I personally think we should boycott SDK: not only will TI be making money off of selling it, SDK programs will improve the demand for the calculator itself by making more programs available for the calculator! I'm not against TI making money, but would be PAYING THEM to earn the money for them!

I personally think, ummmm...NO!!!

The argument about higher demand due to application is possible, but there is absolutely no chance that TI is going to make money directly from the SDK. Even if they charge $100 or $300 a license, they've spent much, much, much more money developing it than they're going to recover. Between all the SDK tools and the absolutely huge documentation, TI has probably spent much over 1000 hours developing the SDK. At the rate one pays a programmer, this adds up to a lot of money.

Thats what im saying though! If they gave it away for free, they would be making more money off of it indirectly through the software that will be produced by it, rather than about 75 people paying 100 bucks a piece!

Please disregard my last post; I didnt think it through very well and im too tired now to re-write it now, maybe tommorrow =P

There are many good open source EE applications. For example Berkley Spice. See link above.
May be we can port it to TI89 and get better thing than both EEPro and EE200.

Just out of idle curiosity, is there some reason that most of the flash apps are engineering related? I know there's ones for statistics, finance, and geometry, but there are what, three now for engineering? Any clue if TI will start making flash apps for other fields? I'd be a lot more interested in astronomy and physics apps since I'm in astronomy. :) Just commenting, that's all.
--
James Marshall
marshall@astro.umd.edu
http://www.astro.umd.edu/~marshall

I think that one of the reasons that there are so many engineering apps is because there are more engineers who are not satisfied with TI's lower calcs. In my Electrical Engineering class there is only one person without a graphing calculator. And nobody can tell me seriously that any calculator below the TI85/Ti86 series is competent for this task. We are willing to put up with the lack of user friendliness on the TI85/TI86 and the cost on the TI89 to be able to use the complex number, polynomial solving, and for the TI89 symbolic manipulation and calculus. While these can be used by other disciplines I think that Engineering students as a group are more likely to use their calculators more often for class and math. (Example I had a routine assignment the other day which required the use of really messy algebra. Having the symbolic manipulation was very useful to help find my errors.)

Because of these reasons I think the authors of these programs have realized that there is a market for Engineering programs (after all the authors are probably new graduates) and capitalized on it. (While I don't like the cost and don't own EE-Pro, it is more likely that Engineers will foot this kind of cash as the average Engineering text book is around $100 for a single class for one semester).

I think these are some valid reasons to why so many applications are focused at Engineers.

Philip Sugimoto


Re: TI Releases EE200 FLASH Application for the TI-89/92+
James Marshall
(Web Page)
Just out of idle curiosity, is there some reason that most of the flash apps are engineering related? I know
there's ones for statistics, finance, and geometry, but there are what, three now for engineering? Any clue if
TI will start making flash apps for other fields? I'd be a lot more interested in astronomy and physics apps
since I'm in astronomy. :) Just commenting, that's all.
--
James Marshall
marshall@astro.umd.edu
http://www.astro.umd.edu/~marshall

I haven't used the engeneering applications, and yes, I'm too lazy to download the demo, so I'm just curious about one thing: do the EE apps have a circuit simulator, or is it just a solver with a bunch of equations and diagrams. Seriously, if it doesn't have a simulator, then it's definitely not worth getting it.

Well I find EE-2000 very slow !
Just an example: When you press escape in the main screen, it redraws the navigation guide, and that takes much time !
The equation browser is also sluggish.
Are flash apps designed in basic ?
If you have to pay 100$ or more for a SDK that gives such poor results, it's not worth it.
The TI-Os is also quite slow compared to what you can do in ASM.
TI should reprogram entirerly the TI-89 os.
THe HP-49 has only got a 4 mHz processor, but the OS runs much faster.

God! What a disorganized, incoherent message!

I'm curious: if you like Hp calcs so much, why are you on a TI discussion board?

Just because he says the OS runs much faster (thereby making an educated comparison, not like "ALL YOU PIECES OF CRAP GO GET AN HP RIGHT NOW!!!"), you can say that he likes HP and hates TI?

Well In fact I am an icoherent person.
No I am not a fan of hp. But the hp 49 is faster with a slower processor. I think that The TI-Os is very badly programed. EE-2000 is a flash app,and its really sluggish. So if you have to pay 100$ to do apps like that there is no point in buying the sdk.
Hope this message is more coherent.:)

I own a HP 49G and a TI-89 and I think they are both really good calculators. The main reason I bought an HP is because my Math Professor won't let us use our TI-89s and a HP is required for my engineering class. Right now I prefer to use my 89, because it's easier to use(only because I got my HP 5 days ago). I'm an Electrical Engineer major, and I too found this EE200 to be slow. I don't know how a flash program would run on the HP, so I'm not going to compare. This is just my input.

Mike

get Symbulator Q it free!!!