The amazing Wolfram|Alpha app for iPhone is on sale for $20 (normally $50) for the rest of the year.
With its simple interface the Wolfram|Alpha App lets you instantly compute answers to questions across thousands of domains—from finance and food, to math and medicine, to stocks and spacecraft, to wordplay and weather...
Just look at it. I reached out to Burberry for comment on the image above, which has been described by some as a Photoshop Disaster, but have not received a reply. What do you think? (Thanks, Souris) Previously:In case you missed it: Demi Moore's lawyers threaten Boing Boing ... The critici... More.
You know those reparative therapy "experts" who influenced the homophobic death penalty legislation in Uganda? For sex and gender minorities, that movement is not led by religious zealots, but by a handful of Toronto psychologists like Kenneth Zucker who still get taken seriously in their field. I... More.
"The knave abideth." Sweet baby Jesus, the attention to detail in this sucker is just mindblowing! What a thing of beauty. Here's the carpet-staining scene: WOO: Rise, and speak wisely, man--but hark; I see thy rug, as woven i'the Orient, A treasure from abroad. I like it not. I'll stain ... More.
Nuvigil is the slight new tweak on Cephalon's Provigil, a narcolepsy drug that became a big off-label brain hack hit for its ability to keep you awake without the jittery side effects of typical speed compounds. The company is banking on Nuvigil becoming the first FDA-approved "treatment" for jet la... More.
The NYT Magazine's "Year in Ideas" issue is a fantastic collection of short, intriguing proposals, problems, and possibilities. Zombie-Attack Science Working with a professor and two other graduate students, Munz built a mathematical model of a city of one million residents, in which an outbreak... More.
RSS Feed
Why pay even $20 for an app that does exactly the same thing as the webpage?
Or, you could simply use the browser on your iphone to go to the WolframAlpha homepage. True, it's not optimized for the iphone, but is that optimization worth $20? $50? Unless you use it all the time, my answer is no.
I don't get it... iPhones have web browsers, don't they?
Unless you're paying for an offline version of wolfram alpha (not bloody likely, I imagine that would be dozens of gigabytes), what benefit does this have over simply clicking this link in safari: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=earthquakes+china+2009 ?
I have never been able to get W/A to answer a single question, even when I type in something utterly banal and quantifiable like | number cattle killed united states per year | all I get back are some numbers about US square miles, and a calendar.
I asked the data librarian / statistics person at a major academic library and they couldn't get it to work either.
W/A has to sell that app for tons of money, because if it was any good they could just give it away for free and make advertizing money when everyone used it (like Google).
As it is, people will fork over 20 to 50 dollars to see that it is a total mess of a product. That's the only way W/A will make *any* $$$ off that mess of a product.
Why not just navigate to the web page in question?
Because Wolfram derfed the site on Iphones to "encourage" purchases of the app: http://gizmodo.com/5418419/wolfram-alpha-is-tired-of-people-not-paying-50-dollars-for-their-iphone-app
The web site is slow on the iPhone (at least on the iPhone 3G - can't speak for the 3GS). It's not quite unusable, but it's definitely slow enough to be very annoying. I would imagine that this app provides a quicker way to use the site, without all of the laggy JavaScript.
I could be wrong though, I haven't ever felt like dishing out that much money for the app. Does anyone know for sure?
Or, for a scant $15, you can call me on your iPhone and I'll search Wolfram Alpha for you!
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+cattle+slaughtered+per+year+in+the+united+states
11.9 million metric tons. (That's 25.88 slugs per second!) Finding the average post slaughter weight of a cow to convert meat back into cows apparently can't be done by WA.
My conclusion about WA remains the same as the day I saw it. Utterly useless to people. Maybe useful to machines when coupled with DBpedia.org though.
Regular PC edition of Mathematica, even a cut-down version, on the iphone would kick ass. Only then would anyone be willing to pay more than 5 bux for it.
rly don't think it's worth $20.
Is it just me or does anybody else always see Wolfram & Hart? Or have I been watching too many Angel reruns?
Anne, since they've allied themselves with Microsoft ("Bing" will supposedly use Wolfram|Alpha for certain searches), no ... it's not just you.
Yes. Every time they do something, it sounds like the exposition for a new episode.
Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure how to compute an answer from your input
I obviously think that Stephen Wolfram is a smart guy. However, I think he's gone off into Kamen/Kurzweil world of nuttiness, where he no longer has people saying "You are a nut, and this is a nutty idea." If you've ever tried to read his A New Kind of Science, you know what I'm saying. He was very proud of the fact that he didn't have an editor and published it himself, but that thing really needed someone to cut about half of the pages out; it was insanely repetitive.
It's pretty asinine to price the app this way (not free, that is) given that the terms of use for the app are the same as those of the web app, meaning the results are the sole property of Wolfram Research. $50 or $20 (or $10 or $5 or $1) is far too much to pay for an application that generates information I don't own.
Some should just write a simple web page that is a proxy to wolframalpha.com.
SCARY: When asked "How old am I?", Wolfram Alpha returned the correct answer because it somehow knows my correct birthdate!?
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+old+am+I%3F
Are you 35?
doh!
So....how long until they do the morally responsible thing and open source it?
The app is FREE on the MOTO DROID. Yay, iPhone.