This is really great on several levels: it helps the app to stand out among all those other calculators and it is a subtle little criticism of Apple’s review process.
Why would anyone pay for a calculator on the iphone when there's a perfectly good one already? I don't see any features there that aren't in the standard one.
The for-pay version is (optionally) an RPN calculator. And both the free and paid versions of PCalc have a backspace key - this alone was worth the switch for me.
Most of the stuff I post to the front page is quite dry and technical: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mbrubeck But sometimes I just want to cheer on an entrepreneur who's done something clearly awesome.
If this is PR, it will be lost with the masses (for whom PR is meant for). This feature neither falls into the hacking nor PR camp. Easter egg, maybe. Useless feature, definitely.
And that doesn't include all the blogs that picked it up. Getting this much publicity with a non-feature (complete with a caricature of a press release) is impressive. Just one example: this is the first time tuaw.com writes about the iPhone version of Pcalc. It could have written about the app when it was released or when new versions came out. It did not. And it's not as though the developer didn't try: http://www.dragthing.com/blog/?p=172
If you can't take the direct route, take the indirect one. And know what journalists value. Not the one-millionth calculator but childish easter eggs. Mission accomplished.
My dad, may he rest in peace, loved to order things from HeathKit, bust out the soldering iron, and go to town. One of the smaller projects was one of these:
I was young, but I remember one day when a friend of the family came over, I caught them giggling. One of them must have been telling the other one an early version of this joke...
This seems like a rather useless feature in my opinion... If you're easily offended, why do things that would offend yourself. The other "user group" is elementary school students, and how many of those have an iPhone they will be downloading calculators for?
