Hi, and thanks for reading the ticalc.org Newsletter!

We're happy to close out the year and bring in the new. Lots of cool stuff came out this year. Hope to see even more innovation in 2001 and years to come.

This year at ticalc.org we once again set new usage records. Our hits increased over 75% this year to roughly 85 million requests. We have almost 15,000 files in our archives and about 18,000 screenshots (57% of files screenshotted). We also received about 25% more comments to the news articles.

This month, instead of interviewing someone important in the community, I went for the opposite and found a random TI user, "Tommy" (not real name), to ask a few questions.

So thanks to all our readers, and Happy New Year!

Eric Sun

Where has the TI community gone?

As a veteran of the TI community (well, more veteran than most, at least), sometimes I wonder about the direction of where we're going. I "grew up" in the community looking up to people like Bill Nagel, Jimmy Mardell, and the ZShell crew. Back then, I think calculators seemed more fun because nothing was documented. In order to get something done, you had to figure everything out yourself.

Now, it seems almost too easy, with all these SDK's and built-in assembly capabilities. Thus none of the truly old-school programmers are around anymore, and we're in a new generation of TI users. I think people have gotten lazier and lazier; a few years ago, sentiment seemed like learning Z80 assembly was the thing to do, and everyone wanted to try it. Now, I think more people are willing to sit back and let a select few people do all the innovation.

Calculator innovation has pretty much reached its end, I think. Sure, there's more stuff we can do, like make more FLASH applications for the TI-89 and TI-83+, but other than that, we can't really expand that much more. I don't think anyone cares enough to do something wild (like trying to make assembly programs work on the TI-73), because why bother when you can just get another calculator? It's not the same as when Magnus and the gang made ZShell.

So what's my point? I don't expect the TI scene to continue expanding at the rate we have been expanding. We'll top off somewhere soon, I think, and then nobody will care anymore. It's already starting to happen: four years ago on IRC everyone talked excitedly about calculators. Now, in #ti, calculator talk is even discouraged. Perhaps the TI scene will eventually die away when calculators are replaced by minicomputers in schools. But now that the vast majority of high schools now use calculators, I think that we've reached the height of the community. But then again, I could be wrong. I sure hope so.

Please send any comments to this anonymous article to newsletter@ticalc.org and they will be relayed.

Anonymous

This has been another pretty quiet month in the TI scene. The TIGCC team was very active, however, and new versions of both the TIGCC and the TIGCC Library were released. Thomas Nussbaumer also released a host of new games, including TI-Chess v3.05, TI-Minesweeper v1.11, and TI-TiltMaze v1.0.

For the non-68K calculators, Jonah Cohen released Megacar v1.0 for the TI-86, bringing a popular TI-92 game to the Z80 processor. Alien Breed: Tower Assault v1.0 was also released by James Vernon of the TCPA.

Eric Sun

At ticalc.org, we often receive many of the same questions. In this column, we hope to address some of these questions for a broader audience. If you'd like to submit a question, please email it to ask@ticalc.org.

This month, Andy Selle takes over and addresses some commonly-asked math questions.

      i ----
      \/ x   = x^(1/i)
 

 3^(1/2)... 

                log   x
                    i
    log   x  =  --------
        b       log   b
                    i
 

Andy Selle