Future of the community
Where do you guys think the TI community is headed in the future?
Do you guys think the community is dead or near death?
History of the TI Community / Discussion
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As TI has created the Nspire, ranted about it, and refused to add some decent programming (save some Lua), I think the TI community is bound to be dead.
P. S. Why am I not a member now? Is it because of inactivity?
Sunrise 3 Progress: 30%
Size: around 20 KB, not including the save lists and in-game RAM.
The announcement of Lua Scripting at T3 this year (the first time they talked about Lua in big) got very much attention.
Certain slideshows even linked to community based sites (http://inspired-lua.org). And then following the trends on the tinspire google group shows that more and more teachers (and students) start to experiment with Lua. Also, I've seen a couple of Engineering students being really excited about the new Physics engine (one that has Lua bindings) in next TI-Nspire OS (3.2).
TI is dedicated with Lua, and they really want to work with the community (and they do. I, Adrien, Levak and Critor work closely together with them). And with the contests on Omnimaga and another one later this year on TI-Planet, I see the Lua community growing.
And you might say that TI killing Ndless with every OS update scare some people away, but as ExtendeD has clearly said he isn't going to give up any time soon.
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
Which TI-Nspire do you have? What are the T3 conferences like?
I have a TI-Nspire CX CAS (I got this one from TI), TI-Nspire Touchpad and two TI-Nspire CAS+'s (which are prototypes).
Beside that I got some 68k and z80 calculators.
I haven't gone to a T3 conference, but Adrien (Adriweb) has been there and from what he told me it seems very nice, and very friendly people.
The people there really appreciate much of the work that the community does (regarding educational projects such as EEPro for the TI-Nspire).
The people I communicate with from TI are also very nice and understanding.
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
What is TI trying to do with the TI-Nspire?
Making a great educational calculator. The TI-Nspire is the best mathematical device they ever made.
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
I meant more along the lines of development.
This is unrelated, but are you subscribed to the Nspire newsletter?
Well, TI defenitly isn't going to give up Lua scripting any time soon. They are very dedicated in making it better.
I'm subscribed to the TI-Nspire google group.
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
That's good to hear. I think TI itself is the one that will make or break the community.
I found the TI-Nspire newsletter, TI-Nspiring Times, when searching through their website. I have read through a couple issues and was interested in subscribing (it is published twice a year), but it is only available to educators. I figured I would mention it to you, since you probably would be able to get it even without being an educator.
Ah, I'm European so I can't get the newsletter.
But, I get enough info from TI anyway :)
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
Does TI have any contests that they're sponsoring, like they used to do with the Flash applications?
Yes, most contests on TI-Planet are sponsered by TI.
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
I'm curious, how did you get TI to do that?
Well, TI seems to be very willing donating stuff if to help the creation of interesting Lua applications.
Probably because they know that the community can come up with some very nice programs.
And Texas Instruments France is now also an official partner of TI-Planet (they even have a TI-Planet feed of their facebook page).
Now I wasn't involved with organisation of these things, I'm more of a developer for TI-Planet.
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
Involved in the site? Hardly.
TI-Planet is one of the main TI-Nspire hacking sites, and we will not censor because of TI.
And TI doesn't care really :P
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
I thought it was almost dead in 2008 until the massive activity increase of 2010 occured. Since late 2011 activity seems to have gone down again, but seeing what happened in 2010 I seriously doubt the community is dying. It might have a period of lull soon, though.
In 2010 I started compiling yearly activity of past years on most english calc forums in the TI community just to see how the community activity evolved over the last few years. It spanned from 2005 until about mid 2011, but I decided to update it again just now. This is how it looks like now:
Of course, 2012 is incomplete so far (147 days) so stats looks much lower than the rest. Note that those stats are approximative, though, due to various factors such as missed spambots (or missed legit posts in the case I had to screen through every post in a spambot invasion) or hidden topics, but it should give a good overview of how active each forum or comment board were. Notice that the overall trend so far seems to be very 2007 (aside from the fact activity migrated from a site to another over the years) and most sites are dropping in terms of post rate. TI-Basic Developer seems to be on a roll, though. :O
I think future activity will depend of how long Ndless remains blocked in OS 3.2 and if Lua picks up, along with if easy to use programming environments comes out for Nspire C/ASM programmers like TIGCC on 68K, but also if new stuff keeps coming out for the 83+ series. It seems like 83+ related activity will continue being high, but I'm not sure about the TI-Nspire.
Now active at https://discord.gg/cuZcfcF (CodeWalrus server) and music links available at https://dreamofomnimaga.page
That's a very useful table, thanks for sharing :)
Unfortunately, I don't really think the future of the TI community is very bright. Things like iPhones, iPods, facebook, and so on are only going to become even more popular and accessible, and they all eat away at the possible community membership. The new TI-Nspire CX calculators look and sound really cool, but I think it is too little too late from Texas Instruments.
