HP Prime works from the traditionally TI community...
Message #1 Posted by debrouxl on 6 Dec 2013, 4:23 p.m.
Over the past few months, people known from a community traditionally interested in TI calculators have become interested in the powerful, if pretty buggy (although the latest OS upgrade is much better from that POV), platform that the HP Prime is.
Among the reasons for this state of fact are the power and speed of the PPL (whereas the Nspire’s BASIC cannot draw pixels to the screen or read individual keys), and a low level of lockdown on the Prime platform (whereas the Nspire is the most locked-down calculator on the market).
That’s despite belief that TI is so entrenched in many a country’s education market, with proportionately large education system nurturing power, that virtually nothing can make a significant dent into the market share of their offerings - IOW, despite belief that the Prime's market share will remain low (which is not a good thing for students).
We’d like to remind, or officially introduce, several pieces of information to the traditional HP community, which are probably worthy of interest:
- a wiki dedicated to the Prime was created by and for the traditionally TI community, before there was Prime-related activity (or hardly any activity since two years earlier, in fact) on wiki4hp. Likewise, the file archive systems of Omnimaga, TI-Planet and Cemetech gained Prime-related sections before hpcalc did;
- work on fiddling with Prime firmware upgrades began on Omnimaga and TI-Planet (e.g. in topics such as Let’s hack the HP Prime):
- reverse-engineering the linking protocols (both HID and fake MSD) began at TI-Planet as well: http://tiplanet.org/hpwiki/index.php?title=HP_Prime/Linking_Protocol. The result is a portable (Windows, MacOS X and Linux) library (https://github.com/debrouxl/hplp), modeled after the time-proven libti* + TILP third-party connectivity kit for TI graphing calculators, which supports a sizable subset of the protocol operations exercised by the HP connectivity kit.
And that’s the work of a community of people with shallow knowledge, and no ability to provide in depth analysis, as we’re told. We’re also told that the HP community is a community of calculator and math experts.
How about finding vulnerabilities, making a framework for leveraging native code, fixing HP's bugs by OS patches, making a real emulator + porting Linux (http://tiplanet.org/hpwiki/index.php?title=HP_Prime/Emulation contains notes to those effects), and other things that only experts can do, so that all Prime users, including us inferior people, benefit ? ;)
Erwin Ried’s linking code deserves a renewed mention, it and libhpcalcs are effectively complementary:
- on the one hand, Erwin Ried’s programs have a GUI (so they’re much more usable), he’s doing a good job communicating about them (YT videos), and he clearly has more free time on his hands;
- on the other hand, libhpcalcs has much wider protocol support (send and receive most file types, get calculator information, set date and time, make backup, make screenshots), and libhpcalcs is portable, lightweight native code.
Edited: 7 Dec 2013, 2:36 a.m. after one or more responses were posted
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