A handy problem Soulver

Soulver calculator app
$2.99 for iPhone; $4.99 for iPad

Why buy a calculator app for an iPhone or iPad? Apple has already included a perfectly good one at no extra charge. But the developers at Australia’s Acqualia Software Pty. Ltd. have come up with a clever variation that might be worth a few bucks to you.

With Soulver you can combine text and numbers, allowing you to make notes as you make calculations. This is very convenient for many tasks, like drawing up the household budget. You can type in a description of each number--salary, mortgage payment, car loans, and enter the relevant number right alongside. As you’re plugging this in on the left side of the screen, Soulver extracts the numbers, moves them to the right side, and instantly performs the calculation, with the result appearing at the bottom of the screen.

It’s also speeds up a variety of everyday calculations. When something costs $7.85 plus 8 percent sales tax, what’s the total bill? Just type “7.85 + 8%” and there’s your answer.

Pecking words into a calculator could get a bit tedious. But there’s a nice payoff--when you’re done, you’ve got an annotated description of your work, similar to what you’d get by building a budget in Microsoft Excel. And you can instantly save a copy of your work for future reference.

Soulver nicely updates the traditional calculator, at a modest price.