Using the F1-F6 keys for navigation feels quite odd at first, but other than that I haven't found anything that seems to not work "right". I don't use it much for math though, so there might be lots of things that I haven't tried yet.

Using the Fkeys wasn't my issue at all, though there were times where they should have made it more obvious that those were the keys that were expected to be pressed. My main issue was pressing exit in applications and expecting to go back up a level in the UI. I'd open an app to look at it a bit press exit to get out of the current menu and press it again expecting to go to the main apps menu and it doesn't do that. Maybe I'm just used to it working that way on Android and excepted exit and menu to act like back and home respectively but it does seem like Android got that part right with their UI and it ended up making things very consistent and nice.

I've never thought about using the Exit key to return to the main menu, but it does make a lot of sense now that you mention it. It would be nice if using it to go to the menu was possible, but the current way of using it works fine for me. The Exit button has some other uses then returning right now, such as deleting what you're typing in Run-Matrix (unless you're in a menu), which is a pretty odd way to use it.

That is what I actually meant, teachers and tests :p
And to be honest, I think its normal we are third place, as the nspire itself is made for education purposes. And as I described in my last post, it looks as if TI is even trying to improve our status.



I agree with you that native applications would be great, but TI will become much less attractive to tests and stuff because they will not be able to stop students of cheating in certain ways (by faking PTT for example). And as both of you have remarked, its the number one concern of TI (and understandable).
But, there is a little chance that TI will start allowing native applications, so long they are signed by them. This would give TI still the ability to stop interference with PTT, while allowing community developers to create nice applications. The biggest chance is that they will not do this, but they were interested in the idea (not from me), and latest discoveries show that the dictionaries in the Chinese nspire's are "OS Extensions" that are signed.

That's exactly what they tried to do with the TI-83+/SE calculator over a decade ago, requiring developers to (pay to?) get their apps checked and signed by TI themselves before they could distribute them to users. They soon seemed to realize how foolhardy that was, and opened up development to the community to self-sign their apps. Unless you know of any specific examples, I know of no instance where users used custom apps to compromise the calculator for testing purposes, so I wonder who inside or external to TI provided this sudden pressure to start locking everything down and getting paranoid about developers specifically aiming to compromise functionality such as PTT. I find it interesting that Casio has no such functionality nor fears, and the Prizm is still accepted on all the same standardized tests.

I haven't heard of such a case yet
Well, apparently TI isn't afraid of Lua (and with Lua you can make cool games, so this doesn't look like the problem to me).
The fact that they allow all these stuff in Lua, I think, is because PTT can block it. I guess that this way they can stop 1. Game play during school and 2. Cheating.
I'm sure there was complains about some of these stuff.

Anyway, I don't know the real reasons behind all this

Which is, effectively, going back to the old FlashApps route...
They've been reasonably successful on the TI-Z80 platform, due to the facts that 1) until recently, there was no way to break the 8 KB size limitation for TI-Z80 ASM programs, and 2) they soon gave the 83+ FlashApp signing key for people to use it.
On the TI-68k platform, which has better third-party toolchains and libraries, FlashApps have remained at the fringe (even if it's not completely deserved).


Uh ? They're majorly incompetent (well, not that we didn't know it...) if they think that they can stop interference with PTT that way.
Even with a thorough checking of the source code (which they didn't do for TI-Z80 & TI-68k FlashApps, and which they have failed for many years on their own code...), they couldn't do that. Malicious code can be hidden in plain sight, e.g. "underhanded code".
Getting TI to sign an application with arbitrary code execution flaws would be a major win

They could block the program then with an OS update :p
No serious, I don't know. I just think TI isn't so bad as most of the people think.

(I'm out of arguments :p)

I'm willing to think that something has changed for the better in the past few months... but only time will tell

For now, my stance on the Nspire series will remain, basically, "use something else, unless you're forced to deal with it, or you're aiming at owning it completely".

