Gauging interest in a DM48 or DM50?

[c3d]

(11-11-2024 12:55 PM)ben.titmus Wrote:  

(11-11-2024 12:12 PM)c3d Wrote:  It does not quite explain why SwissMicros changed their attitude towards me around that time, though.

I'm afraid it explains it rather well if you think about it. They were burned with one Open Source project so naturally they will be a lot more cautious about trying another one. Remember that it cost Michael money to make the prototypes for WP43 (as well as opportunity cost).

That makes sense.

Quote:My guess (and it is just a guess) is that Michael would be willing to consider building hardware for db48x at some point in the future.

Well, maybe I should give it another shot, but so far, he does not seem to have been too warm to the idea. I don't want to insist to the point of alienating them.

Quote:If I can give some advice based on issues from the WP43 negotiations...

Don't be precious about insignificant details that nobody other than you will care about. You seem to be very insistent on the name of the calculator in earlier posts on this thread.

I'm a bit curious about what gave you this impression. I thought I made it clear that I did not care and that SwissMicros would be in charge of the naming (and that this was not the point of the poll), e.g.

Quote:I have thought about DM51 when writing the poll, actually :-). I think it is important to recognize that DM in the name are the initials of the company founders, so I'd rather keep that for their hardware. Of course, if they were OK with the idea of prefix change, then I would feel honored, but the recognition goes both ways.

What I meant here is that I expected the physical device to be named "DMsomething" and not "DBsomething" or "CDsomething". To me, there is no direct connection between the device name and the application name, just like an iPhone 16 can run DB48x or DB50x. That, I thought, also clarified that I was open to using another number like 51. I actually refer to a future scaled down DB35x elsewhere in the thread.

I did explain elsewhere why I had chosen DB48x as a name, and why it works for me, but this was not intended as a push back against a SwissMicros product name suggestion.

Quote: But remember that Michael has many other calculator offerings and your calculator name will need to fit in there. If you have a number that was used by HP then people may expect the same functionality and interface. If you pick a higher number people might expect more functionality. This is one of the silly issues that almost derailed WP43. You may really care about the name, but almost everyone else would much rather have a physical calculator and they won't care what the name of it is.

Again, I could not care less. They could call it JB007 for all I care ;-)

Quote:Make sure that there won't be significant changes to the keyboard layout in the future. For example, I personally don't like the layout of any of the HP RPL calculators because they prioritise trig functions so much which is fine for certain applications, but not for every application. But more importantly it's quite a deviation from HP RPL calculators (and also the number of functions on db48x) to have a single shift key. Note that R47 (the physical version of C47 that is in the pipeline) which created the single shift key with two shift functions will have two physical shift keys.

As far as I am concerned, we are very close to a final layout for the keyboard on a device with 8 rows of keys.

This would have to be revisited if SwissMicros could, at a reasonable cost (to them) build a device with 9 rows of keys like the HP48. In that case, the expectation would obviously be to mimic the HP48 key layout rather than the HP42.

It's not as obvious as it seems. Some of the choices that I made in the context of a DM42/DM32 would have to be revisited, notably the fact that function keys are not alphabetical. For example, the "character catalog" feature requires function keys to be "free" for menu use during alphabetic entry. This is not true on the HP48, where F1-F6 are for A-F. For the same reason, the hexadecimal entry optimization would not work either.

Quote:I'm more than happy to privately discuss anything that came up with WP43 discussions that might assist your db48x discussions. And I would very much like a SM RPL calculator!

There are no db48x on SM discussions at the moment, except on the forums. The polls were intended to have some data before potentially restarting them, but I have not reinitiated contact with David or Michael on that topic.