48/50 vs Prime, what am I missing?

[tcab]

One of the often quoted issues re HP48/50 vs Prime is the Prime's lack of user programmable soft menus for use in the Home view. HP48/50 has them, the Prime doesn't quite have them.

Note, I'm specifically talking about user softmenus which are active in the home view. This means when the main home view input field (where you type stuff and do calculations) is active. And to be clear, softmenus are the six buttons on the bottom of the calculator screen, which can change their button label dynamically.

Softmenus to me, are so important that their inclusion in the HP42 makes e.g. going back to the HP41 very difficult. The 48/50g generation maintained the user custom softmenu tradition, to:

• get access to variables
• invoke functions
  

Yes the Prime has softmenus all over the place - its just that you cannot create your own custom softmenus that are present in the Home screen view, whilst the home view input field is active. You can only display a soft menu whilst locked into a running program, using DRAWMENU or LibMenu. The point here is that the Home screen input prompt disappears whilst a program is running, which means such custom softmenus cannot just 'sit there always' and be used to quickly choose from a list of variables or to launch user functions, which is what 42/48/50 calculator users love doing.

The alternative in the Prime is

• Hitting the Toolbox button brings up a menu of your user Program Functions
• Hitting the Vars button - ditto for variables
  

albiet these menus are not customisable, and are just part of the Prime's menu system. You have to wade through a few submenus to get to what you want - no "one click" button invocation (unless you assign specific functions to specific keys in user mode). On the bright side, you can get to everything (user functions, user variables, built in functions and variables) easily. You can double tap on a previous function in the history stack to copy it into the current input prompt. Also, hitting ENTER repeats the last command, which, in conjunction with a function referring to 'Ans' can be a powerful way of feeding the last value back into the current function:

Code:


2 ENTER
X^2     (this creates Ans^2 in the command prompt)  
ENTER  (displays 4)
ENTER  (displays 16)
ENTER  (displays 256)
etc.

And finally, if you really, really want custom user softmenus on the Prime, customise this program http://www.hpmuseum.org/forum/thread-9430.html and keep user mode on. Then hitting the template button (the one with the blue 'units' on it) will popup up your custom menu. Thus two keystrokes - yes its not one keystroke but its pretty close. Yeah, and you have to edit a program to maintain your custom menu (though arguably this approach could be improved via more programming and perhaps a custom app to configure?
It could also be turned into a horizontal DRAWMENU style menu). Oh one more thing - this kind of menu doesn't always sit there for you to look at, which is often comforting - it only appears briefly when you invoke the hotkey.

So in conclusion, yes I still miss custom softmenus on the Prime and think that a softmenu system that is active whilst using the interactive home screen would be fantastic. Nevertheless, I have grown to appreciate the Prime and learned to live within its paradigm. The Prime is simply light years ahead and more comfortable for me personally to use. And there are so many alternatives to the softmenu approach that I don't miss softmenus as much as I thought I would!