Survey posted 2004-07-16 01:15 by Jon.

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I have a big question. Why have we been talking about POTY so much over the past few weeks when we are in the middle of July and POTY voting is in the month of December. I dont think it takes the ticalc.org staff half a year to come up with a new voting system. Anyways what was wrong with the voting last year. It was easy and straight to the point. You have choices and you choose the best program for the year for that calc.

It might take that long. The reason they're asking now is probably that if there's a strong surge of support for a method that will take time to implement, they will have time to do it.

I don't think, though, that the selection method for last year was good because this site is structured for people who aren't developers. Those people are usually gamers, so they create an account and vote for their favorite game. This leaves out useful utilities like ID that deserve POTY status.

yet another possible option might be to have several stages of voting. You could have 2-3 voting periods, where you would start out with a prelimiary vote, and then go on to either a semi-final or final round (depending on how many programs, how many rounds wanted,etc). In the preliminary vote, all programs would be given a chance to be voted for. For the next round, you could take the top 20 or so programs from the preliminary vote, and then have a final round where the top programs from the preliminary round are voted upon, and then from this you can pick your winner via popular vote.

I guess this would have to be implamented next year but if you had a button on every programs page,that is elagible for the next POTY, that says nominate for POTY. and limit the voting to one vote/person/catigory/calculator. then at the time of POTY the top 20 or so programs, in each catagory, whith the most nominations/month would be in the contest.

I think voting for POTY should be handled like this:

1) All BASIC programs are set up in a list and all ASM programs are set up in another list... both with checkboxes, and the user checks all of the programs in each category that he/she thinks are eligible for the POTY.

2) The top 25 BASIC and top 25 ASM programs are put in seperate lists and voted on by the STAFF ONLY.

3) The top 10 of all ASM and BASIC combined are the only ones put on the POTY Poll Page and voted on by the user.

4) The winner is the program at the end of a set period of time with the most votes.

A few problems:

1.Dude, you know how MANY basic Misc. programs there are? Ad most of them havent been downloaded ever? The list would be HUGE!

2.Why does the staff vote on the top 25?

Another problem: If the top 25 are determined my downloading, I'm sure there will be some people cheating downloads.

That wouldn't work.

Even if no one cheats the download stats, DOWNLOADS HAVE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH QUALITY!!!! I've seen tons of junky BASIC "solve every formula ever invented!" progs that got more downloads than some really good games and utilities!!! A lot of people seem to think that downloads = quality. That's just a load of crap-you have to download a program to try it out, so it's not like you can say "that program doesn't work very well, I'm not going to download it". The only thing the number of downloads shows is how many people are INTERESTED in seeing if it's good or not.

There can't be that many basic misc. files in one year, can there???

If the staff voted on the top 25, everybody would get a say-so and not just the visitors and members to the site.
(I really don't know why I wrote the previous comment like I did, but I felt I had to say something.)

For the purposes of POTY voting, aren't visitors and members the only people concerned?

I really don't understand who else would 'get a say-so.'

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Yes, there can be that many!!! Just look at some of the new uploads for the 83+ on some days...

There is an other problem;

There will be a lot of basic programs (esp math and misc)that are written especially in basic to give it a real open source / educational aspect.

We can't ignore these argument, this is the fundament of the Ti-community.

Was that supposed to make sense to me??? Could you explain that a little more clearly?

"...to give it a real open source / educational aspect.

We can't ignore these argument, this is the fundament of the Ti-community."???

He probably meant that some programs written by people in BASIC who know ASM were written that way not because the author didn't know how to do it but so that it could be easily edited by users.

Oh, ok now I get it... Why would you write in BASIC if you know ASM? That would be like a waste of effort. Although it would benifit other programmers, most ppl at this site at least know BASIC.

(P.S. I just made my first ASM Program. I will be programming in no time :P)

Because ASM is more powerful than BASIC, but BASIC doesn't often crash the OS. Sometimes it will still create errors, but if you have missing memory after running a buggy basic program, you can delete the leftover variables. Plus, BASIC is all open-source no matter what the author chooses, so people can make programs better for their calculators, or add features to things if they really want to.

This is way off topic, but I can't get something to work in my next ASM Test program. Can a sprite be any wider than 8 pixels. I've figured out how to make it taller, but can't seem to get it wider. Can someone help me???

In TIGCC use Sprite16 and Sprite32 instead of Sprite8. To make it wider than 32 you will need two sprites.

At least I don't think there's anything bigger than 32.

Makes sense, but you can just include the source code...even a detailed explanation of how it works so that it's not too hard to add your own features...

For example, if you had a math suite and wanted to get rid of the Algebra I utilities and keep the Algebra II utilities, what would be easier-install TIGCC, associate the files, learn C, remove the switch...case structures, recompile, debug, and transfer to calculator or transfer to calculator, look up Toolbar...EndTbar, remove Title structure and associated labels, tokenize, and run.

To put it another way, more people know BASIC and it's a lot easier to use on-calc.

OK, BASIC is still easier to modify, but you could include a batch file to assemble the source code (I've seen them included with programs before), and some simple instructions that say something like "to remove the calculus tools, delete all code between Label1 and Label5, type ret underneath Label1, then run asmsource.bat". It doesn't have to be that complex.

But that's a heck of a lot more work for the author. What's easier, making all those labels to make it easier to modify a program not meant to be modified, creating a batch file, and including instructions for how to modify it, or write the program in BASIC in the first place. You don't know how someone's going to modify your program, so if it is meant to be modified, let them do the work, and then you might as well do it in BASIC.

LOL...OK, OK, I believe you! BASIC progs are easier to modify. :-)

But with a decent number of comments in the source, most decent assembly programmers wouldn't find it too hard to modify an assembly program... ;-)

Most people are not decent assembly programmers, though.