Asgalon Tikal Calculators Support Page

This is the support page for the Asgalon Tikal Calculators, which are available through the Apple App Store. An Android version is in preparation.

Tikal-25 scientific-technical calculator

This app emulates a calculator model from 1978. It is restricted to a 8 digits display, which is sufficient for most tasks. Internally, it uses 128bit Decimals for arithmetic operations and 64bit Doubles for transcendental functions, so rounding errors should be mostly negligible. The correctness of the calculations is verified with a set of now 45 unit tests that feed different types of calculations into the engine and verify the correctness of the displayed result against known values.

Whenever a choice has to be made between nostalgia and enhanced usability, normally I choose better usability. So the accuracy is much higher than possible in 1978, and the user interface uses dynamic elements to improve input feedback. So this is an evolving system, improving with usage experience.

Basically, there is not much here yet, support-wise. I wrote this app because my calculator failed after 46 years and I decided to transfer it to the iPhone, and since it was quite an effort to develop this I am offering it to the public. I have no idea yet if there is any demand for this. The Tikal-25 app will receive updates from time to time. It depends a bit on the demand. We are a bit informal right now. In case of support needs please write a plain text email to support (at) tikal.asgalon.net

Hints and Tips

Here you can read the online version of the Manual. The online version contains the features of the version under development.

The Statistics Visualization, Log and Manual are reachable by tapping on the header line "⌥ Asgalon Tikal-25"

To Do

Localizations - Until now there is only rudimentary support for some languages. Translations for function symbols are missing, and especially the Arabic version needs more care for Eastern-Arabic numerals in the keypad and display and the mathematical symbols and functions. I replaced the 7 segment display with the arabic system font. I have to do some more research about variants in mathematical notation used in different locales using eastern arabic numerals. This will need some work, to be followed by other variants in mathematical notation, especially for educational purposes for other locales, where needed.
Better Color Schemes
Improve Button design
Some more user configurable options
Accessibility features
App Intents / Siri Voice commands
Extra function blocks for domain specific applications
Android version, needs nearly complete rewrite

Known Problems

The existing translations may be of poor quality. This will improve when the app pays enough to engage professional translators, or you send me translation proposals for your language to integrate.
Upside down portrait mode does not work, no idea why. I have it marked as disabled, but that does not change anything. The solution is always just a quarter turn away.

Next Version

The next version (1.3) will have a renewed design better adapted to the iPhone with larger buttons. The OFF switch, which was a remnant of the "emulator" setup will be replaced with a level switch to choose between different function sets, so level II will have the hyperbolic trigonometric functions and some more useful operations, such as definition of functions with up to 3 variable parameters. Also, Level III will have functions for computer and electronics engineering with hexadecimal, octal and binary base conversion and Boolean algebra operators. The basic system will get some early refactoring in preparation of an Android/Linux version

Next version will also have configurable display variants, probably for western, arab and klingon numerals first. There still is a slight problem with the button font configuration for that. Klingon and Arab hexadecimals are probably a bit experimental.

Privacy Policy / Data Protection

We don't really handle any customer data, but here is the obligatory Privacy Policy required by the App Store.