    this is super cool good work!

  • by MikeYasnev007 on 9/20/22, 2:04 AM

    Hopefully I am not counter or calculator)