newRPL: Alpha demo 0.9 released [UPDATED 2017-10-25]

[Claudio L.]

(12-05-2017 01:21 PM)Gilles59 Wrote:  Hi, I am very impressed by the power of NewRPL! The future of the RPL is here. It's very fast on the HP50g and incredibly fast on a PC. Great job really !

However I am not convinced by the new menu system and I really have trouble getting in there. I would have preferred that the NewRPL keep the old menu system.

Im' also impressed by the the fact that for an "alpha" version, it's very stable. I was skeptical about the way newRpl works with interger and approx real numbers but it's a good approach.

Glad you like it. When you mention the menu system you don't like, do you mean having 2 menus on screen? or the organization of the main menu?
If it's the first, just be patient with yourself and it will grow on you. It takes some brain reprogramming to get used to, but once you do it's OK. Or if you give up, just long press VAR to go to a classic single menu system.
If it's the second thing, I need some help organizing the menus. Right now they are organized by library, which means roughly by topics. But this is just a quick attempt to expose the many available commands, they should be better organized, and input from the community is crucial.
As a matter of fact, the entire menu system (and the help too) is written in plain RPL, so it can be modified by anyone who knows how to create a menu in newRPL.
I encourage you (and invite everybody else to join) to create your own custom menus "to your taste" and share them here, so they can be reviewed by everybody and eventually pulled into the ROM. Also work on your custom key assignments and share them as well. newRPL is extremely flexible, even more than the stock firmware, so the key is to configure it to your liking. Then share your configuration here for open discussion, everything that makes sense can be incorporated as a default (be it new menus, menus assigned to certain shortcut keys, etc).

Finally, regarding the "alpha" tag: After 4 years I'm considering moving to Beta, even though it isn't feature complete by far. The fact the Alpha tag scares people thinking it's an unusable proof of concept makes me think Beta is more appropriate. However, usually Beta software is feature complete, in the final phase of debugging and cleanup. newRPL is far from being there yet.

PS: Teaser... I finally got USB comms working like a charm! Most of the issues were on the PC side, working around dumb permissions and differences between OSes. I just need to put in place a protocol to send large files (currently limited to roughly 2 or 3 kbytes max. object size to be transferred), and finish implementing USBARCHIVE and USBRESTORE, which are much needed for reliable backups on the 39/40gs hardware.
I hope I can get all that done and release before the holidays for people to play with it.