dabigkahuna

alexonline said:

On iOS, you can go to General, then Display and Brightness, then Text Size, and if you increase that, it will increase the size of the text everywhere, including the App Store. 

I've played around with this for awhile. Saw some things I didn't like at some sizes, but found if I just moved it one notch bigger, it made a significant improvement without making some things worse (at least so far). Thanks.

TextBladeDenied said:

> You have written many comments remarking upon the rationale for the firmware rewrite, as if you were the leader of the Textblade dev team who devised the idea and is explaining it to everyone else. In reality you are just a fool parroting a tiny little blurb of misleading if not outright false information which was communicated by Mark as an excuse for the latest round of delays.

Wrong again. I just point out what we know - that they are rewriting to save memory. They MAY be doing any number of other things but we don't know about those yet and I've even said their statements about this or that capability being added are not clear about whether they are before or after GR.

What you do is write like you are on the dev team since you make statements that you do not have actually facts for, yet you present them as facts!

> You rambled about how expanding jumps from 6 to 12 may or may not be considered a new feature.

Yep. Depends on how they have to do it. Oh, some can say no matter what, even if it only involved changing a for/next loop to cycle from 1-6 to be 1-12 and nothing else was affected, people can fairly say it is a new feature. But I can see the alternative view.

> You feigned expertise on the question of defining what a code freeze actually is, but you know nothing about the topic.

I claimed to be an expert on this? When? BTW, if we are going to be precise, there most definitely is not a "code freeze". They gave a pretty good hint about that when they said they were REWRITING the code! I pretty sure you can do that if you've frozen the code. Now, "feature freeze" you can do, though, as I've said, it would be silly to not write an improvement at the same time they are saving space. They said jumps are now twice as fast. Is that a new feature? Could be viewed that way, but I would say it is just a happy benefit of cleaning up code.

> Nobody is going to make a logical argument that convinces you or Mark how awful you are behaving.

If you are going to make stuff up, it is best not to do it about something which is so obviously wrong. I've publicly posted about things I disagree with what they've done. That doesn't even count the private comments I've sent.

patientlywaiting said:

Sigh. WayTools has previously stated that their infrastructure rewrite was limited to feature parity with the current firmware. (Good!)  But now I see on the WayTools Forum that they are adding new features to it (e.g. new sticky modifier keys; ability to use it while wired; etc.). *head in hands*. 

From the way they wrote it, we can't tell if the sticky is before or after GR. Same applies to most things they've talked about.

I have no doubt but that some things can be "added" which really aren't much in the way of additions that could cause problems. For example:

We have 6 jump slots. More are apparently coming. Is this a new addition to be concerned about? It would depend on several things, but to take a simple example, consider a spreadsheet where you have a formula which looks a cell in 10 rows. When it finds a match, it takes info from other cells in that row.

But then you decide you want 20 different options. Well, it is no problem to change the formula to search through 20 rows. There is no risk here of screwing up some other routine. Jumps could work like that. It checks the chord you hit for the jump slot and when it recognizes it, it connects to the info that goes with it.

Even if it didn't work that way originally, a rewrite reduces the code may well make it work that way. I have a real life example of that. Many years ago, when we'd get computer magazines which had program listings in BASIC we would enter into our computers manually, I saw one that was about word jumbles. Those were things you saw in newspapers that, I think, had either 5 or 6 letters jumbled up and the reader would try to unjumble each one. Well, the code was written to handle those two situations and it was written so the first thing it did was see if you entered a 5 letter or 6 letter word. It would then jump to the part of the code which dealt with that length - the two parts of the code were essentially identical except for the number of characters it dealt with. Very wasteful and also limited.

So I rewrote it and, by using variables, you could enter any size word (thus not limited) and with no need to duplicate code (thus not wasteful). This means that even if jumps were developed in a way where adding more would be complicated, the necessary change to free up space could also mean they could add more with no additional complication or impact on other things.

The point is, if that is how more slots come about, is that really adding anything new? It could be argued both ways, but since the concern is about adding new things causing delays, in this example, if accurate, I'd say "no". Other things I can't even theorize since I don't have any idea about what they involved.

Rolanbek said:

WayTools_Support said:

Arkorott - per our earlier reply to you, we’ll post news of several exciting advances on our forum. We hope you like it.

When?

R

They've already said in May. Doesn't mean it will happen, but that's what they said.

I can say with some confidence that they are diligently working on the product. There is the fact that by all accounts the TB is a major improvement on keyboard concepts. Something no one else has done in many decades and even now, being able to see the basic concept, still haven’t.

It is probably appropriate to also point out that some stuff they get criticized for as taking them off the task of getting it ready for shipping have been wrong. Such as the complaints about taking hours to talk to treggers. 

Well, it’s true that they do spend hours sometimes on a single call but as is often the case, that only tells part of the story. Typically these calls don’t take place during working hours. Most of mine take place at night. VERY late. A recent one ended after midnight for me - which means it was after 3:00 AM for them! If you look at many of their updates, they have also come late at night. If I get a call during working hours, it is likely because I had a serious problem making using the TB almost impossible- so they needed to get to the bottom of it quickly. 

IOW, a lot of what they got criticized for taking away from the main task was actually taking their non-work time to go over things that weren’t emergencies! This is a good thing. 

While communication in general could be much better, those of us in Treg can say they have always been hard at work on issues. We may not know how serious a given problem is, but they definitely work hard to solve them. 

We also can’t say for sure whether they tried to make it “too good” before shipping - but no one else can really know either. That can include WT since business decisions are not always clear cut. But that has nothing to do with working hard on it.

it comes down to how challenging this system is and what level is decided it has to be at before GR. The challenges are huge but it is hard to make that clear if you haven’t used it. But you might take note that a number of treggers who didn’t think so before changed their minds when they got it. 

Which leaves the the question of whether they are making it too good before shipping. There is no way to be sure either way. Just opinions. 

So, focusing on what we know at the moment that is relatively new - the old firmware was declared to be good enough, finally. But that still leaves the problem of decent customer support after GR and that requires rewrite to free up space. 

Next public item should be the tech update this month (best not to miss it again, WT). Shipping update to Treg would be the next big step. Then cross your fingers that all they learned from the first time means we don’t find lots of problems again!