TI community activity: An analysis

[DJ Omnimaga]

Like we did last year in late November, shortly before Ticalc.org begins the POTY survey rounds, let's take a look at how the TI community have been going in the last 12 months. 2010, in overall, was a great year for TI-83+ and TI-Nspire programming with many more discoveries and releases and the renewed interest seen in 2009 has turned into an upward activity spiral.

First of all, there have been a considerable increase in amount of notable calculator games and utilities being released. If you take a look at Ticalc.org featured program page, you will notice that after an all-time low of 2 POTY candidates in 2008, the 2009 POTY beats 2006 and 2007. However, 2010 has even more, even if we excludes all retroactive features such as FFTOM2, Contra 83 and xLIB. 2010 was also a year where many old programs that were not featured back then finally got their deserved feature. If we add them to the list, 2010 rivals 2003 in features.

Unfortunately, the 68K scene did not see a noticeable activity increase, as people appear to be moving towards the Nspire world, but the z80 scene exploded and this year will be the second largest TI-83+/84+ POTY survey, after 2004. Some interesting things occurred as well: For the first time ever, there will both be a TI-81 and TI-Nspire survey. Quite ironic considering the TI-81 was discontinued 13 years ago, eh? With the TI-Nspire, we can thank the Ndless team for allowing third-party development on this machine. Ticalc.org also enjoyed a revival, news/archives-wise, although traffic still seems to be dropping in overall, with only two months that saw an traffic increase over the same month last year. There also appears to be a small slowdown in news since recently, although it is still way higher than it has been from Early-2007 to Mid-2009 and last year there was the whole key factoring issue. In overall, though, 2010 has been a very good year in terms of calculator releases and it looks like 2011 will be another good one, with Axe being more and more popular and mastered by more programmers, and the arrival of DoorsCS7 BASIC libraries and the possibility to see new ones appearing inside this revolutionary shell.

On the community side of things, activity skyrocketed in overall, although some forums saw their activity continue to dwindle due to many of their projects and staff being inactive or other miscellaneous problems such as downtimes or most projects being inactive. For example, United-TI saw its activity boost from the key factoring and Nspire cracking discussion halted by a week-long downtime one year ago and due to long-term effects of some miscellaneous problems including most projects being inactive. Revsoft was also hit by a long downtime and took a long while to recover.

On the bright side, TI-BASIC Developer forums have started to pick up again since the end of the Summer and both Cemetech and Omnimaga have been breaking activity records for a while. They saw many new members arrive with great projects. Cemetech saw its activity increase signifiantly starting in 2010, but it really took off for real around June. Now they have big chances to break their all-time yearly posting record from 2006 this year. Although their activity appears to have dropped recently, it is still around their 2006 levels, and since around March they generally see a huge activity increase, 2011 looks very promising, especially with last year revival of DCS7, CALCnet and their annual Summer programming contests. Omnimaga, on its side, saw the birth of Axe Parser language, which quickly got popular. After Ndless opened the TI-Nspire to ARM assembly and C development in March, forums saw an influx in TI-Nspire programmers while Axe continued to attract new z80 programmers. After a major slowdown in May, the programming contest boosted activity until Early September. After the Axe contest ended, the site saw another activity jump due to the arrival of new programmers and the birth of several promising projects and has been averaging around 400 posts a day since.

I think we have to thank everyone who contributed into this wind of change in the TI community that renewed interest for new stuff, revolutionized the TI programming world and everyone else who contributed into making the community a better place than it was a few years ago. Hopefully this renewal of interest will last for a long while.

On the Omnimaga side, hopefully we will finalize our download section update soon, it may eventually be possible to use the French Omnimaga IRC channel directly from OmnomIRC and hopefully make Spybot45 post notifications so they're less disruptive for the flow of discussion on IRC, by disabling notifications for posts made outside calculator or pixel art related sub-forums instead of just the restricted ones. The later update would also make it possible to bring back Cemetech notifications from their project sub-forums.

[yunhua98]

Go TI-Community, it has really kept me interested in calculators, and I'm glad I joined it when it started picking up again! 

[Builderboy]

Ti community seems to have picked up again Its so awesome to see all the new projects thriving and building more interesting in the community!

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yep.

Also personally I would like to thank certain people in particular for having boosted activity considerably in 2010: Quigibo for bringning a new language that many people use now, ExtendeD and the rest of the Ndless team for opening the Nspire to 3rd party dev. Both brought even more activity here and later the community. KermMartian for devoting so much time in Cemetech, allowing it to pick up again too and also for his help and contributions to the community, especially Doors CS7. BrandonW, Calc84maniac and later Thepenguin77 for all their discoveries, some of which brought more life in the community. And finally, everyone else that decided to focus on calculators again in the TI community instead of discouraging people from trying new stuff and focusing on bad stuff.

