Mailarchives (A89: WindowsTI)

I have been inspired by WinShell for the TI-86 and the column about Telnet 83 to come up with WindowsTI OS and TI-IE app for the TI-89. I have included pictures that I made wednesday night. Justin Karneges has said that he is going to try to make the PPP protocol part of an ASM program, and my ideas rely mainly on if this comes true.

WindowsTI is like the "Ultimate OS" described on ticalc.org. It will be module-based so features can be included or left out. A few of the different features that have been described are: built-in RAM compression, false multi-tasking, icons/descriptions, and others. ASM programs will exclusively run in WindowsTI with a text/graphical interface. Special commands in the WinTI-API will allow the use of the "taskbar" as the menu system (as demonstrated in TI-IE). This will result in better use of screen space.

TI-IE (Texas Instruments Internet Explorer) will be exactly what it sounds like: a graphical browser. The problem with this is that the current graphics available on the web are larger than that of which the TI-calc can contain. This can be solved in two ways:

I know that this sounds very optomistic, given the TI-calc's memory and processing power. I do not know if a decompression scheme can be programmed in a small amount of memory. I think that GIF support is necessary, and JPEG support would be appreciated. This is why I chose the TI-89 for this project, because it has more memory and is faster than the other TI-calcs. TI-IE would have the basic ability to view web pages. File upload/download support is very considering, but the only practical use of uploading is to play a multiplayer game over a web page with another TI-calc hooked up to the Internet. TI-IE would not support encryption because I was told that this was way over my memory budget. My dad cringed when I told him how much memory I had to do this in.

Thanks for any comments. Again: I am not a programmer (yet), though I will do graphics. I plan to draw more pictures of WindowsTI and a few programs for it, such as mTIRC and TI-Explorer.