Author Topic: Casio's Response to My Suggestions  (Read 18647 times)

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Offline sammyMaX

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Casio's Response to My Suggestions
« on: March 03, 2012, 09:22:03 am »
I emailed the guy that responded to me to give me my free Prizm. Here's (the important part of) what I said:

Quote
1. Support for arbitrary-precision arithmetic. The Nspire family of calculators have this, and it makes them tremendously powerful. I also have an Nspire, and it is a tough decision for me to choose between the two calculators I own because while the Prizm has many advantages over the Nspire, the Prizm cannot perform operations involving very large numbers (say, 23200)
2. Showing what each function in the catalog takes in. When I use the catalog to select a function, I often don't know what inputs I should type in, or the order that they go in. This can become quite frustrating because I would then have to experiment with the function to see how to use it. Reserving a line in the catalog menu to display what inputs a function needs and the order they go in would be very useful.
3. A better font. You might think this is a minor complaint, but the font of a calculator contributes tremendously to the look and feel one gets when using it. I believe the font is too thick (it looks like everything is in bold), and also too large in most places. It also has serifs, which makes the calculator look a bit outdated, and characters such as the lower case "p" don't line up with the rest of the characters. Changing the font to something that is sans-serif and fixes the problems I mentioned would improve the look and feel of the Prizm significantly.
4. Fix the logarithm button. This is only a minor complaint, but pressing the logarithm button will give a log function that doesn't display what base it is in. However, if you go to the math menu, and then logab, you get to specify the base as well, which I prefer.
5. Allow third-party C and assembly development. Not doing so has been TI's greatest mistake, and it is one that you can take advantage of. Allowing third-party development will attract a large audience of programmers to buy the Prizm because they are tired of jumping through so many hoops to develop on the Nspire. The programs they will make will also benefit Casio - believe it or not, many of the programs made for calculators aren't games, but rather extremely powerful utilities that extend the capabilities of the calculator even further! Just look at what TI-84 developers have done over time: they made extremely fast prime factoring programs, added support for arbitrary-precision arithmetic, added the ability to type lowercase letters, and even allowed the calculator to recover from RAM clears! Opening the Prizm to third-party development will make the Prizm even more powerful, and it would be much easier for Casio to release an SDK than it would be to program all the features third-party developers would have added.

Implementing these suggestions, which can be done just through a software update, would make the Prizm a near perfect calculator, and it would be an easy choice for me, as well as others, to pick between this and an Nspire. I truly hope that Casio will listen to these suggestions.
I know the guy I emailed probably wasn't in the programming department of Casio, and that most of their important decisions are probably made in Japan (he's in Washington state), but it was worth a try. I at least got a response! Here's his reply:
Quote
Thanks for your feedback and detailed suggestions.  I'm glad you are enjoying your Prizm and I hope you share the word with other students and teachers; word of mouth is the best way to spread the news.
 
I will certainly pass your suggestions on to those that make the decisions, but wanted to take a minute to respond to a few of your points:
 
1. Arbitrary-precision arithmetic: I admit I'm not familiar with this, but you've piqued my interest.  I will be looking into it.
 
2. Catalog Help: An absolutely fabulous idea -- I don't make these decisions, but I'm going to push for this one.
 
4. The logarithm button: Have you tried the MATH soft-menu in Run-Matrix?  I think this is the button you're speaking about.  From Run-Matrix, just press F4, then F2 and you'll get the log-of-any-base template.
 
5. Third Party C Development: From a certain perspective, I'm totally with you.  I've got some programming background and I've seen what a nice community of modders there is out there.  And it certainly would, as you said, open up our calculator to a great deal of demand.  However...  we're a primarily a provider of calculators to the education market.  Can you imagine how teachers would react if calculators could be modified?  You and I both know that modifications would include things like faking a memory reset or other things that would facilitate cheating.  Until we figure out a way to allow modding AND keep calculators safe for testing purposes, we're at an impasse.
He didn't respond to my suggestion about fonts :( And he says that third-party development won't happen until they can keep it safe for tests  :'( I wonder if my other suggestions, especially catalog help, will be implemented in the next OS update though.

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Offline Spenceboy98

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Re: Casio's Response to My Suggestions
« Reply #1 on: March 03, 2012, 09:30:51 am »
Cool. I hope they go for the catalog help. It gets a bit confusing.
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Offline Spyro543

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Re: Casio's Response to My Suggestions
« Reply #2 on: March 03, 2012, 09:38:18 am »
There already is some third-party C development going on- some people have made third-party SDKs, but Casio endorsing it (or whatever the correct word is) would be nice.

Offline sammyMaX

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Re: Casio's Response to My Suggestions
« Reply #3 on: March 03, 2012, 09:39:21 am »
Yeah, that was what I meant.

