Thanks for your response Michael. I agree with Bjorn that this work holds great potential and encourage you to pursue it.
Comments inline Cheers, bob On 2012-01-07, at 10:19 AM, Michael Dykman wrote: > 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 see the underscore clearly now that you point it out :) . I think I would reduce the return key size as this puts the x and y beside each other, but thinking it through I am not sure it is needed at all and if it were there would also be a case for m, n, u, and v. See comments on symbol screen below. >> 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. That is what I meant and that keeps all the primitives within one keystroke of each other. It could be nice to have x and y included on the symbol keyboard by making the lowest line smaller as this would allow explicit programming in most cases without having to go back to qwerty. u, v, m, and n would still not be available on the symbol keyboard, but there is only so much space and most programming is done with x an y in verbs. > >> 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. Actually there is position change of '.' and ':' between number and qwerty/symbol keyboards. I think that this could be pretty important, so you may want to lock down size and position on '.' ':' space '(' and')' > >> 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 Some of these ideas extend further into visual gui and touch interfaces as well. Keep up the good work. Cheers, bob > > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
