Wolfram Alpha for iPad: Clean, beautiful but is it still useful?

Posted by James Eunson | June 3, 2010

Wolfram Alpha for iPad is a strikingly clean and familiar frontend to the “knowledge engine” of the internet, but is it still useful off the desktop?

Hailing from Wolfram Research, famed creators of Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha is a self-proclaimed “knowledge engine”. It’s not a search engine but rather, a fact and solution finding engine.

The goal of the platform is this:

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.

And now, all that power is accessible via your iPad.

Choose your battles

Wolfram Alpha certainly chooses its battles, and completely demolishes them. Its focus is on scientific problems in the areas of Chemistry, Biology, Computer Science, Mathematics and host of others.

Solutions given are very relevant and specialized to whatever domain you are working in. There are diagrams for chemical equations and step-by-step solutions for many classes of Math problems. It’s a professional reference, an essential educational resource – above all, it’s a really nice site (and the iPad app promo site isn’t half bad either.)

And the app makes a great transition to the iPad platform. There’s not much new to see in the interface department but that isn’t so much a bad thing.

When opening the app for the first time, you’ll notice almost the same user interface as the site is used — which is actually a great thing considering the light, airy site interface that characterizes the site was already damn near perfect.

Upgrades abound

One improvement that jumps out is how much easier it is to find demonstration problems of Wolfram Alpha. An easily missable link on the front page of the website takes you to the web version of this. In the iPad application however, example problems are front and center and really demonstrate the versatility of the site.

Operating in my personal domain of Computer Science and Maths, I had no idea it did genetic and chemical equations and includes a whole lot of interesting stats about materials and elements. If that kind of thing floats your boat (and it does mine!) then you’ve come to the right app.

Wolfram Alpha for iPad also keeps a history of your previous entries, which is useful to see the progression of subproblems you’ve solved in solving one particularly nasty, larger problem.

It doesn’t go to 11

So the desktop version is essential, but does it belong on your iPad?

Let’s not mince words: the site and the app are almost one and the same. Short of some minor usability improvments mentioned above, the app is basically a window to the site.

To some degree, you’re paying for the priviledge of having the web page bookmarked on your home screen and nicely formatted for your iPad screen.

If Wolfram Alpha for iPad failed on any level, it’s that the site is already too good. How can you improve it in the transition to the iPad platform? I can’t really think of any obvious faults, and it seems the developers agree.

And even if there were areas to improve upon, would giving the iPad an edge over the web app really be a smart move? Especially when the web app is almost certainly their prime source of traffic.

Wolfram Alpha is an excellent app but there’s nothing the app brings to the iPad that can’t already be done on the desktop, and probably more easily.

At the basest level however, Wolfram Alpha justifies its price in making you smarter than when you started it. And you can never have too much of such a swish interface.

If nothing else, purchasing Wolfram Alpha for iPad is a cheap way of expressing your appreciation to Wolfram for providing such an amazing web application free of charge. And it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than Mathematica!

Our rating – 4 out of 5

Wolfram Alpha for iPad is $2 and can be purchased here.