43s status

[walter b]

Hi John,

(01-24-2015 04:35 AM)John R Wrote:  I realize (1) this is a religious issue for many here, and possibly (2) a sore point for the developers -- (3) this thread from the old forum seems to indicate that the community preference was to have the arithmetic operators on the right, but that a private caucus among the developers eventually resulted in the opposite decision. (4) Ultimately the placement of these keys is (and should be) up to those who are actually developing the product, of course.

(Numbers inserted by me.)

1. Certainly.
2. I'm pretty neutral in that matter still. I only hate swapping these two columns every fortnight.
3. I took the time and read that old thread again. There were people with very firm opinions but - in my view - no clear majority among those who participated. And there were earlier threads, too. So, a decision had to be made at that time in 2013, and we (Eric, Richard, Pauli, Marcus, and me) decided per our votes as developers (4) we'd go with the operators on the left ...
   

... though we repeated our market research later on this forum, but there's next to no progress in that matter for many months. After all, let me repeat FYI that the 43S will have a customizable keyboard: so anybody not content with the startup default layout may reassign the functions in the way the arithmetic and navigation keys are swapped, for example. One press on [USER] will then switch to that person's user layout and a suitable overlay will modify the surface accordingly, so even the people feeling overruled should be happy.

I hope this explains a bit. And I'm convinced we won't talk about that again and again as soon as we had some real 43S stuff to play with. But alas ...

d:-)