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Offline AngelFish

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Re: Casio's Response to My Suggestions
« Reply #4 on: March 03, 2012, 09:42:41 am »
1) I already released an ASM arbitrary precision math library with the basic functions awhile back, so...
2) I would like this
3) Meh, I'm fine with the font personally
4) The vast majority of people don't know the difference between Log() and Log_n(). Using Log_N() instead of the standard Log() would be confusing and strange to most users. I personally think it's better to keep it the way it is (and have an option to choose?)
5) It's already allowed though. All we really need is proper documentation.

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Offline sammyMaX

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Re: Casio's Response to My Suggestions
« Reply #5 on: March 03, 2012, 09:44:56 am »
Where can I find your math library?

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Offline alberthrocks

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Re: Casio's Response to My Suggestions
« Reply #6 on: March 03, 2012, 09:45:40 am »
I don't know if they side with the 3rd party development, but they've been passive about preventing it.

Anyway, very interesting indeed. :) I will likely send a reply too sometime soon.
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Offline AngelFish

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Re: Casio's Response to My Suggestions
« Reply #7 on: March 03, 2012, 09:46:21 am »
It should be in the "Libraries" topic in the subforum. If not, you'll have to get it from Ashbad or Kerm on Cemetech. I don't believe I have any copies.
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Offline turiqwalrus

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Re: Casio's Response to My Suggestions
« Reply #8 on: March 03, 2012, 09:48:53 am »
Cool. I hope they go for the catalog help. It gets a bit confusing.
well, at least we're trying to document everything already :D

Offline critor

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Re: Casio's Response to My Suggestions
« Reply #9 on: March 03, 2012, 09:49:49 am »
Let's all migrate from TI to Casio! :P

Offline sammyMaX

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Re: Casio's Response to My Suggestions
« Reply #10 on: March 03, 2012, 09:54:50 am »
Ahhh, I see qwerty. Great work with the library, but a library ≠ a program, and it won't be as fully featured as if Casio themselves implemented all the catalog to support arbitrarily large numbers. Then again, that would be a PITA for them to do, so kudos to TI for having the patience to make their Nspire support arbitrary-precision arithmetic. :)

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Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Casio's Response to My Suggestions
« Reply #11 on: March 03, 2012, 12:20:58 pm »
Like with TI, couldn't the community simply get together and not bother publicly making tools to cheat available? I noticed on the Nspire people stopped updating OSLauncher and I'm sure TI wanting to prevent cheating is a reason for that. On Casio cheating programs are not available yet and I'M sure the Casio community could work together as a compromise to not publicly advertise such program on their site and discourage users from cheating and this would be enough to help Casio, except maybe a few minority of students who might happen to find such program on Mediafire or P2P sites, and given most calc users are illiterate about programming and calc programs, I doubt a lot of people outside the community will even be able to install cheating tools, and the ones from the community probably won't bother using them if it means convincing Casio and TI to allow 3rd party development.

Currently Casio did not lock down 3rd-party APPs, but I wouldn't be surprised if they tried in the future.

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Re: Casio's Response to My Suggestions
« Reply #12 on: March 03, 2012, 12:34:57 pm »
For question 5, I think TI should have the same reaction, as in wishing to allow third-party development in C while keepimg calculators safe for testing purposes, but instead they are like, BLOCK EVERYTHING.

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Offline Darl181

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Re: Casio's Response to My Suggestions
« Reply #13 on: March 03, 2012, 01:08:42 pm »
Let's all migrate from TI to Casio!
Hm, maybe people could start putting these in their sigs if TI stays with the way they're traipsing along now.
:TI:

Also I sent him a question of my own a few days back, about the ability to install the emulator on a flash drive:
Quote from: Self
Hi, a question about the emulator, the license of which is offered in this promotion.  Can it be installed on a flash drive or similar, so you can bring it with you?
If not, is this planned for the future?
Quote from: Nathan (Casio)
Hi <snip>,
 
That's a fascinating question.  Let me respond with a question of my own, since I don't often install software on flash drives: wouldn't something like that require zero copy protection?  The ability to do something like that would clearly be useful, but if it short-circuited our ability to market our product then it would amount to shooting ourselves in the foot.
 
Standard copy protection as I understand it would either require a registry entry (which would require installation on a machine, not a flash drive) OR would require a disc in the drive (which would make a flash drive installation pointless, I believe).  Am I missing other options?
 
I hope these questions make sense and I really am interested in your response.
 
Kind Regards,
Nathan
Aside from how amazing it is to get a response from an actual person rather than an auto-responder hooked up to Cleverbot or something (insert :TI: smiley again :P)..any ideas?  The only sort of thing I can come up with is some sort of ID that you register somewhere, kind of like the calc's serial number.  Perhaps part of the validation process would involve checking some db for the same ID?  But then that might require internet access...

I'm not too familiar with this sort of stuff :/
« Last Edit: March 03, 2012, 01:27:54 pm by Darl181 »
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Offline sammyMaX

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Re: Casio's Response to My Suggestions
« Reply #14 on: March 03, 2012, 01:12:45 pm »
By emulator you mean the Nspire Student Software right?
I don't know how it would be possible to install it on a flash drive, but I don't see much of a purpose - Goplat's emulator is perfectly fine for me.

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