Apologies if some of these have already been entered -- it's a very long thread.

This comes from the perspective of a total newbie to SourceCoder (though not to TI-83/TI-83+ family programming). So there may be some things here that seem perfectly fine to you as they are, because you have experience with the tool. Please be assured that I mean all of them constructively, as suggestions for making a good tool easier to work with based on problems I have as a new user. (BTW my background is programming, and I maintain my own Web pages.)

1. When I click "Parse file", there's no indication how to view the parsed output. Kerm kindly told me in another article that I have to click the little down arrow, which works, but I submit that's not at all obvious if one doesn't already know it. Suggestion: change it to a "View Source" button. Better yet, why not just display the source immediately, below the summary information, without requiring another click?

2. The syntax check refers to line numbers, but the editor doesn't show line numbers. This would be a huge time saver versus looking for the bit of text given in the error message.

3. The edit window is really narrow, about a quarter of my screen, so I have to constantly scroll back and forth horizontally. This makes it hard to keep my train of thought. Suggestion: offer some option to wrap lines (showing the difference between a wrapped line and a new line clearly) or expand the window, or both. Maybe make the calculator display optional?

4. The page scrolls vertically, and the editor window scrolls vertically. Every time I click Check Syntax, the page jumps so half the edit window is hidden, and I have to readjust vertically. (My screen is 1600x900, and my browser is Firefox 14.0.1 on Windows 7.) Suggestion: create an anchor <div id="somename" at the buttons at the top of he edit window (Check Syntax, Export as .8xp, etc); and when I click Check Syntax go to that anchor rather than the top of the page.

5. The "Export as .8xp" button does indeed want to export an .8xp file. Does that mean my .83p file that I started with has been converted to TI-83+ format? Again, this may just be a matter of the desired route not being clear to me in the interface. I'd like to be able to convert .8xp files to .83p as well, but can't see how.

6. When I put in some deliberate junk (:Blah blah), the syntax checker doesn't flag it in any way I can see. I can see it's quite reasonable for a syntax checker to check only syntax, but in that case I'll suggest it would be fantastic to check also that only
commands are included in the file.

Thanks for listening!

Stan

1. I agree that the current system may be unclear, although to be honest, no one has ever mentioned it before (perhaps they just left frustrated and didn't bring it up). Ladies and gents of the forum: What do you think? If I were to replace the arrow, what do you think would be clearer?

2. Hmm, line numbers would be nice. In the past my sticky wicket has been synchronizing line numbers with scrolling of the textarea. I could look into it once more and see if Javascript can make this feasible now.

3. Are you using Firefox? If so, you can expand the textarea's size using the pull tab in the lower-right of the area. I think the best of those suggestions would be a button that would hide the calculator area and expand the TI-BASIC area. Do the colons marking new lines not sufficiently delineate where lines start, though?

4. Excellent suggestion; I shall definitely do that.

5. The .8xp and .83p formats are, for all intents and purposes, identical. The different is minute, and the two are more or less interchangeable. As long as a .8xp file doesn't contain TI-83+-only features like lowercase letters in strings, it can be loaded on a TI-83 (or even renamed to .83p, if it makes things clearer). There's no button to export as a .83p because it would perform an identical task to the .8xp button, just with a different extension.

6. The syntax checker flags characters and character sequence that your calculator cannot understand, not invalid BASIC code. I haven't implemented what you describe because many users use SourceCoder to translate Axe, plain text, and other content into calculator programs.

Thanks for the great suggestions!

With #1, I would definitely find it more convenient to just show the source immediately if there's just a single file. Otherwise, there's not much point in adding an additional step when there's no other possible action on the page.

For grouped files, there are multiple file names and multiple arrows, if I recall correctly. In that case, it's probably best to leave them collapsed by default. You might extend the link to include the filename next to the arrow so it can be styled like a link. This would make it more obvious that it's clickable.

By the way, perhaps “collapse all” and “expand all” buttons would be handy, especially for groups containing many very short files.

Great ideas all around! I'll see if I can get to implement all that this evening and see how it looks.

I _am_ using Firefox, so I'll give that a try.



I see your point about the great similarity of .8xp and .83p, so let me clarify. I have .8xp versions of my programs, with lower-case letters in strings. I also have .83p versions, for the occasional student who found a classic 83 in some Egyptian sarcophagus and wants to use it. Right now I have to repeat every edit in the second version, a "maintenance nightmare" to use the technical term.

The more serious problem is that I don't have a classic 83 myself, so I can't test my classic 83 versions. I test them in my TI-84+SE so I know that they work, but have I overlooked a lower-case letter somewhere? Every time I try to load my TI-83 version onto a student's classic 83, I wonder if I've screwed up an edit and it won't load.

It would be fantastic if I could just upload my .8xp version, click a button, and have my lower-case strings all converted to upper case -- just the letters, of course, not the TI-83 variable names. Then I could maintain just the ,8xp versions, edit them,and export new .83p versions at need.

Almost as good would be if the syntax checker in "83p mode" would flag every lower-case letter in strings -- again, not the variable names.

I know this is a pretty specialized need, so it might not be worth your while, but hopefully you now see why I was asking.

I still have some of the above to address, but I have made the following changes:

:: Div with program/file/image contents starts expanded if only one item is parsed. For example, a program from a .8xp will start expanded, a group with one image will start expanded, but a group with 4 programs will start with each image contracted
:: To streamline the div show/hide function, dropped support for Internet Explorer 4, Internet Explorer 5, and Netscape Navigator 4/5/6.
:: "Expand all" and "Collapse all" buttons added at the top and bottom of the SC2 view page.
:: Anchor added to top of error display and top of editor textarea to streamline workflow when repeatedly clicking "Check Syntax" during editing.
:: Fixed program name not properly carried over from Parse->View to Editor when the Edit button was clicked.

Thanks, Kerm!