It seems that most of the older, better community programmers have either decided to simply stick with their existing calculator(s) or completely left the community and moved on to other things. The limited programming documentation and support for the calculators has basically handicapped the community, as the barrier to use the calculators to do any real programming is rather high; that simply doesn't bode well for beginner programmers.
Consequently, there are very few TI-Nspire programs available (even on ticalc.org), which is one of the main things that people look for when deciding to buy a calculator. I know I've seen a few people come on the TI-Basic Developer forums asking for TI-Nspire programs and games, and we had to tell them that the calculator doesn't really have much available and probably won't. They were not only disappointed, but regretted buying a TI-Nspire.
Well, there is a lot of progress in that area.
nSDL allows porting of tons of games, the Gameboy and NES emulators can run thousands of games.
And there is a GBA emulator under development. So there isn't really a lack of games.
And there are arriving more and more Lua games too.
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
Where is most of that stuff happening? How far along is the development?
The GBA emulator isn't that public, I don't believe that he posted on Omnimaga about it yet. Don't know the exact state, just that it's being worked on.
And there are multiple Lua games being actively made on omnimaga. Progress is good.
So most visible dev is on Omnimaga.
I and TI-Planet are busy on certain projects that are not so public.
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
Calc84maniac started working on a GBA emu in 2010 after finishing gbc4nspire and working on a custom z80 emu. However, he stopped due to poor performances and later due to a data loss. He seems to have started from scratch recently, though. It's all secret, but I wouldn't be surprised if eventually there was an Omni topic somewhere.
Now active at https://discord.gg/cuZcfcF (CodeWalrus server) and music links available at https://dreamofomnimaga.page
Looking at the table for forum activity really highlights the popularity of Omnimaga, so I was wondering what is your secret to success? Also, why are none of the non-English forums included on the table?
Well, this year doesn't look so bad. We are the 149's day, so 572730/(149/366) = 1,406,840. Of course that would only be if we continue with the same ratio in the next months.
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
Although i might be biased, over the years there were people that were kinda obnoxious to new members asking questions already answered before, rather than giving them a chance to feel welcome then eventually pointing them in the right direction (Google/search). In addition to that, there were episodes where programs were singled out solely because of the usage of ASM libraries instead of pure BASIC, the language used, the file size or the amount of sub-programs and files. And of course there were the troublemakers, but those were mostly in one or two IRC channels.
As a result, Omnimaga decided to have rules that are stricter to prevent such stuff from happening, so no programmer is singled out or scared away. Also, years ago, I tried to convince other site admins to discourage the above more, which was a very bad move from my part, because they have the right to run their site how they want. Early on, people didn't see rudeness as a big issue in the TI community, so the "nice" side of Omnimaga did not attract that many extra users. However, in late 2008 and 2009, some people were more concerned about keeping people around due to a much quieter TI community. As a result, if one of those people judged a website to be hostile and not willing to change and they didn't like that, they slowly migrated to Omnimaga if they were aware of its existence. This caused an influx of members in 2009.
Of course, the stricter rules towards rudeness were kinda controversial in the TI community, though, because some people (from a certain former TI channel in particular that I will not name) found it as an attack against free speech or found that it attracted less mature members (although a lot of those contributed a lot positively after a while). However, in the end, it paid off, especially in 2009.
However, I think the bulk of the users might have been partly due to the gameboy emulators, Axe Parser language and Ndless, although the members who joined for the GB emulator usually posted once or twice to ask help or report bugs then never came back. Axe and Ndless, however, brought several new developers around.
Also Omnimaga game-oriented side probably attracted more people, since calculator game projects usually got an unusually higher amount of feedback.
Of course the way Omnimaga is or its philosophy might not please everyone, so that's why I'm happy other sites survived the 2008 lull too. It would suck if only one single calc site existed, because that won't leave choice for people. Some people might prefer more lax rules regarding rude comments, for example, or different kind of humor (for example, Omnimaga tends to be more attracted towards internet memes and less sarcastic humor).
Also Burr my table only tracks posting activity. I do not know the traffic of other sites, but I know in 2006 Omnimaga had around 100000-200000 hits per month for pages. Nowadays it gets between 500000 and 1000000 page hits per month. I don't know about visits, though.
Now active at https://discord.gg/cuZcfcF (CodeWalrus server) and music links available at https://dreamofomnimaga.page
I'm sure the respect-oriented approach helped Omnimaga increase in size, but I agree with you that the games and other projects are the primary reason for the explosion of activity; that's the way it has always been in the community. Can you really have a community, though, with only a few calculator sites? Omnimaga and Cemetech are doing well and have lots of activity, but the community as a whole is definitely smaller — I know we used to complain about everybody wanting to create their own site and forum, but I believe the fact that people aren't interested enough to bother creating them is a direct reflection of that.
