A sweet little poll about the WP 31S layout

[Manolo Sobrino]

(04-15-2014 01:11 PM)walter b Wrote:  

Manolo Wrote:I think it's nice to have a poll about them, thank you Walter. But let's not fool us. You can't design or even choose a good layout without using it first. You should test these things for some time with emulator versions and then choose/suggest alternatives.

You're welcome. That's exactly the reason why I wrote this: http://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-1100.html.

BTW, I think most forumers have some experience with scientific calculators, some even look back to quite a few decades. And - although not every thought is explained on this forum - I'm confident that most people here are capable to assess a layout based on their experience. Life isn't always 100% but some trend should be observable.

d:-)

Yes, I do have my share of that as well, scientifics beside the notebook/stack of paper, (Staedtler HB, yellow ) pencil, and computers for programming, but sometimes I question my habits. Is my experience and the force of habit shadowing my judgement? I've found that many times it is indeed. You have to think out of the box sometimes, great things might be there. If you don't question what you're used to -UIs are not an exact science, you can't prove the superiority of anything a priori- you're probably missing them. That's my whole point.

I just wanted to arrive at a layout closer to my needs while thinking about usability for the specific user cases I could think of, all this keeping in mind the philosophy of the RPN entry method, which is not the position of trigs IMO... and the WP31S functionalities/WP34S implementation characteristics draft, that's all. And it's been a lot of fun. People here should really give it a go and try to get their own.

Thank you again for the project and for keeping an open mind about it.


(edit#2: And I agree, after having thought about it a lot, I realised that there were no choices left to put x<> on x<>y and FILL on ENTER, while keeping the arrow modifier on the 4 angle keys (that's 5 keys that go together folks, they could go in a row or 1 next to 4 in a box, and that's it), that won't mean placing other catalogues on the smaller keys unless you go for b) and its permutations of (x!,%CH) and permutations within the statistics 3x2 box. It's that or scatter randomly the statistics keys. There are lots of constraints here, that's why I called this problem the Rubik in another thread.))

(edit#3: Well, starting with b) one could move all the catalogues down to the bigger keys while keeping some sense if you don't mind being a bit creative... )