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An online calculator, just what the world needs right? Well, after using Calcoolate for just a little while I’d say yes. Built with the philosophy that everything should be Web-based, Calcoolate is an Ajax-based calculator that’s lickety split fast because it does all the work using your computer with no calls back to a server. It even saves the results as a cookie which has to make it one of the lowest bandwidth hogging Web-based apps around.

My favorite thing about it is they didn’t make Calcoolate look like and function like a desktop calculator. You know the kind, I’m sure you have one on your computer right now. It looks just like a calculator. It’s hard to use and it tries to duplicate a real-world calculator. Online calendars have the same problem but that’s a topic for some other day. Calcoolate is nothing more than a text field with a few buttons you for common functions if you don’t want to learn the shorthand. Entering “4*10-5” into the text field and hitting enter will display the answer in a history table which saves all your calculations. Kind of amazing that a calculator would remember more than one result at a time isn’t it? Each result in your history can be given a name and used as a variable in future calculations. Some features, like copying the history to your clipboard, are only available in IE which is unfortunate but probably not a deal-breaker for many. It’s a simple site but it serves a useful purpose and does it quite well, effictively killing off one more desktop app in the process. Oh I forgot to mention you can do all sorts of unit conversion with it too.

I use my desktop calculator maybe once a week and it’s generally a tedious process. Find it. Launch it. Use it for some minor calculation. In the amount of time it takes me I could be done if I had used Calcoolate instead. Windows users can install the app and have it launched in place of your desktop calculator. I guess I’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way and bookmark it.