04-July-2017 Virtual Keys - Virtual Keyboard v1.3b [Updated]

[IHarwell]

(01-04-2022 08:32 PM)IHarwell Wrote:  

1. Perhaps draw icons on the title bar like the Prime does when you press the appropriate button?
2. Detect whether the current font size rather than making everything large enough to handle the largest font. (See Easy Sto II code for an example of this that works pretty well. It took some time to get it running reliably, so I wouldn't recommend writing it from scratch unless you know of a better way to do it.)
3. Use the "Shift" key to move to capital letters instead of "Alpha" (How the Prime does it natively)
4. Perhaps add a "Backspace" and/or "Enter" button on the keyboard?
5. If the user holds down either the "Shift" or "Alpha" keys, exit the mode when they're released and don't exit the mode while it's "Del" key with the "Shift" key down, which should delete the next character and leave the Shift mode on.
6. Perhaps add an option for it to remember the last mode it was in between calls?
7. Add pass-through support for the Apps, Home, Cas, Symb, Plot, Num, Help, View, and Menu buttons. Most built-in features exit whatever mode they're in and execute those buttons directly when they're pressed.
8. Take the lower commands on the screen on entry and redraw them above the keyboard when running it. This would only apply to the Home and CAS views, I think.
9. Move to Python for much faster drawing routines? It can be done here since it looks like they aren't trying to interact with the command line directly or read screen pixels from within the input loop. The Python methods for reading key states is quite efficient, but would require a poll loop rather than reading the key buffer. It would introduce a roughly fixed 15-20 ms latency on entry, but would get the execution loop to run significantly faster if my testing is any indication.
10. Change the exit routine to leave when the "On" key is released rather than when it's pressed, as it currently exits, the calculator sees that "On" is pressed, and immediately runs it again.
    

Okay. Here's a minor update. It addresses the error in the previous version as well as incorporating some of the easier items on the list.

It addresses #10 using a flag to indicate if the program is interrupted. Turns out hitting "On" just exits the program immediately.

It addresses #5, as that just made sense to do.

#2 was actually a bug in the previous version. It had the wrong value for small fonts, so it wasn't detecting those correctly.

#6 was already a thing and I just missed it. XD

I'll see if I can work in #7 tomorrow. The others depend heavily on preference or are major overhauls.