Lionel, that's more or less my view, with an appended "...specifically a TI-84+SE, a Casio Prizm, or a TI-89, unless you have a good reason to use something else."

Why can't they set up an environment for native development that still inhibits one from messing with the the actual inner workings of the operating system? Why can't they make some form of protection against it? It'll be some work, I'm sure, but isn't skidding around that with Lua just as much work? Perhaps lock everything that the program shouldn't have control over before execution of the native code? Or is this really that much harder than it sounds?

On a side note about Lua, the fact that they're hearing the opinions of only a few community members doesn't really impress me; I don't see why they don't ask the whole community directly for input. The people TI picked to associate with are very skilled and are excellent picks, but they don't represent an entire community's thoughts.

They could do so, but there's two problems with that, one technical, one a sort of logical/ethical thing that makes me squirm. For the former, it's a lot easier to break out of what the calculator is intended to do, including just emulating a fake PTT interface, if you're dealing with native code rather than something interpreted and higher-level that has less hardware control. For the latter, providing a native development environment and still trying to restrict what the user can do with their device feels like a very Apple-esque attitude to me, something that is anathema to how I feel hardware/software development pairing should be performed.

This, very very much; if they're going to pick a few people, I think, they should at least make them individuals with the means and inclination to ask the larger community for feedback to return to the company, or invite the people whom they have chosen to gather feedback from the community at large.

As Kerm wrote, framing what can be achieved with the platform is unwelcome. We have the right to use the hardware we bought (and therefore own) for the purposes we see fit, including destroying its software and hardware if we fancy doing so.
We can understand that manufacturers have economical motivations to put limits on what users can do with platforms - but we don't have to care

It's not like we're doing everything we could to frontally attack them. If we were, for one thing, RunOS would have been released one year later, soon after Ndless 1.0. Between the making+non-release of RunOS, and the making+release of OSLauncher, TI added lots of protections...


They can attempt making such a protection, but in the general case, for native code, it cannot be bullet-proof.


Software locks tend to be a waste of resources. The unlocking procedures could be reverse-engineered statically or dynamically, and triggered after somehow getting control of the processor (which can be hard, but eventually happens on all closed platforms).

Did we get to a deadlock in this discussion? It seems that Jim ran out of pro-TI arguments. Lionel, I noticed that interesting discussion of yours on the Nspire Google group about teaching teachers to downgrade.

Jimmy is not a teacher, but indeed, it's fun to mention the topics of downgrading and unlocking on the tinspire Google group

Ah, I should have guessed that it was even more unlikely than I thought that a teacher would have been inquiring about downgrading. Didn't he say it was his school's Nspires that were having the problem? If I'm remembering correctly, and he did in fact say that, that's what led me to think he was a teacher.

As I have mentioned before, I know not the least about programming (but would like to understand the basics) but am fond of Casio graphing calculators. As such, I am wondering, for a person who would use the calc more for functionality than program-ability, would the TI-Nspire CX (non CAS) or the Prizm make more sense?

I'd say that they can do pretty much the same things as each other, but for me functionality varies directly as programmability. The CX, although Ndless 3 is in development, can't run native code yet while the more developer-friendly Prizm can. With more programmability, more people will write math and game programs, increasing the functionality.

And indeed, I think that the main thing that is missing from the Prizm is a 3D graphing program. I actually have plans for a project to add that functionality, now that Jonimus and company have added the floating-point functions of newlib into the Cemetech Prizm SDK, and I'm sure other people have had the same ideas, so I would still go with the Prizm. From several teachers, I've also heard that the pedagogical value of the way the Nspire displays and organizes math is questionable.

Newlib is still buggy and I wouldn't say I'm ready to officially say its done, not to mention that I would hope there are math related things built into the prizm since them reinventing the wheel for every app would be rather retarded, then again this is Casio so I wouldn't be surprised. They seem to under engineer things where TI seems to over engineer.