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Site Name
TI-Basic Developer
Site URL
Founders
Founding Date
September 1, 2006
Years Active
2006 to Present
Aliases
TI|BD, tibasicdev
Tagline
The TI-Basic Information Repository
Affiliations
Site Genre
Programming
Challenges
Archives
Forum
News
TI-Basic Developer (TI|BD) covers how to make TI-Basic programs for the current TI graphing calculators (including the TI-83/84, 68k, and TI-Nspire series) using the many different TI-Basic commands, while discussing proper programming design and showing several techniques that can be incorporated into programs.
The site also offers an assortment of other features including:
- A forum where you can ask questions, get help with your programs, or just converse with other programmers
- Program archives where you can post your programs and download other peoples' programs
- Source code to study and learn from, including games, programs, and short routines
- References for help on various subjects, such as tokens, fonts, and error conditions
Site Staff
Administrators
- burr — founder
- DarkerLine
- Weregoose
- James Kanjo
- alexrudd
- graphmastur
- Timothy Foster
Moderators
- thornahawk
- Socks
- Xeda Elnara
- Mr Dino
- Silver Phantom
- Toothless the Dragon
Site URLs
The TI-Basic Developer site has only had two different URLs over the years:
- http://tibasicdev.wikidot.com
- http://tibasicdev.wikispaces.com
The Wikispaces hosting was chosen because a member of United-TI named Axcho recommended it since he was using it to host his own sprites-related wiki. After about a week of using Wikispaces, it was decided that it wasn't very conducive to site growth: the design was rather awkward and hard to get used to, and it also lacked the more advanced wiki features and functionality.
After doing some research of what free wikis existed, Wikidot was found to be the best designed and most complete. Subsequently, a Wikidot wiki was registered with the TI-Basic Developer name and tibasicdev subdomain, and all of the content from the Wikispaces wiki was copied over. The Wikispaces wiki was then deleted, and all of links were changed to point to the new Wikidot wiki.
Site Screenshots
(Screenshot of TI-Basic Developer main homepage June 2015)
(Screenshot of TI-Basic Developer TI-83 homepage June 2015)
Site Milestones
- September 1, 2006 — TI-Basic Developer wiki is started by burr using the content from his TI-Basic Developer guide as the foundation for the wiki.
- September 6, 2006 — The wiki is moved from Wikispaces to Wikidot for hosting because the look of the pages and editor is better, and it offers a lot more space for the wiki to grow and mature.
- October 7, 2006 — Talks of merging the wiki with the Function Library forum occur, but they ultimately fall through because it is decided that the wiki already covers much of the same content and the forum quality isn't very good.
- November 8, 2006 — Alexrudd and DarkerLine are promoted to admins, so they are now able to do all of the admin-related things for the wiki.
- February 21, 2007 — DarkerLine decided we should give each command its own individual page, so that all the relevant information about that command can be put on one page.
- December 16, 2007 — The xLIB Guru has merged with this wiki, and its content has been added.
- January 29, 2008 — All TI-83 commands have now been documented! Woo!
- January 29, 2008 — DarkerLine begins work on the 68k section of the site, creating the homepage, top navigation, command stub and the command index.
- February 9, 2008 — Burr created a portal page, which acts as a bridge between the TI-83 and 68k sections of the site, and is now the new homepage for the site.
- March 27, 2008 — burr started a Did You Know… page with a list of premade DYK's, along with changing the "Did You Know…" section in the sidebar into an include page.
- March 30, 2008 — burr started the Featured Articles page that lists the best articles available on the wiki, along with changing the "Featured Article" section in the sidebar on the homepage into an include page.
- April 2, 2008 — James Kanjo made the 83 & 68k pages automatically retrieve the first 5 news items from the old news section.
- April 2, 2008 — DarkerLine and James Kanjo worked together to upgrade the implemented "include template" sections of the site. Result: Site automatically retrieves the required parts of the "Did You Know" and "Featured Article" sections for the 83 68k home pages.
- April 24, 2008 — DarkerLine has finished the first chapter of the Starter Kit, a tutorial for beginner programmers.
- May 10, 2008 — James Kanjo has set up a new framework for infoboxes for the 83 portal of the site.
- May 15, 2008 — James Kanjo has set up a new framework for infoboxes for the 68k portal of the site.
- June 2, 2008 — burr updated the showcases page separating the programs by genre and using the tabview.
- September 27, 2008 — Timothy Foster created the page TI-Nspire Programming.
- April 1, 2009 — TI-Basic Developer has reached one million (that's 1000000) pageloads!
- April 3, 2009 — James Kanjo created an all new system on recognition and awards for members of the TI|BD community.
- April 29, 2009 — I am happy to announce, that as of now, we have exactly 75 programs in our archives, 146 news items, and 3 announcements.
- July 25, 2009 — burr, the founder of this site, transfers Master Administrator status to DarkerLine.
- July 27, 2009 — The TI-Basic Developer goes Pro on Wikidot!
- March 11, 2010 — The archives have been upgraded to make uploading process much easier.
- January 31, 2012 — burr reorganized the forum to make it easier to use.
- Febuary 1, 2012 — burr started a new section of the site called TI Story for documenting the TI community history
- April 10, 2012 — TI Story has moved to its own wiki — http://tistory.wikidot.com
- April 25, 2012 — Xeda Elnara was made a site moderator due to her commitment and dedication to the forum
- June 5, 2012 — burr redesigned the homepage for the TI-83 section of the site
- December 12, 2012 — burr redesigned the main homepage to complement the respective calculator homepages
- December 27, 2012 — Mr Dino was made a site moderator due to his commitment and dedication to the forum
- January 16, 2013 — There are discussions about redesigning the forums to be more robust.
