This lead to the development of several calculator replacements to take advantage of the fact that a desktop has perfectly good keyboards hooked up, can afford to show good history, etc. I wrote one (which is now being maintained and ported to QML by someone else), but the most popular one seemed to be SpeedCrunch (http://code.google.com/p/speedcrunch/) or Qalculate (which KDE's KRunner supports using for inline expression evaluation nowadays, IIRC).
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Interestingly (IMHO), the issue with skeuomorphic calculator apps had been noted by a KDE developer in 2004 (http://dot.kde.org/2004/09/27/kcalc-modest-usability-improve...), and probably by others even earlier. Unfortunately Roberto's blog post doesn't remain online (Archived here: http://web.archive.org/web/20041010185905/http://www.pycs.ne...)
This lead to the development of several calculator replacements to take advantage of the fact that a desktop has perfectly good keyboards hooked up, can afford to show good history, etc. I wrote one (which is now being maintained and ported to QML by someone else), but the most popular one seemed to be SpeedCrunch (http://code.google.com/p/speedcrunch/) or Qalculate (which KDE's KRunner supports using for inline expression evaluation nowadays, IIRC).