As most people who have been part of the TI community for a long while are aware, the global interest toward the community seemed to slowly decrease since the TI-84 Plus craze in 2004, according to lower forum posting rates in general, http://www.ticalc.org/about/webstats.html and the smaller amount of program releases.

However, in 2009, something different is happening: there are more and more notable program and game releases in overall than the previous one or two years. POTY 2009 will be the largest POTY since 2005 (note that each POTY includes entries from December 1st of the previous year to November 30th of the current year), with 8 z80 entries so far (the same amount as in 2006) and 5 68k entries (same as 2006 too). There are no TI-86 entry (there was one in 2006, the last time a TI-86 program was featured) but there are 6 for computers (4 more than in 2006). While the OS key factoring and hacking tools released this summer might have artificially boosted that amount of featured softwares, there were still more notable game releases before this happens, so this is somewhat good news. Not more traffic, but more releases. There also seems to be an increase in files added to the archives too, including games.

Could this means the TI community is picking up again? For sure, more possibilities are open now that the keys have been factored and that the TI-Nspire got cracked. Besides these discoveries, the people who claimed in 2005 and 2006 that everything was done on calculators in terms of programming has been proven wrong in BASIC, Hybrid and ASM in many ways, especially the later, with softwares such as TI-Boy SE.

Yeah I know, even before the key factoring there was still an huge load of projects going on. It seems in general, since late 2008 at least, there have been more dedication toward calculator developpement than there was from Summer 2006 until Summer 2008.

Omnimaga also got a bunch of new members too that I did not see before on the old board and UTI.

Now would be a good time to do more competitions to bring new coders and so code done.

And bring the lazy to activity too.

That's a good point.  I vote for a new contest sometime.

well personally i have some other stuff on my plate (including IRL) so it would need to be ran by the other staff like what was supposed to happen with the last one

i generally prefer emulator too, since my calcs often got stuff alerady on them and not enough RAM. That means no hacked pics (unless you do an installer)

I have some ideas that we could do for short mini-competitions.  They would only last a week or so, and so we could have a couple in quick succession.  Perhaps ideas like 24Hour coding, where a theme is revealed at a predetermined time and entrants have 24/48 hours to complete a game/program.  Or a 1K challenge, where coders are challenged to get the best game into a file size of 1K or less.  What do you guys think?

thats sounds awsome and a good way to get ppl more interested in programming (or get us back into ot )

Well TIBD is a little more obscure then we are, although we are close...
Yeah, how about week contests or something?