- October 10, 2014 — Silver Phantom was made a site moderator due to his commitment and dedication to the forum.
- October 10, 2014 — Toothless the Dragon was made a site moderator due to his commitment and dedication to the forum.
Site History
(Taken from TI-Basic Developer history page)
This is the history of the site from the beginning as remembered by me. I have decided to write this down for posterity sake for those people interested in knowing about how the site came into being, and what the decision-making process was that has caused the site to exist as it does today. — burr, site founder
Before there was any TI-Basic Developer, I had written a few small TI-Basic programming guides in 2004 and 2005: an optimization walkthrough, a debugging tutorial, and an optimization table (in that order). During the process of writing the guides, I was frequenting the forums on United-TI and Cemetech quite often, and one of the common requests was TI-Basic programming help.
Although people (including myself) would provide quality help, going out of their way to not only answer the questions but make the answers thorough and easy to understand, people would continue to ask the same questions over and over again. After a while of seeing this, I realized that it was simply futile to try to get people to use the forum search engine before starting a new topic because you are working against human nature.
So, I decided the only way to truly solve the problem was to create a TI-Basic programming guide that we could refer beginners and everybody else to. The focus of the guide would be to cover the main TI-Basic commands, while also organizing them into relevant categories based on their function. While there were existing guides that covered the commands, most of them were incomplete, often inaccurate, and generally just poor quality.
Before writing anything, I looked through several TI-Basic tutorials and guides that other people had written (especially BASIC Guru by Ben Ilegbodu and Basic Tutor by Kerm Martian) and some of the different TI forums (including the aforementioned United-TI and Cemetech, as well as Omnimaga and CalcGames). The greatest resource, though, was TI and their calculator manual, which was the starting point for much of the content.
Once a few of the command category pages had been written with all of the information about the commands included — a complete description, menu location, advanced uses, optimizations using before and after examples, and even sample programs that used the commands — the guide was shown to Weregoose and kalan_vod on IRC. Both of them were very receptive, and thought that it would be a valuable resource for beginning TI-Basic programmers upon its completion.
At the same time, they liked how in-depth the commands were covered, and suggested that the scope of the guide be changed to include all of the TI-Basic commands. While this sounded like a good idea, there were still over 300 commands left to cover, which was a considerable amount of work for one person to do by themselves. What they recommended was that a TI-Basic topic at the United-TI forums be started requesting help with the guide, and that's what was done.
Several people replied to the topic offering suggestions and help, but the problem was that they couldn't actually help with the guide, since it was just static HTML and hosted on a Freewebs account. Alexrudd suggested that the guide be placed on a wiki, which made a lot of sense given the success of Wikipedia at the time. The wiki service that was chosen was Wikispaces, after visiting axcho's sprites wiki hosted there.
A wiki was registered with the TI-Basic Developer name and tibasicdev subdomain, and all of the content from the guide was posted on it. Fallen Ghost, alexrudd, and Weregoose joined within the first couple of days, and there were several edits and a few new pages created. After about a week of using Wikispaces, it was decided that it wasn't very conducive to site growth: the design was rather awkward and hard to get used to, and it also lacked the more advanced wiki features and functionality.
After doing some research of what free wikis existed, Wikidot was found to be the best designed and most complete. Subsequently, a Wikidot wiki was registered with the TI-Basic Developer name and tibasicdev subdomain, and all of the content from the Wikispaces wiki was copied over. The Wikispaces wiki was then deleted, and all of links were changed to point to the new Wikidot wiki.
As with any new site, the overwhelming majority of edits and additions to TI-Basic Developer in the first few months were done entirely by me. There were minor edits here and there by other people, but it was nothing really substantial or newsworthy. Of course, not seeing anybody actively contributing can deflate a person's spirit, and that's precisely what happened.
I decided in early November to stop contributing to TI-Basic Developer, and moved on to other TI-Basic projects. I didn't want my lack of interest to doom any potential that the site might have, however, so I promoted alexrudd and DarkerLine to administrators: they were now able to do all of the admin-related things for the wiki that I had been doing.
After checking back on TI-Basic Developer in early 2007, I was greatly surprised to discover that there was some new activity on the site: alexrudd started documenting some of the math commands in the Math menu and Harrierfalcon added some information to the variables page. At the same time, there was some new discussion going on in the United-TI topic associated with the site.
So, I decided to continue contributing to TI-Basic Developer myself, and started working on putting together some new content — a portability page documenting the TI-Basic differences between the calculators, and a usability page discussing ways to make TI-Basic programs more user-friendly. Once I was done with both of those pages, a new idea was proposed by DarkerLine: creating an individual page for each TI-Basic command, so that all of the relevant information about the command can be put on one page.
The idea was favorably accepted by everyone, as documenting all of the TI-Basic commands had been something that everyone wanted to do for a long time. Work then began on putting together a command template. After looking at WikiTI and Wikipedia, it was decided that each command page would include a sidebar, as well as an explanation of the command, sample uses, tricks and optimizations using the command, and related commands.
We then began taking the command info on each command category page, and placing it on its own page. After that was done, a command index was created and the remaining commands started being documented. This process was especially hastened by DarkerLine, who not only created a screenshot for each command, but also documented almost half of the commands himself.
While work on the command pages was going on, I and other people continued to create new pages on the site. However, there wasn't many new users, so to get some more user involvement, I started a topic on Cemetech advertising the site and requesting help. The response was mostly favorable, with a few people joining as a result, and it also started off a separate discussion about creating a TI-Basic book.
To be continued…