Apps: Calzy 3

Who would have thought a simple calculator app for iOS devices would be picked as the first ever app from India to bag an Apple Design Award? The annual event, held alongside the developer conference, awards the best apps across Apple’s platforms, and of the thousands of apps that are launched every year, few make it to this level. Yet, there was Chennai’s Raja Vijayaraman on stage in his Rajinikanth T-shirt to pick up the award for Calzy 3, the calculator reimagined.

The appeal behind Calzy 3 is apparent when you start using the app — the user interface is clean without economising on features. Pretty much straight away, you notice Calzy is missing a few usual suspects, most notably the Memory buttons. In their place, the app lets you simply drag and drop results to the top of the app and save them for future use. Most additional “advanced features” — tax calculations, currency rounding or scientific mode, for instance — are hidden by default and are accessible by 3D Touch-ing one of the bottom row of buttons. Yet, you can make Calzy your own, by customising the keyboard layout — you can adjust the text size and drag-and-drop and arrange the keys according to your preferences! As a bonus, there is a lock screen widget for quick access, along with integration with iMessage, the latter allowing you to bring up a calculator within conversations and do stuff like split bills while chatting.

Yet, the story behind the app has all the makings of a rags to riches tale, with Vijayaraman’s humble beginnings as a mechanical engineer-turned VFX artist (he has worked on Rajnikanth starrer Robot in 2010). That’s around when he bought his first iPhone and used the apps on the device, quickly progressing to code for the platform in Python and Objective-C, and then using Swift, which has become Apple’s main app development language in recent years. Calzy 3 wasn't his first app — he has a bunch of other apps to his credit — but ask him why he thinks Calzy 3 became a hit and Raja says, “Balance is the key…having useful features with a good design. Oh, and you should have good taste!".