is SDL easier to program than nspire c/asm?

Well it still is in C. But yes, it is much easier than doing everything from scratch. Also SDL's quite mature and there's a lot of resources and information available on the Internet about it, that's always good.

Here's a screenshot of a little program I'm writing for a TI-Nspire SDL tutorial I'm working on:



I actually released 0.2.0 but didn't make it public, as I found some small issues (found them while working on the aforementioned program) that needed to be fixed, so the next public version will be 0.2.1, which should be out tomorrow if everything goes well.

Now by default all text is somewhat formatted before drawn on the screen, i.e. unnecessary spaces are removed. It can be removed for whatever reason using the NSP_FONT_NOFORMAT flag. Screenshot (the string used is the one in quotes of course):



I'll probably add word wrapping at some point too, not sure how cleanly it'll fit in the code. Speaking of cleanness, I've removed tab support, all font width/height getter functions I had at one point, and the textwrapping feature when using SDL_nDrawString(). That is because those features are very rarely useful, have inconsistent behavior and are a bitch to maintain and integrate. They would only be useful in console-type applications, and in that case nspireio should do the job. Removing them allows much cleaner and more robust code.

EDIT: After some further thought, I'll possibly add the string width/height getter functions again. It was especially the tab character that made me hesitate, but now that it's gone I guess I can clean those functions up. They might be useful for drawing centered text and whatnot.

Off-topic: Those tiles are nice. Are they from a game in particular or did you make them yourself?

Some free ones I found somewhere I can't remember.

Some more updates...

I've added support for own extremely simple image format, and I added a SDL_nDrawStringInRect() function which draws a string within the boundaries of an SDL_Rect, as you could imagine. Here's a little screenshot showing off the NSP_FONT_AUTOSIZE feature (non-monospaced fonts), SDL_nDrawStringInRect() (the purple rectangle is only to show how it fits itself inside it, it's not part of the function), and an image included in the executable (everything is of course well integrated into SDL, the SDL_nLoadImage() function returns an SDL_Surface for example):



Here's also a more recent screenshot of the image converter that'll be included with nSDL 0.2.0:

The values change when I use the touchpad but the mouse doesn't appear. 

That's normal, I disabled the mouse so that I can only read raw values (no SDL involved except for the font drawing). So it seems it does update it normally. I think the problem might be similar to the one had some time ago. Thanks a lot, I'll look into it.

Could somebody with a CX do me a favor?

Could you grab the the attached file, send it to your calculator and just see if everything works. Move your finger around the touchpad to move the mouse, if you press it you should see "SDL_MOUSEBUTTONDOWN" showing up. It uses hardware 8 bpp and the touchpad, so I'd like to know if everything works nicely. Thanks for whoever helps me.

(0.2.0 is advancing nicely, there'll be a lot changes and a bigger "launch" than usually)

@Hoffa, TI (TI-Nspire section) does give a damn about us. They have showed it multiple ways:
- By sending email to all magor TI-Communities
- By contacting several community members, allowing them to beta test stuff
- By listening to multiple of our sugestions

Yes, that's what I meant by "there might be some patting going on". I stand my ground, we're irrelevant farts next to shareholders. However, in those things you listed, we're (well not me personally, but you get the point) just doing their job free of charge, obviously they're going to exploit us as much as possible. Free beta testers and innovative suggestions that ultimately encourage investments and increase the businesses value is only advantageous for TI. Of course they don't want a source of free information to dry out; sending a few e-mails and keeping shallow relations is required, they wouldn't want the illusion of something deeper to fade away.