My name is Anthony Cagliano, internet alias "ACagliano". I graduated from St. Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr, presently called Divine Mercy Catholic Academy, in 2005 and from Archbishop Molloy High School in 2009. I am currently a computer science major at Queens College. I specialize in software design for the z80 line of Texas Instruments graphing calculators.
I began my career as a TI software developer in 2006, when I designed the line of BIG programs, now infamous for their somewhat perverse humor. For obvious reasons, I never officially released the line. Simultaneously, I began experimenting with graphics and various other facets of a decent program. I struggled with programming for much of the first year, but eventually found my way. I went from pathetically useless graphics and joke programs to more practical utilities, such as games and math and science aids. In 2008, I founded Blast Programs Incorporated, alongside a friend of mine, known here Turquoise Drag0n. Our goal was simple, to provide a platform from which your average student could obtain and use our software.
In 2010, I opened talks with Deep Thought, another TI software developer and owner of ClrHome Productions. In short order I merged Blast Programs into ClrHome Productions and I have been an author and administrator here ever since. In recent years, I have stopped turning out programs at such a frequent rate, as I find I generally don't have the patience anymore, or that I'd much rather be chilling with my friends at night than writing a program. In fact, Legend of Zelda and Star Trek are my first major projects in two years. Instead of writing programs, I now use my skills and experience to serve as an advocate for the programming community, publishing articles and empassioned arguments in favor of greater support for third-party development by corporations.
If you ever downloaded a program of any type from the ticalc.org file archives, you found that most of them were difficult to use. While occasionally you found a download that was straight forward, most of them had several files that needed to be transfered onto your calculator. "Send this to your RAM, send this to your Archive", read the cryptic text file telling you how to install the program. No contact info. No help in using the damn thing. What about the program itself. It crashes, or maybe says "Err: Memory" or perhaps "Err: Undefined". Or, you get a bunch of cryptic prompts. Ever had that happen to you? Then you know how frustrating that can be.
My pledge to you is that any program authored by me will never be cyrptic or complex to install. I know exactly what pissed me off about programs I downloaded and I have spoken to other users about it as well. We see two main problems. First off, users really don't want to have to send several files to their calculator. It gets even more annoying when you lose one of those files and the program needs it to run, resulting in an error message. And second, the documentation is extremely vague or just lacking altogether.
Any program that I release will follow several standards. First, I have a "one file" rule. You will only need to send one file to your calculator (some of my programs may require the DoorsCS7 Flash Application to run; this will be clearly noted both in the documentation and in the program splash screen). If I need to produce external subroutines during run-time, the main program will handle creating them before usage, then destroying them after usage. I will never retain copies of things in any portion of memory when I do not have to. My programs are designed to be crash-proof. Often, they will automatically restore themselves after a crash, but if this is not possible, they will reset to defaults, but at least be fully functional. Finally, my programs will always come with a complete user's guide, which will include detailed instructions on how to send the program to your TI device, install it on your calculator, then how to use it.