GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 347700
gcalctool users non-intuitive button labels
Last modified: 2006-07-24 16:39:44 UTC
1. Bsp is a disaster as it's not labeled this way on most non-english keyboards (even my old hp hardware calc uses left arrow for this), 2. Clr shoud be clear, del or a pretty X icon 3. Abs should be |x| It's pretty bad when a software calculator with little or no constraints self-limits itself further than the real hardware things. We should probably compare gcalctool labels to the stuff on high-end scientific calculators, as these people spent a lot of time and money on ergonomy to justify their price. For example: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Voyage200.jpg http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:HP48G.jpg http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:TI-89Titanium.png http://www.casio-europe.com/fr/sc/products/detail/FC-200V/ ...
As mentioned in the fourth comment to my blog entry http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/richb?entry=comments_from_an_orca_user This is what localisation is for. Let's take backspace. The msgid for the string in question is "Bksp". Some locales have left that exactly as it is. Some have converted that to "Bsp". Others have converted it to something else. Same for Clr/Clear. What locale are you running in? (Abs or |x| is something different. I'll discuss it with my HCI guy. I notice that neither of the scientific calculators in Windows Xp or Mac OS X have an Abs/|x| button).
It's French and Bsp I suspect none of the translator people had the faintest idea what Bsp stood for, so they just blindly copied another european sting
That's possible. The actual code in calctool.c is: { N_("Bksp"), N_("Remove rightmost character from displayed value"), N_("Backspace"), { 0, 0 }, { GDK_BackSpace, 0 }, '\010', M_NONE, do_delete, NULL, bsp }, What can be done is to add a "Note to translators" just above the "Bksp" line. Same for "Clr" { N_("Clr"), N_("Clear displayed value and any partial calculation"), N_("Clear"), { 0, 0 }, { GDK_Delete, 0 }, '\177', M_NONE, do_clear, NULL, clear }, The Abs or |x| is a separate problem. I've added my HCI guy to the CC: list. Calum, what would you prefer here?
I've checked in the changes ("Note to translators" comments) for Bksp and Clr into CVS HEAD. I've bumped the version number for gcalctool in configure.in to 5.8.18. Next tarball release will coincide with the GNOME 2.16.0 (beta1) call-for-tarballs (next Monday). If Calum gets back to me telling me i need to adjust the Abs string to |x|, I'll do that to. Leaving the bug open for now.
Thanks a lot!
Well, I'm not a mathematician, so the only real point of reference I have is my own scientific calculator (a Casio fx400p), which uses "Abs". So while I'd certainly be prepared to bow to popular demand [1], "Abs" seemingly has a precedent in real calculators, and I can't really offer any other good usability reasons why it should be changed. [1] i.e. several requests, or at least more than one :)
(Sorry, that should be "fx4000p", for any Casio-philes...)
Thanks Calum. I'll leave it as "Abs" for now, but I've added a /* Note to translators ... */ comment for that entry. This will be version 5.8.19, which should also be generated as a gcalctool tarball for GNOME 2.16.0 (beta1) today.