Geometry app three suggestions

[parisse]

(04-09-2014 06:42 AM)Angus Wrote:  You can't be serious... The apps are designed to have easy to use interfaces for doing calculations. The backbone of the new calculator, the innovation if you want. Targeted at people like students in school who even don't want a manual.
Pointing out that there might be a potentially higher usability than in TI's implementation (which implies that you are almost happy with the current state)

I consider myself that the current geometry app is perfectly usable as it is, other might think differently of course, especially if they are used to a complete different way of doing things. The philosophy of the current geometry app is that you choose one view to input: if it's the PLOT view then it means you don't really care of the coordinates of the point, otherwise enter a commandline in the SYMB view with the precise coordinates. If you define an object from other objects, from PLOT select the command, then select the other objects by typing their initials on the keyboard and enter or comma between the arguments of the function you have selected. In other words, it is a commandline-oriented geometry application, with a helper to enter the commandline from the PLOT view.
If you think that easy to use is contradictory with entering/modifying commandlines then you won't like the current geometry app. But you will miss the unique features of this app: you can do analytic geometric *proofs* using exact computation (unlike conjectures with other dynamic geometry calc applications), and it is fully integrated in the CAS system: you can do any kind of computation in the CAS history with the variables defined in the geometry app.
Moreover from a pedagogic point of view, I really believe it is much more interesting to describe a geometric construction by a list of commandlines (the SYMB view) than to explain which menus you must tap to get your construction, because the list of commandlines is much more universal than something that works only with one software (and you can't get the construction displayed by the software anyway).