Around 2003, there were only two z80 forums that were signifiantly active: United-TI and MaxCoderz. Cirrus was active too but it merged with UTI so that doesn't count. Drubu Productions was next, but it only had 3000 posts in half a year. After it closed, Dysfunction Programming got a forum and replaced Drubu, but even at its peak it never averaged higher than 600 posts per month, while both MC and UTI had between 1500 and 4000 consistently. The only other forum with signifiant activity (which in fact rivalled Omnimaga 2010's activity in 2004) was yAronet's 68K board, most of which resulted from flame wars between some members and one in particular.
Of course, ticalc comment boards were pretty active as well, but today it seems like the TI community has returned to a state where only two forums are really active and there is one or two other board in the background that has some decent activity. The latter, today, would be TI-BASIC Developer.
Back in 2005, there were far too many sites, though. Back then, most people thought it was cool to own a programming team, so they created a forum just to look cool. It saturated the community and most of those smaller sites died. However, in 2006 there were like 5 quite active english z80 board. It just seems today it became like in 2003-04 when it was all about MaxCoderz and United-TI: The only difference now is that it's Cemetech and Omnimaga instead. However, back then, while both maxCoderz and UTI never ever topped Omnimaga/Cemetech's 2010-11 activity, they still managed to stay active without having to branch out to computer programming, pixel art, hardware and gaming to keep members around.
My view of the TI community is that 5 years from now, it will not die, but the only way a calculator forum will survive is if most staff remains active and if its discussion isn't exclusively calculator-related. Back in 2008-2010, about 15-20% of Omnimaga/Cemetech's daily activity was from their respective founders. Also, if a new upsurge in activity occurs, it may not necessarily be as big as in 2010.
Now active at https://discord.gg/cuZcfcF (CodeWalrus server) and music links available at https://dreamofomnimaga.page
Yeah, I think you're right. I had noticed that you and Kerm have an amazing number of posts at your respective sites, so now I know why; I used to think you guys just liked hearing yourselves talk :D I also think the fact that ticalc.org is hardly ever updated is also an important factor in the community's dwindling numbers — most people still think of ticalc.org as the face of the community, and if they aren't updating then the rest of the community isn't either.
I guess my take away from all of this is that it takes a lot of dedication and effort to have a thriving community, and that just because you have a thriving community today doesn't mean you will in the future — case in point, United-TI and MaxCoderz. In addition, it really has to be a coordinated community effort if the community has any chance of success in the future.
The reason why only English forums are included is because all French forums ran on softwares that did not allow me to track stats the way I did with other sites. I had the same problem with TI-BASIC Developer, because forum IDs include topic titles, making it impossible to search the first post of every year by guessing the ID. However, TI-BD has a recent post option and not incredibly huge activity, which allowed me to easily count posts by year there.
Omnimaga forum software doesn't allow me to track stats the way I did with other sites either, but I had access to daily stats, wich fixed the issue.
Also see my reply below for other answers to your questions.
Now active at https://discord.gg/cuZcfcF (CodeWalrus server) and music links available at https://dreamofomnimaga.page
That makes sense. How many active sites are there in the French TI community?
TI-Basic Developer actually does surprisingly well in search engines; it appears in the top five or ten for most TI-Basic related queries. There isn't much of a community developed around the site, however, and all of the people that post and visit now are completely foreign to me. When I created the site back in 2006 I spent almost all of my time writing content, and basically neglected creating a community around it. From what I can tell, my retiring from the site at the end of 2008 basically caused most of the regulars to leave the site. I am not really involved in TI-Basic Developer or the TI community as a whole, and my involvement in TI Story is basically done as well.
TI-Planet and Espace-TI are the most active French sites. yAronet was once the core of the 68k community, but it's not much active now.
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
What about other non-French, non-English communities? Or, is France the only one still active?
I know there are Chinese communities, but I have no idea what's happening there and how active they are :P
There are still some other websites in other languages (Dutch for example), but none is as big as the English/French communities. (as far as I know)
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
I'll have to learn Chinese then :D
:D that seems like fun :P
Maybe google translate will be enough.
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
In China there is http://fxesms.5d6d.net/ which used to be extremely active (even more than Omnimaga ever) at its start, but then it dwindled over the years. It mostly covers Casio calcs and 68K TI calcs.
In Japan there was http://hidebbs.net/bbs/ticalcbbs but it seems to no longer be maintained.
Now active at https://discord.gg/cuZcfcF (CodeWalrus server) and music links available at https://dreamofomnimaga.page
By the way, I think two other major reasons for the TI community activity decreases some years were the following:
-Minecraft and World of Warcraft: At their peak of popularity (2005 and 2011 respectively), those games drained calc programmers away from the TI community considerably due to them being too addicted and eventually losing interest for their usual hobbies.
