Ahn reviewed my prototype v1.1 on Saturday afternoon. The following are notes I took.
- He didn’t understand that the “|30″ notation indicated the current memory position
- He wanted to see the entire memory displayed as it is entered; had the idea to display each of the thirty characters as a smaller font
- He would like the < and > butons to auto repeat
- He originally thought the LED indicators meant there were three independent character sets
- I was reluctant to make any enhancements to the program… I already had so much invested in the program and tried to defend having to do more work.
- Ahn believes that reviewing the character memory would be a very useful enhancement to the prototype
- What about a pressable jog dial?
- I spent a fair amount of time explaining the operation to Ahn. This leads me to believe that the prototype as proposed is not as intuitive as it could be; one downfall is once you’ve entered a character, you can’t go back and erase it. On the real machine you can.
After we met, I revised my software:
- Prototype now starts up in alpha entry mode which it didn’t before. This gives the user a frame of reference to start from.
- Implemented auto repeat for the < and > keys
- Added “Not available” message for buttons that aren’t implemented
[ Here is the latest version of the program ]
I also need to explicitly state the task I want users to accomplish, ie. “Please enter ‘JACK.SMITH’”