HP Prime: a student's view

[Liam Hays]

jte Wrote:Thanks! (I’m the author of those apps.)

What? Just you, one person by themselves? That's incredible.

jte Wrote:I’m not sure if you noticed, but you can effect purely vertical / horizontal stretches (in Function and Advanced Graphing) if you carefully position and move your fingers when pinching.

I have noticed this feature, and I haven't had any use for it (yet).

jte Wrote:For example, the scaling code I implemented that is used during pinch-to-zoom (in Function and Advanced Graphing) comes in two variants (when the scaling factor is less than 1): one for light mode and one for dark mode. Why? So that thin lines don’t get hidden by quick scaled rendering (lost due to aliasing). You could, for example, try plotting |Y-1|>.1 in Advanced Graphing (with default Plot Setup settings, so that there is a one-pixel-thick line not in the solution set) and then pinching inward: the one-pixel-thick line will come and go as you pinch.
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One of the things that Function and Advanced Graphing do to speed up plotting is use byte code evaluators for expression evaluation (only for simple expressions in Function; the full PPL evaluator is used for expressions beyond the BCD byte code evaluator’s abilities). Things like common subexpressions are recognized by the expression -> byte code compiler (if F1(X)=SIN(X)+SIN(X), an evaluation of F1 for a particular X value only calculates SIN(X) once).

It's things like these that, in my opinion, make HP calculators unique: attention to detail beyond comparison.

jte Wrote:If you haven’t seen the graph gallery in the Advanced Graphing app, I’ve put some fun example plots in there. (Available via the physical Menu key while in a Plot view of the Advanced Graphing app.)

I love the plot gallery---do you think you could add Tupper's self-referential formula? My only complaint with the gallery is that you have to save Advanced Graphing as a new app to be able to access the equations.

jte Wrote:I’ve been looking through the Prime’s UI a bit over the past couple of weeks and have been thinking of possible improvements / refinements (things in the Python editor that jumped to mind immediately for me were syntax colouring, indent guides, improved help support, …)

Nice. I personally think the help for most Python functions and some newer PPL functions is kind of poorly written (missing punctuation, typos). It's not really an issue, though, as it doesn't obscure the function parameters or anything.