WP 34S --> WP 31S

[Jonathan Cameron]

Walter,

(02-14-2014 05:46 AM)walter b Wrote:  Now, instead of making lazy managerial statements, assess the situation and compare the demands with the five keyboard locations available. Then please come up with a proper suggestion.

Okay... A bit more rigor is called for. I used the catalogues (as currently implemented by Sanjeev) and tallied up how many times each menu used each special character and came up with this table:

The total count of occurrences is in the second column (#). Note that I've lumped the count for upper and lower case versions of sigma and phi. (The value in the bottom right corner is just 1. I must have had my cursor in that cell when I did the screen capture of this image.)

Which confirms most of your points. A few discussion items:

• Sigma appears most frequently, so having it on the keyboard is probably useful, so I vote for leaving it where it is.
• There are two letters (mu and sigma) that appear most frequently. The other 6 most frequent letters or special characters appear 3 or 4 times. I feel like the difference between 3 and 4 occurrences was not significant.
• So if we cannot get all 7 special characters with 3 or more uses (other than sigma) in the remaining openings, how do we chose any of them?
• My inclination is not include any of them, which is in line with your original layout.
  

However, leaving out most Greek letters leads to one issue: How do you jump to the end of the menu? I realize that going "Up" in the menu gets to the end. But we have made the UP key a shift-key, so it is not as convenient as on the 34s. One possibility is to add the Greek letter Omega (capitalized) to jump to the end of the Greek letters. Omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet and many people know that.

Also, I still feel like making an exception for the degree symbol for the CONV menu. If you use a conversion that is away from the beginning and want to do a temperature conversion, press the degree symbol and the odds are fair that you will land on exactly the conversion you need (or can get there very quickly using only "Down"). If you press "A", then you have to go "Up" to get the conversion you want, which is not as convenient as going down.

So here is the layout I suggest:


This leaves 3 potential spots open. The location of the degree symbol and Omega could be changed. I think rather than trying to decide which 3 of the 6 or so frequently used special characters to add to the keyboard background, maybe it would be best to leave them empty and make the keyboard a little less cluttered.

-Jonathan