Hi Bob, Comments inline.
On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 12:29 PM, bob therriault <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Michael, > > I think that your qwerty screen is excellent. Thank you. > On the number screen I think that the underscore [_] should be added to allow > for the entry of infinite and negative infinite into number vectors without > changing screens, also it would be useful to have y on this screen if you are > going to include x. The underscore is there, immediately to the left of the '1'. As for selecting which letters made it to the numpad, I wanted to squeeze in all the characters used for forming literals. The 'x' is provided for extended integers. Do you think providing 'y' should take precedence over having all the hex keys there? Space is pretty tight but I could gain some more by giving up on the oversized digits. Alternatively, I could just reduce the return key to standard size and put the 'y' in the vacated space. Thoughts? > I assume that the [...] key takes me to symbols, the [123] key to numbers and > the [ABC] key to the qwerty. Correct. The shift on the qwerty keyboard is really a caps-lock at the moment. I intend to convert it to the classic mobile tri-state shift eventually. >> If this is the case I think that you can change the [...] key that appears >> on symbols to a shift to take you to your two character primitive layout. >> This would allow you enter tacit code by just using the shift key (or shift >> lock if you prefer) and the symbol layout. I thought of that. In that case the 'shift' would produce identical results to swapping in the alternate keyboard unless I mistake your meaning. > I might also suggest making sure that symbols such as period [.], > semi-colon[:], and parenthesis [(] and [)] are kept in consistent positions > across screens to allow for muscle memory. It can be really frustrating to > have the symbol change location according to the screen. I did keep '.' and ':' consistent between qwerty and sym1, my idea for the numpad layout required a bit of a shift which I may rethink. The parentheses do deserve more consistent treatment.. thank you for pointing that out. > I think that is all that I see for now, but I am not a keyboard designer, so > take this very much as a crowd source approach to design :) . I am no keyboard designer myself. It's the crowd-sourcing I am after in this forum. Thank you very much for your comments. Given the wild popularity of mobile devices, I think it is important to get J onto a mobile device to broaden it's popularity. I used to carry a CE-device with J and it often struck me how the conciseness of J made it an ideal language for mobile use. - michael > On 2012-01-06, at 3:06 PM, Michael Dykman wrote: > >> I am working on an Android implementation of the J console which gave >> me an opportunity to create a soft keyboard for same. Several years >> ago, I carried a CE device provided by my employer and I loved having >> J in my pocket but I found it frustrating casting around for >> characters on that vendors keyboard. >> >> In the absence of prior art, I embraced Stewart's Law and implemented >> according to my intuition. I have uploaded a series of screen caps >> from my emulator demonstrating the collection of soft keyboards I have >> built. >> >> The bottom of the images are cropped slightly; the emulator is >> slightly taller than my laptop screen. The right panel represents >> Android 'hardware' inputs, the left is the device display. >> >> http://i288.photobucket.com/albums/ll178/william-conquers/Android/sym1.png >> http://i288.photobucket.com/albums/ll178/william-conquers/Android/sym2.pnghttp://i288.photobucket.com/albums/ll178/william-conquers/Android/qwerty.png >> http://i288.photobucket.com/albums/ll178/william-conquers/Android/num.png >> I would be interest in any comments. >> >> -- >> - michael dykman >> - [email protected] >> >> May the Source be with you. >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm -- - michael dykman - [email protected] May the Source be with you. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
