NOT BASEBALL 

MyScript calculator (iTunes version link) is a calculator that does a fairly good job of recognizing your handwriting and turning it into an expression and then evaluating that expression. It can even solve equations if you use ? as the variable.

It’s fun to use. Most of the time it could recognize what I wanted. I could cross out what it didn’t recognize and rewrite it and most of the time the second pass worked.

To be more practical it needs a couple upgrades. First, really complicated expressions- like financial computations from the formula for monthly payments with interest rates entered like 0.04/12 were recognized by the calculator, but not computed. It seems there must be a limit in how many computations can be done at once. Also, you can’t easily use the answer from the previous computation, You can add more to your last calculation, but I sometimes ran out of screen space. It would be great if “A” or “ANS” automatically used the answer from the previous computation. The solve feature only returns one answer. When working with trig functions or square roots you need to know that more solutions (might) exist. Also, you can only have one “?” per equation at this point.

The company that makes this calculator also makes a LaTex generator using handwriting recognition. This causes me to guess that this calculator is going to get a lot better soon. All they need to do is improve the math kernel since they can already recognize complicated expressions in their other product.

BASEBALL POSTSCRIPT

Wow, what fun for fans of the Royals- 4 extra inning games out of 5 games and they have won them all.