To be more specific, we learned that it was ok to use ss when a beta symbol is not available.
That sounds plausible.
We wouldn’t have had a reason to be told that because we were expected to only be writing German by hand, hence the ß would never be unavailable.
(Frankly they were only teaching us what we needed to pass the exam, they didn’t care about anything beyond that, and neither did most of the students.)
But the “it helps to distinguish words like Buße (‘penance, fine’: long vowel) and Busse (‘buses’: short vowel)” still makes me think it’s probably worth having.
(Also, I wonder how many Japanese and chinese users we have.
I know the Arduboy forums have quite a lot of Japanese users.)
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Is it just me or we may be over-thinking the whole thing? Depending on the usage people will use it for it may just not be an issue anyway.
On the pokitto I think it will probably just be used for some quick editing of code anyway or simple game information editing… Or the part that I would like, text based games…
My point is that for a standard basic virtual keyboard for the Pokitto we may not need to put everything in it.
Just my 2 cents… I speak and write French and English everyday, and I still don’t care if we have the french punctuations on the keyboard…
And yes… I do know that some just might like to debate about it for fun too. So you can take what I say with a grain of salt ( & pepper if preferred)
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@Vampirics I think it’s just a little drifted away conversation, you’re completely right. Just a very basic fun tool, no real need for all special characters. My language has a lot of accents but we keep writing without it every day, no problem. I also like that we all learn some interesting facts along the way, so it’s okay to talk a little deeper about stuff even if it’s not directly related anymore. All is fine 
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If you have not noticed yet, this lot goes to bathyscapic depths in almost everything. 
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Yes and I appreciate that lot too. Just thought maybe I could try to refocus the lot a little, as I like the progress being done so far. 
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Overthinking is my hobby. :P
There goes my plan to write a Japanese novel with it…
Aparently bathyspheric is in the dictionary but bathyscaphic isn’t,
despite bathysphere and bathyscaphe both being valid nouns.
Keep using it, maybe it’ll catch on.
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As you know, bathyscape superceded bathysphere. We’re just so evolved around here.
Edit: wait… are we getting distracted, again!?!
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Depending on your view, I’m either a terrible moderator for allowing such longwinded tangents,
or a really good moderator for encouraging lighthearted conversation,
and peppering the forum with comments that only I think are funny.
(Or a really terrible moderator for encouraging boring academic discussion about character encodings :P).
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I see only a discussion in a good spirit. That’s what the discussion forums are for isn’t it. Keep going
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Yes, was about to say the same. Just as Top Gear was actually never about cars, Pokitto is about using this little device to explore ideas. I certainly never imagined we’d be discussing all this stuff that we do.
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Let’s hope our ‘host’ doesn’t misbehave like Top Gear’s did. :P
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That would be bad because the show died when they left 
Today I’ve been mostly away but at least managed to create a small reusable library for the editor – simply #include "asciiftw.h" and call asciifyThatBoy() on your string and get a nice ASCII guess approximation. There’s a translation table for UTF-8 that you can potentially expand, add azbuka, hiragana, katakana, whatever. I’ve added some basic symbols and Greek alphabet so that you can read math texts.
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Update:
- loading files works
- file stats
- popup windows
- a lot of bug fixes
I’d be so happy if we could create a mini operating system 
I know it’s ambitious but @FManga is already working on the kernel, and PokiPad could be the first userland program. AFAIK many great things started with text editors, so who knows.
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I second this. The new bootloader could be some kind of mini OS. Basically like a hub for everything. And that keyboard make it even more obvious now.
Operating systems are a charming area of CS I’d like to explore deeper and that would be great to have on an educational platform, even if a very basic one (like MS-DOS, that was basically only a hub too).
There are already nice things around for education, for example minix – an educational OS that inspired Linux, and served to develop it (the whole story can be read for example in Torvalds’ biography Just for Fun, it’s a real awesome book.). Minix supports ARM BTW.
Also a lot of concepts are explained in the OS dev wiki.
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I recommend ‘Operating Systems Demystified’.
Round-robin thread scheduling is an interesting thing.
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I have read this book. After reading it I also felt like looking into operating systems and maybe look how to create one… Then I came back to senses and decided just to start reading another book
Maybe I should check this out… will add it to my ‘to read list’
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Ship Maker 2000 claimed that spot.
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Oh man, I remember an OS course I’ve taken, it was one of the most difficult, meant to filter out students, survival rate < 50%. It gets real complex when you get into the virtual memory and paging and scheduling, tables of tables of tables and stuff 
Good times.
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