PrimeComm

[debrouxl]

Quote:What do you do with it?

Communicate with the calculator. It was there slightly before PrimeComm, though it was announced slightly after it. I wouldn't have announced libhpcalcs so early without the PrimeComm announcement, I'd have wished to do some more work.
libhpcalcs is derived from the time-proven (the effort started in 1999) set of libti* libraries aiming at performing the same operations against TI graphical calculators: TI-Z80 series, TI-68k series, TI-Nspire series and soon TI-eZ80 series (with several changes to TI-Z80 support). It retains the API design (mostly), portability (Windows, MacOS X, Linux and normally FreeBSD), interoperability (written in C, so that every decent programming language can plug into it) of libti*. The GPLv2 license, too, as some code was taken from libti*.

Quote:No UI?

No graphical UI. It obviously has a terminal-based UI, but that (rightfully) doesn't appeal to most users...

Quote:Prime Comm has formatting, Search and Replace, etc.

Indeed, but it fails to fulfill the core functionality of a communication program, on which more advanced features such as document editing (which is indeed good in PrimeComm), can be built: transfer files to and from the calculator.
PrimeComm has been broken since nearly a year ago, while libhpcalcs was unharmed by that firmware version; for the latest 6940 / 6975 firmware version, Daniel Mewes made several reliability / functionality fixes so that libhpcalcs would be able to transfer all of his files (that is, especially the larger ones), and contributed them to libhpcalcs.

Quote:All I know right now is that the Connectivity Kit has many, many serious flaws and nothing seems to be happening with it. Has caused much grief for me.
Most serious is Missing files when doing Backup/Restore.
If I'm understanding correctly CK has always been a problem.

Correct, other persons have had and are still having problems with the official CK. But it's the canonical program, and the only one which can update the calculator's firmware.
Missing files when doing Backup/restore can be due to transfer errors, which are quite frequent due to limitations of the Windows stack. The USB HID class used by HP for the Prime for most communication operations makes it possible to avoid the need for the royal Windows driver pain (I know, I and libti* users get to deal with it...), but conversely, forces relatively slow, unreliable communication, at least on Windows.
At some point, during the early making of libhpcalcs, my beta-tester (critor) reported a packet loss ratio of 3 out of 4 on a ~20 KB transfer, just because I was printing logging output to the horrendously slow Windows terminal, which was interferring with the precise timings of USB HID control transfers. At least, that's how I explain such dismal behaviour. Writing logging output into a file fixed the problem, but once in a while, a packet still goes MIA.