How to Freeze up Your HP' and Other Secrets of the Wait(-1) Command

[Jsather]

First, I apologize for lobbing accusations. I have been frustrated and was venting, and I regret it.

On the point of touches south of y=219 receiving special treatment in Wait(-1) returns: I like the special treatment and have found it easy to handle “button presses” right up front when a {3,x,y} comes back without predecessors. My only criticism is lack of documentation.

As to priorities, since Cyrille asked my opinion, I would prioritize getting a technical writer assigned to reviewing help screens and the user guide so that system programmers can work primarily on system code. The code priorities should be elimination of bugs before addition of new features though I hope the new features keep coming.

As for documentation weaknesses: foremost, the typos create a bad image for HP. I would open a direct channel from the community to your new technical writer for feedback on typos, errata, and needs. I would even enlist the user community by organizing the contributions already being made around the forums and blogs. Users are an HP asset that doesn’t show up in the bean counts.

There should be a programmer’s guide familiarizing new users with all the unique programming requirements of the Prime. In that manual, there should be a command reference section rich with examples. I would like to see another manual devoted to the advanced mathematical and CAS capabilities. This will be many new owner’s first CAS capable calculator. There are currently 8 pages devoted to CAS in the user manual and 60 pages to the Geometry App. My opinion is that the pretty baby is the CAS, not the Geometry App.

How about that? The technical writer isn’t even assigned yet and he’s busy for as far as we can see.

Thomas’ point about finding bugs during the documentation process is also my experience. But if you’re saying we must choose between improving the documentation and improving the calculator, nuts to the documentation. Make the calculator better.