Article by George Norman

On 09 Feb 2010

The team behind computational knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha announced the release of an iPhone specific app last year, in October. The one thing that people complained about at the time was the rather hefty price tag - they liked the functionality a lot. The Wolfram Alpha team explained that because so much hard work went into the app, they couldn’t give it away for free. They did offer a significant discount during the holidays though.

The news is that the Wolfram Alpha iPhone app has been updated to version 1.1. The update comes with this significant change: the specialized keyboards (the ones you see when you first open the app) have been “painstakingly constructed to ease the burden of entering queries”.


“Our goal in creating these keyboards was to form families of characters that naturally occur together both in common use and in traditional mathematical applications. We also wanted mathematical expressions to look and feel natural to enhance usability and understanding. Version 1.1 has four specialized keyboards: the default keyboard, the “math” keyboard accessed by the right-shift key, the “Greek” keyboard accessed by one press of the left-shift key, and the “symbol” keyboard accessed by a second press of the left-shift key,” explained the Wolfram Alpha team.

This is on top of the regular features the Wolfram Alpha iPhone app has to offer:

• The app is connected to Wolfram Alpha’s supercomputing cloud. This allows it to bring the Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine experience to the mobile user.
• It can be used by pretty much anyone, but the team at Wolfram Alpha highlighted these category of users in particular: financial analysts, physicians, scientists, engineers, students, teachers, journalists, parents, economists, nutritionists, systems analysts, marketing managers, pilots, sportsmen.
• The app’s user interface is specially designed for the iPhone. Consequently the UI features a special notation keyboard, customized iPhone output, editable history, and it integrates with native iPhone services (like Maps).
• Easily get an answer to all sorts of questions, spreading across countless domains.

If you would like to get started with Wolfram Alpha, please click here.
If you would like to get the Wolfram Alpha iPhone app, please click here.



Tags: Wolfram Alpha, Apple, iPhone, iPhone App

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