oday Tapbots, makers of iPhone utility apps Pastebot and Convertbot, have released their latest application, Calcbot for the iPhone and iPad.
The $0.99 app [iTunes link] is great looking, highly functional and works beautifully on both the iPad and the iPhone. It has also been fully optimized for the iPhone 4.
To help promote the app, Tapbots has teamed up with the MacHeist guys and their company tap tap tap to try to make the release a little more viral. What’s the viral marketing plan? Free software.
If you go to the special MacHeist page for Calcbot, you’ll see an option to get Socialite for Mac for free.
Simply share the news about Calcbot with your friends on Facebook and you’ll get a full license for Socialite from Realmac Software for free. Socialite is a really solid social media client for Mac OS X that lets you manage Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Digg and RSS feeds all from one app.
This is an interesting way to promote a new mobile app release and we’re curious to see how Calcbot performs.
Incidentally, Calcbot is a solid application in its own right. In addition to having support for basic and scientific functions, the app also stores your calculations on a sort of virtual receipt tape feature. That means you can access your past calculations, including all the steps involved in getting to that figure, and you can either access them instantly in the calculator (to add on expressions) or copy or e-mail the string.
Calcbot also uses a live expression view so that you can see the history of your calculation quickly and easily. This is handy if you frequently start a calculation and then forget where you are.
The iPad doesn’t include a calculator app and the built-in app on the iPhone is completely usable, but not nearly as spiffy. While Calcbot isn’t going to be as advanced as, say, PCalc, it’s also less expensive.
What do you think of the app and its launch promotion?
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