All these contests make you wonder what TI _really_ plans to accomplish :P

Anyway, as interesting as this sounds (free calcs!), I won't be able to participate :(

It's all marketing and PR. And, with the amount on those prizes, you can be sure they're going to get some free publicity and a traffic surge in addition to the overwhelming amount of people that come in September.

If you want your program to be downloaded (to developers here), make something good, write a good description, and upload it in September. It works, trust me :).

Yay! I'm trying my best to win at the faceplate design competition, and I think I really could if I rack in enough votes.. if you think my design is good enough, please do vote. I'll worship you if you do o.o Check my url to see mine. And good luck to everyone else who is trying to win too!

*grumble* spent 2 days on my design, and left it trying to upload for 2 days, never did upload. lost, 2 days of work.

plus, i had a kick-*** design (check link) that i made in Photoshop that I can't upload either... i'm just peeved at the entire process right now...

Well I think the reason why they did that is so you can't copy someone's work at all (unless you disassembled the swf into a fma and hacked in a send, but even then..) and so that everything is legit. Still that tool is pretty terrible, and viewing the entries is even more terrible, but... eh. That would be a good design though

thank you, and idk... the only thing is that if they did a file upload thing, it might give an edge toward... umm... how best to say this? unempoverished users?

and, besides, handing out templates could be a nightmare. how best to distribute them? psd so you can set a path for the sticker? alienates everyone not using photoshop. jpg so that it's cross-compatible? hard to select the area that the sticker goes in.

besides, after upload, now what? they'd have to manually transfer the image to flash, taking more time than necessary.

It'd be really, really nice if they could take an image from the flash production when you submit, and show the image instead of the objects that make up the image. Grr, horrible to view and utterly, utterly slow.

This *IS* TI we're talking about, you know...

great, great
but I have to say
that those racists of TI
ONLY allow AMARICAN people
but as a lot of people know
only less than 8% of the world is American
just to mention

Belgium Brainiac

...it's called LEGAL REASONS...

Still, it is unfair...

It's also harder to control competitions if they went worldwide, so it's easier to host it in its home area. But yeah, I can see what you mean, it would suck ><

Since when is "American" a race?

Yesterday.

But he that posted on the 26th...

Crap, that's miss-worded.

But he posted that on the 26th...

As I pointed out on #tcpa:

In my opinion, this whole contest is flawed.
The flash is terrible (you can't even erase mistakes!) and slows down everything.
Plus, look at the source. It's amazingly horrid!
You'd think they could hire a decent web designer...

Like andy said earlier, it's TI. *sigh*

You'd think they'd be able to better.
They have the money!

Some companies don't want to have any possibility of losing profit. Some would rather keep it to themself instead of making things better. *cough*MS*cough*

Perfect example! Now if a bunch of us had done it (the sticker contest submission form, that is), I bet it would be written and generally handled a lot better.

Yeah, although if we the innocent were to host it, could we offer $1000 and 82 brand new ti-84+SE's? Probably not..

Well, that might be the point...
Make a simplistic interface with limited options that everyone can use.
And if you mess up... Oh well!

Obviously the point of this "contest" is to generate new GraphiTI designs cheaply, as well as get even more publicity for them. If you've designed a new sticker, you are more likely to go out and buy one...

But if you look at 98% of the designs, are they really worth it? Some people are like "Okay I'll make one, even though I probably won't win". Alot of them so far are so cheesy and flourescent looking, as if they were made in mspaint within 2 minutes.

Mine I spent an hour to make and I'm really determined to win the grand prize, and I have a lot of hope to do so as well. Unfortunately I have to collect votes to win, which I don't like but I'm trying really hard to do that too.

So.. if you'd like to see me win, or at least help out, vote for mine, or at the very least look at it via my url. I bet the person that wins gets theirs created for a new design that TI will sell. No royalties though, as the terms of agreement say that what you submit they own without question, but ah.. I really do want to win this competition, at least for the First Prize.

Put it this way, many of them probably aren't worth it, but may contain a spark of inspiration and creativity that TI can harvest and make money with. Basically, I see TI designers combing through the top scoring designs and, upon finding one with that certain undeveloped potential, touching it up in Photoshop, and packaging it.

This contest will be extremely lucrative for TI: They spend nothing (practically) to set up the contest and promote it. Then, they harness the brains of hundreds of thousands of people to make designs for them, without paying them a cent. Yes, at the end of it, they award a small prize to the top design, but then turn around and sell it and the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th designs for millions!!

talking about crappy stuff, i know this might be a little off topic but...
i believe that we have too much cr*ppy BASIC trash in the archives. it takes me 5 minutes to load, and seriously, i have to scroll throught a bunch of cr*p just to get at the good programs. Rating systems don't work well either, because most people are simply too lazy to vote, so some semi-good programs are also stuck at the bottom.
well, my solution for clearing up is simple: allow us to delete our own trash. even that simple option can clear up a lot of junk. i know because i've created some cr*ppy programs too that i want to delete, so that would surely clean up the archives.

Well, can't you simply update your program, but tell the archiver to delete the updated version because you want to get rid of it?

Still, in any case, someone might download your program and improve it and release it. If you had deleted it, that eliminates the chance that anything good can come of it. You might as well have not programmed it in the first place.

What I really like about ticalc.org is that it takes any and all creations; no program is refused because it isn't good enough. We should be proud of our creations, even if they're not so good; put it this way, if we don't write programs, who will?

i totally agree.

Get a domain.
If you have a server, nobody wants to type in the IP!
Domains are dirt-cheap now. Go buy one!

Well, is it worth uploading, just to know that our program is uploaded??
On some computers, with pentium II and ADSL, it has even become impossible to open the page of the BASIC programs, so why dont make a director cold cr@p and put all the cr@p in there?

Nobody would put their own file in a directory called 'cr@p'...

Yeah, many people seem to forget that you can EASILY remove your own files just by sending the file archiver(s) a simple e-mail, which takes about 30 seconds.

Last time I checked you could say "crap" in this forum.
Oh, and click on the main thread next time.