Different note app / way to store often used formulas / how to start programming

[debrouxl]

Quote:as I don't like the rocker buttons on the nspire and hate ti for only allowing to install their software on one computer (to destroy the used market I believe) but at least it is a finished product were I can do pretty much anything without having to read the manual first.

The fact is that the Nspire is, at the time of this writing (i.e. nearly 7 years after it first hit the marketplace), a more finished and integrated product than the Prime (which first hit the marketplace less than 6 months ago) is.
I'd say "fortunately so": even with TI being the market leader for graphing calculators in education (due to both Casio and HP letting TI become so), it would suck for users if the Nspire's polish and integration level were still poor after all those years
Among other things, there are computer-based and iPad-based versions of the Nspire software, and a third-party emulator. At the time of this writing, no Android-based versions were ever published, although we noticed at some point through LinkedIn that some Android developers had joined TI Education Technology.

The Nspire's polish and abilities are far from being perfect, that said:
* the computer software and calculator software behave differently in user-noticeable ways. I mean that in Lua programs (a platform-specific Lua with a proprietary event-driven API but no ability to read or write files...), special care must be taken in user programs for all three of computer, tablet and calculator support to be smooth;
* since April 2011 (yup, nearly three years ago), all Nspire OS versions 3.0.1.1753 and later have provided the dubious new "feature" of a bunch of brand-new CAS bugs which none of the 2007-2011 OS versions, let alone the 1995-2005 TI-68k OS versions (which have several bugs and limitations that the Nspire series' CAS doesn't have, that said) to users... At its core, the Nspire series' CAS remains fundamentally the same as the TI-92's CAS from 1995: in 2011, I showed that the core of an old TI-68k/AMS C CAS program of mine could be ported to the Nspire verbatim.
* its crippled BASIC language, which didn't even exist in the very first Nspire OS versions (yup, TI did the blunder of releasing a non-programmable graphing calculator, though it lasted only for several months), and remains willfully unable to draw pixels on the screen or read individual keys from the keyboard. On its side, the PPL has been there from the beginning, and it shines.
* have I mentioned that unlike HP for the Prime, TI is actively fighting its users' legitimate quest to use the full potential of the Nspire platform, and that such a silly and counter-productive strategy backfires ?