A skinnable phone/desktop 42S emulator (aside from Free42/Plus42)

[MickM]

(10-22-2023 02:35 AM)Eric Rechlin Wrote:  It sounds like the functionality you are requesting in the E key has nothing to do with the skin, so I don't see how they are related.

I was hoping to not bog down this topic with the details of my skin, but I guess it's not looking that way. Amongst other features, my skin (which does not conform to the standard 42S layout) contains buttons for predefined metric notation exponents for faster entry of such numbers. The button labeled "µ" (micro) is simply a macro that emulates the sequence of pressing of E +/- 6 and similarly "p" (pico) emulates E +/- 1 2 and so on. I have attached a graphic of the phone version of the skin purely for context. While I'm more than happy to accept any feedback on it, that would totally derail this thread so that's better done in another post (if this skin actually ends up becoming a release candidate).

(10-22-2023 02:35 AM)Eric Rechlin Wrote:  The only thing I can think of is you are trying for a transactional model here -- change your program this way and I will give you this skin to use. That's not a good philosophy for open source software, or even life in general. Make what you want because you enjoy doing it. Give it away if you want others to enjoy it too. But don't hold your creation hostage from the world because someone doesn't want to implement what you want. Thomas hasn't asked for a single cent for Free42 despite spending surely thousands of hours on it.

So that's certainly a humbling interpretation of what I'm doing here that I hadn't considered. In my long career as a EE designing ICs it's been ground into my core that, given the ultra high cost of tooling, all known bugs must be squashed before any manufacturing run. The constantly cited mantra being it's always cheaper to do it right than do it over. I've had many colleagues try out my skin and, in their monkeying around with these new metric notation keys, literally every one of them noticed that if you do e.g. 1.2pµ (i.e. trying to break it or find some flaw) that they expected the final number to be 1.2E-6 but instead got 1.2E126. They thought that unexpected behavior was a bug because they pressed a button that had "µ" printed on it and they didn't get what the button clearly indicated it did. Like myself, they thought "fix that bug and your product can be released". We discussed the reason behind the bug and came up with solutions including the previously mentioned E fix to labeling the buttons as e.g. +µ (which was both awkward and mathematically inaccurate) to …µ (which was just awkward). I'm sure you're all aware that entering 1.2pµ can be resolved by typing 4 backspaces after the "p" before typing "µ". Not everybody, but most said the current implementation was just a clear user interface bug and needed to be fixed before release. They (myself included) saw the trade-off of tweaking the E key functionally to hijack a key sequence nobody ever did as the clearly easy and obvious solution. While I respect your assertion that I was holding my creation hostage, my genuine interpretation was more of "Rats! I simply can't release my product to manufacturing unless this bug is fixed". It not as though I was preventing Thomas from moving forward, it was more that I was preventing myself i.e. the harm (or loss) was to me.

This whole open source contributing is new for me. I've not involved myself in such an effort before so apologies for the business model vs cultural model mis-step. While I continue to have a hard time seeing any practical downside to the requested "E" change from a user's perspective, perhaps the less fractious path forward would be to release the skin (along with its bug) and see if the community of users even cares. Would you say that is a better path forward?

dm319: Thanks also for your opinions. I'm hoping my above comments overlap enough into your claims. I would say that if shown the relevant chunk of code that deals with the entering of exponents I could probably finagle that "E" fix, but it's the associated universe that thwarts things for me (figuring out github, the Apple App Store, and all the other things I don't know that I don't know). It'd be hard for me, but likely easy for Thomas - that's all I was implying. Thomas does, of course, have final say in the matter. I was just doing my best to test his assertion that modifying "E" as requested actually impacted anybody while also dangling whatever carrots I could find while I was at it. There was never any intention to offend, but there certainly was the intention to debate underlying assumptions...