-Recession/economic crisis: When a recession occurs, people lose their jobs, which means they cannot afford the Internet bill anymore. This means fewer people online. This also causes less people to buy their own calcs (and thus, code)
Now active at https://discord.gg/cuZcfcF (CodeWalrus server) and music links available at https://dreamofomnimaga.page
So, what do you guys think about the other graphing calculators (HP, Casio, Sharp)? Have any of you used Casio's new calculator?
I know HP's calculators are very good mathematically, and I think they are the only ones really competing with TI in terms of Math and Science capabilities.
The Casio Prizm allows native applications to be run without any "jailbreaking", but the device is underpowered compared with the TI-Nspire.
But I have only used (graphical) calculators from TI, so I can not really judge about them.
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
Thanks for reminding me… Why is TI so difficult about the jailbreaking of their calculators? It seems so counterproductive, like they want to intentionally shoot themselves in the foot.
Here is some info Adrien got at T3:
A propos de Melendy Lovett, mentionnée plus haut au début de la journée :
Melendy Lovett est la directrice de la section Education de Texas Instruments, et donc en gros, pour les français, qui en généralisant, ne connaissent que TI par ses calculatrices, on peut dire pour résumer que c'est la PDG.
J'ai eu l'occasion (enfin, j'ai tout fait pour) de parler à Melendy Lovett en personne, pour lui parler de la communauté, et de ce que les personnes les plus hautes de TI (elle étant au sommet) pensaient d'Ndless, le jailbreak pour Nspire, et essentiellement ce qu'elle a dit, c'est que le blocage Ndless se fait par nécessité de garder un système "sûr" au niveau éducatif, pour les profs voulant être sûr d'avoir le contrôle sur ce qu'il se passe sur les calculatrices de leur élèves.
C'est surtout aussi pour protéger certains "abus" légaux avec la mise en place d'un OS CAS sur une machine non-CAS lors d'examens standardisés, par exemple, où TI doit montrer l'exemple en fournissant un système digne de confiance au point de vue des gestionnaire de ces standardisations d'examens, qui donnent leur feu vert pour annoncer par exemple que tel ou tel produit (TI-nspire non-cas par exemple) est officiellement accepté lors des examens. Si TI autorisait sur Nspire un modèle complètement ouvert (comme sur les autres plateformes, donc), ils ne pourraient pas probablement avoir un tel accord avec les organismes qui s'occupent des examens standardisés, et donc qui affectent directement les parts de marché (et donc tout l'aspect économique - les sous, en gros), et ils ne peuvent pas se permettre de voir disparaître cette "image" publique qui leur est financièrement profitable par la même occasion. Si les écoles/profs favorisent l'achat de tel ou tel modèle, c'est aussi parce que les étudiant pourront par la suite s'en servir, et non pas uniquement en cours par exemple.
Voilà en gros le point de vue du côté exécutif de chez TI (forcé par mes questions…). Bien sûr, un point de vue très différent de celui des utilisateurs et programmeurs - mais on le savait déjà.
and
Melendy Lovett told Adrien they had to block Ndless to avoid having to deal with tools which for example, would run a CAS OS on a non-CAS Nspire, or which would attack the PTT mode.
(edit by Adriweb : These are examples that I myself refer to, I don't think she was the one to bring these examples in.
What she insisted on, and I think it's fair to write about this here, in order to have some objectivity, is that TI is liked "ruled" by its clients, and its main clients are teachers and schools. Meaning that they have to make what teachers want, and they listen to teachers and what they say. Since TI and the teachers are really close, TI can't really allow multiple opposite "development directions", and rather than do as what the community would like, they have to align with what the teachers want, most often. The thing is that there is a real trust relationship between TI and the teachers, and TI thus can't lose this trust by providing tools/devices that can (in the bad case, but since it's a possibility that cannot be marginal, it has to be said) not be trusted because some people can crack it and do things they normally wouldn't be able to do. As teachers want to feel safe about TI products, TI has to provide such products, that's why they try to block Ndless at each update : "protect the teachers" to avoid losing the trust they have established.)
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
Well, that actually makes some sense; I guess it is really all about schools and teachers, and the TI community is more of a burden or nuisance than anything else. I do find it rather ironic that TI is supporting you guys (TI-Planet), even though that is where much of the development of Ndless is happening.
Probably because we also do lot's of stuff they like and we promote the TI-Nspire :D
TI-Nspire projects of me:
nCreator | PCspire | Klondike Lua | LogoMagic | EEPro for the TI-Nspire | Other
/forum/t-470961/history-of-the-ti-community#post-