Hide soft menus?

[DavidM]

Initially I was a bit skeptical of the value provided by removing the menus, but decided to try it out anyway. My first attempt was a prototype app that altered the system outer loop just enough to skip menu drawing and extend the stack downward:


The more I used the calculator without the menus, the more it grew on me. I also tried removing the stack line numbers from the display:

(a feature I refer to as "Joe Horn Mode" because he was once willing to go to great lengths to get rid of them

The result is a very clean and simple display, and there's an aesthetic to it that (for me) makes it easier to focus on the numbers as I'm working. It didn't take long to realize, though, that there were still plenty of times that a function or app was needed that temporarily required menu access. Quitting and restarting the app was easy, but a nuisance. This caused me to refine the approach somewhat.

Attached to this post is a "proof of concept" library for the 50g that attempts to hide the menu and status areas in a semi-intelligent way. You can think of it like this: the default display mode has no menus and 0-2 lines of header (user-selectable). If you perform some action that otherwise would have changed the displayed menus (such as pressing VAR, TOOL, or any other menu-changing feature), the menus and header will temporarily return. Executing a system or user function will work as usual, then the menus/header will be removed again when the function completes. There's a bit more to it, but that's essentially the paradigm this is based on.

I'm not suggesting this is a significantly better approach than the standard display. Rather, it's a simpler alternative that works best when you aren't needing all the status info and functions that normally surround the stack. For me, that situation is actually quite common.

If you're curious, I've made it fairly simple to try this out. The attached file is a zip containing an installer and README info. The installer stores library 1420 (NoMnu) into port 0 and attaches it to your HOME directory. In its current form, the library works best in port 0. I'll probably make some changes later to support storing it in ports 1 or 2 along with some other planned tweaks. Removal is a simple one-button selection from the library's menu.

I encourage you to at least give it a try, and please share your thoughts. I've found it surprisingly nice to be able to remove some of the clutter from the display. When needed, it's very easy to temporarily show the "normal" info just by pressing the ON/CANCEL key (which toggles the display mode). Otherwise you can simply exit the app to resume normal menu operations. If you're like me, there are plenty of times when you just need to bang through some calculations without using a lot of menu-bound functions. That's when this type of interface is most useful.