Due to the Easter rush, life duties, wondering why people in Quebec now park their car like this, trying to figure out how to turn ON a calculator and use a variable after almost 13 years of TI programming and spending a lot of time doing pixel art, the following calculator news has fallen under my radar: As announced on Facebook, a new HP Prime firmware is about to come out.

As the message says, the update adds various improvements in response to criticism and feedback from the TI and HP community. Although it is unclear if all the major bugs will be fixed, we have to thank the HP Prime programming team for being so open towards the community and participating in the various forums to gather suggestions and feedback. According to the Facebook post, here is the change log for the new firmware, although it is unknown when it will be released:

New Functionality (Connectivity Kit)
 1. Application has had major improvements to the user interface. Please refer to the included connectivity kit users guide for instructions and details.
 2. Support for the HP Wireless Classroom network has been introduced. Please see http://www.hp-prime.com/ for details on the Wireless Classroom kit.
 3. Greatly enhanced communication speed over USB link to calculator.

 New Functionality (Calculator Software)
 1. Improved touch support throughout system. This includes pinch to zoom support in graphing applications, and kinetic scrolling.
 2. Pressing HELP in an open command line will attempt to find the name of the command prior to the cursor position to display system help for that command.
 3. Includes revision 2 of the on calculator help files.
 4. Greatly enhanced robustness and capability of statistics 2 variable logistic fit.
 5. Wireless support for capable units turned on. Wireless icon will appear in the right top corner menu.
 6. Calculator Unit-to-Unit communications has now been enabled on units that can support it.
 7. Numerical values now can be displayed with digit groupings. Examples include: 1,234.567 1 234.567 and 1’234,567
 8. Two new numerical display formats introduced.
 9. Vectors are now displayed as a single line object until they become a matrix. This aids distinguishing vector and matrices apart further.
 10. User selectable first day of week setting for use through the system.
 11. First boot unlock and settings wizard. User will be asked to confirm language selection and some initial settings.
 12. Inference application now can do Chi^2 calculations and Linear Regression T calculations.
 13. Geometry application has been completely redone and is much faster, consistent, and capable then before.
 14. Enhanced color pickers allowing a greater range of color selection.
 15. Pressing ENTER will now open chooser in a dialog, or toggle checkbox.
 16. Enhanced unit object display to ensure a more standard form with complex units.
 17. TRIANGLE, FILLPOLY and LINE commands can now draw multiple objects in a consistent way with each other. Useful for very complicated 3D drawing in user programs.
 18. INPUT command can now create multiple page dialogs and contain choose boxes, check boxes and grouped check boxes. It can also allow specific item types and gives control of parsing behavior for input. It also supports size and position control.
 New Functionality (Virtual Calculator)
 1. A horizontal skin has been included for use with monitors that are restricted in the vertical pixel range.

Dang, those drawing commands make it seem like they really want to help programmers who want to work with 3D. This is awesome!

I'm guessing Han will appreciate the 3D updates. I hope the Geometry app is still integrated with the CAS. (You can do some really awesome things, like GA:=point(zeroes(x^3-1)), GB:=circle(0,1) and have the complex solutions of x^3=1 graphed. polygon works there too. There are actually some 3D commands that are pretty much hidden, but not doing anything. (Yet.) I ran into them by the help for plotparam: plotparam([v+u,v+u,v],[u=0..1,v=0..1],ustep=.1,vstep=.1)[/u] gives a pnt(hypersurface([[v+u,u+v],[u,v],[0,0],[1,1],big matrix of 3D point vectors,undef,[[]]),0). is_coplanar is oddly shown in the Toolbox. If they're adding 3D support, that would be epic.)

Wasn't there a rotation demo a while ago? It seemed slow, however.

What would be cool as well is if images could be rotated.

The problem with this is how you you then use the rotated image? The coordinates used are always in the upper left corner, so to keep the grob consistent we'd have to change the size in order to not lose information and it seems to me you'd then have difficulty using it since it would be hard to know where to place it..

What would be more useful would be a way to apply matrix transforms to a GROB; e.g MATTRANS([trgtG],[dx1,dy1],[dx2,dy2],srcG,[sx1,sy1],[sx2,sy2],matrix,[color]) acting like a mix of BLIT and DIMGROB (with the default color). That would allow for rotations along with flips and more.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on April 26, 2014, 10:02:24 pm

What would be cool as well is if images could be rotated.

The problem with this is how you you then use the rotated image? The coordinates used are always in the upper left corner, so to keep the grob consistent we'd have to change the size in order to not lose information and it seems to me you'd then have difficulty using it since it would be hard to know where to place it..

I didn't really get it. Of course the size would change but you are aware of it since you requested the rotation. Isn't there a function to get the size of GROBs ?

Now you lost me.