On a side note, in 2010 Omnimaga had more activity than the six previous years combined (Although in 2004 and 2008 Omnimaga forums were only open for 6 months)

2004 - 60
2005 - 9457
2006 - 30132
2007 - 15898
2008 - 3783
2009 - 15004
TOTAL 74334
2010 - 75581 (excluding today)

(I'm also slowly adding some of the 2005 forum smileys back. I lost everything from 2006 and 2007, though.)

[Munchor]

These news are great!

It's also good to see if any Omnimaga user program wins POTY

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yeah hopefully this programming activity will continue over next year.

What I appreciate with the new Omnimaga forums compared to the old one is that there are more active projects and the focus is on calculators rather than just off-topicness and randomness. On the old board, there were like one or two projects with new posts per day and about 8-9 topics in misc talk/randomness with new posts. Sometimes, on the new board, half of the first projects/ideas topic page has replies from today.

[Munchor]

Yeah hopefully this programming activity will continue over next year.

What I appreciate with the new Omnimaga forums compared to the old one is that there are more active projects and the focus is on calculators rather than just off-topicness and randomness. On the old board, there were like one or two projects with new posts per day and about 8-9 topics in misc talk/randomness with new posts. Sometimes, on the new board, half of the first projects/ideas topic page has replies from today.

Everybody has their own little project. I joined with 0 knowledge on programming and a week later set my first project, Formulum!

EDIT: 0 CALCULATOR programming knowledge, I knew lots of PC Programming already

[AngelFish]

Yeah hopefully this programming activity will continue over next year.

What I appreciate with the new Omnimaga forums compared to the old one is that there are more active projects and the focus is on calculators rather than just off-topicness and randomness.

There are probably a lot of secret projects no one even knows about too.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yeah hopefully this programming activity will continue over next year.

What I appreciate with the new Omnimaga forums compared to the old one is that there are more active projects and the focus is on calculators rather than just off-topicness and randomness. On the old board, there were like one or two projects with new posts per day and about 8-9 topics in misc talk/randomness with new posts. Sometimes, on the new board, half of the first projects/ideas topic page has replies from today.

Everybody has their own little project. I joined with 0 knowledge on programming and a week later set my first project, Formulum!

EDIT: 0 CALCULATOR programming knowledge, I knew lots of PC Programming already

And now you sometimes work on games too.

I really need to get into programming again. I was just too tired lately because I had a lot of stuff to do.

Yeah hopefully this programming activity will continue over next year.

What I appreciate with the new Omnimaga forums compared to the old one is that there are more active projects and the focus is on calculators rather than just off-topicness and randomness.

There are probably a lot of secret projects no one even knows about too.

That too. We often get wow'ed with amazing stuff.

On an off-topic note I just noticed something... dirty

Spoiler For **NSFW**:

[16:29:59] (O) New post by DJ Omnimaga in TI community activity: An anal http://omniurl.tk/5519/94218

Spybot45, couldn't you have truncated the topic title at a different location?

[Galandros]

Personally in the Internet I have preference from slightly to moderately active and smaller circles.
But it is also great to have a wider audience so it might attract many more programmers over time. Some people interested in mathematics (like thornahawk and Weregoose) and teachers would be interesting.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Indeed. I tend to want to keep Omnimaga as game-oriented as possible, though, like it always have been for years. This is why I've been relunctant about adding the technology/hardware sub-forums requested by a few people in the past, still, and why the archives disallows math programs.

I could eventually make a sub-forum just for math projects/releases, though, and put a techno sub-section inside misc talk or something. That way they also got a place to discuss if they absolutely want to discuss about that stuff on Omni.

As for activity we averaged at 400 posts a day for quite a while and it's quite good. I admit at 500 it starts getting a bit hectic to follow, though, which is a bit why I'm slow on replies these days, so the recent average posting crest is a bit good in some ways, though. At least it's still extremly high and a lot of projects are being updated.

[Ashbad]

Well, cemetech seems like it is the home of utilities and such, and we are the home of the games.  Though, maybe a math programs forum might serve us well.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yeah, although they got some more games lately and they have a lot of BASIC/ASM programmers to help. Omni is more centered towards Axe and Nspire coding, although it still has a lot of BASIC stuff and some ASM as well.

Also for projects, I was tempted to make a category for utilities as well, not just split math and other stuff. That would make the section easier to browse.

On an unrelated note, I found a random spreadsheet program for Windows like OpenOffice, but one that supported trendlines. It's called Gnumeric and while it's not as great for other stuff, I decided to generate a graphic of the post stats just for fun. The black line is a 7 day moving average, the pink one is for 30 days and the red dots are the daily post stats, connected by a blue line. Note that the stats prior August 2008 are innacurate, though: they're based on monthly averages as well as the very few posting stats I still had from back then, so this is why everything prior 2008 looks strange.

EDIT: Bah at scrollbar