By Prarthana Mitra
A Chennai-based iOS developer was one of the winners of the coveted Apple Design Award at the World Wide Developers Conference 2018 in San Jose for his reinvention of the age-old calculator app.
Raja Vijayraman, the developer of the app had no idea he would go on to win the huge award at Apple’s annual developer-focused event, even as he was flown to attend the event held on Tuesday.
Elegantly and uniquely designed, and highly customizable, Calzy 3 from Chennai-based WapleStuff is one of the finest calculator apps in modern times, according to tech critics, and a must-have on your Apple device.
The iOS store describes it as a “beautiful modern calculator”. Written in Swift, its unique selling points include a feature to store multiple numerical values and reuse it across multiple calculations with a simple drag and drop interaction.
So what can Calzy do?
The award-winning app lets you “drag & Drop to share results in other apps, and help you perform day-to-day mathematical calculations in a more elegant way,” Apple said in a statement late Tuesday.
It offers a unique “Memory Area” which is stripped of all traditional memory functions but comes with an expression view where you can review all the steps in the current calculation. There is a scientific calculator too which can be pulled up from hidden settings using 3D touch.
Unique “memory” area of the application. Credit: Screenshot.The bookmark option enables users to access earlier calculations which can also be secured with a password.
Calzy can even set a button to calculate a specific tax on the amount. Available at Rs. 149, Calzy works across all Apple devices from the Mac to Apple Watch, and even as a Today Widget and iMessage extension.
Hear it from the man himself
“I had no idea. I thought I would be meeting people at WWDC,” Raja told the Indian Express after the felicitation.
A mechanical engineer with experience in the prolific South Indian film industry, where he worked as a graphics artist, Vijayraman is a self-taught coder who soon discovered that he has an innate knack for developing software applications.
First launched in 2014, the latest version of Calzy is a completely revamped version of the previous app. As the unassuming Vijayraman collected the award in a Rajnikanth T-shirt on Tuesday, he proved to the world that the desire to learn, coupled with simplicity, is key.
Prarthana Mitra is a staff writer at Qrius
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