Re: 39GII -> 50G idea Message #9 Posted by David Hayden on 18 Aug 2012, 11:02 a.m., in response to message #8 by Matt Agajanian
I wrote a long description of things I thought could be improved on the 50g shortly after I got mine, but I can't find it here. Maybe it was on the HP support site. I was upgrading from a 41C after 30 years or so and I'd never even seen a graphing calculator before, so I thought my "virgin user" comments might be helpful.
Probably the most important things were
- two rows of soft keys and soft labels.
- soft labels change when you press a shift key so you always know what they do.
- All keys display the name of their function if held down for a while like the 41 series did.
- keyboard overlays.
Two rows of soft keys would let you greatly reduce the clutter on the keyboard. Prev/Nxt could go away and be replaced by soft keys for the rare menus that would need them. Something like half the functions on the keyboard simply serve to activate a menu or start an environment. These could all be pushed under a "menu" key.
Overlays would put an end to the endless debates over whether "reverse hyperbolic normalized triangulated probability distribution" should be on the keyboard, or if "conditional jump to subroutine and skip two if less than" is more important. One could create an overlay and keyboard assignment for their the functions related to their favorite topic (fluid dynamics, electrical engineering, probability, statistics, integer math, programming, or whatever).
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