DM42 News

[Guenter Schink]

(01-29-2017 11:03 PM)Thomas Okken Wrote:  The long-press to allow the letter mappings and the original ones to coexist sounds pretty elegant, but why not go all the way and apply this to %, pi, and small E as well? I think that would be perfect.

Once the user interface is changed, consistent behaviour is very important for ease of handling. If the shift key invokes lower characters, then there is no place for "%" instead one would expect an "h" similar for "Pi" and the small "E"

Quote:Also, I'd still recommend not assigning any characters to ENTER and EXIT. They are both used a lot in ALPHA mode, and using them should not be made more cumbersome by requiring shift or long-press to get their standard functionality.

ESC doesn't have a character mapped to it, and long ENTER would only be used to confirm the alpha input. I think that's different from entering characters and may justify different behaviour.

Quote:EDIT: on second thought, maybe all the original functions should be short-press, with letters entered by short-press only where they do not clash with a pre-existing meaning, e.g. the SIN key. This has the advantage that you won't get unexpected behavior when your HP-42S muscle memory is on autopilot.

I think there shouldn't be different behaviour. Again consistency is of major importance. The user should not have to think about in which cases long or short presses have to be used.

Quote:Of course arguments could be made for other arrangements, and those could be implemented as well, with some way for the user to choose between them.

EDIT 2: Long-press would sabotage auto-repeat, at least for the short-press meanings of keys with long-press. Not a big loss since that's mostly a Free42 feature, not an original HP-42S feature, except on the "up" and "down" keys.

I believe that auto-repeat is not really important. Michael tries to achieve a more useful enhancement of alpha input. Some minor caveats have to be accepted I think.

Thanks for the input,
Günter