N.C.D. New Calculator Day - TI 89 Titaneum

[Dave Britten]

(06-18-2015 12:44 AM)Jlouis Wrote:  Well, just bought it out of curiosity, as I played in my Android tablet, and I Just can say: I what a mess! Very confusing... very small fonts... dwarf graphs...very menu driven...botton line: back to 48gx.

If someone has some tips, I will give a try, But I think it does not come close to HP.

Cheers

J.L.

It's really nice for programming, especially if you've got the external keyboard they produced around 10 years ago, but as you've noticed, it's pretty awful as a daily number cruncher.

The main problem is that they took an OS designed for the TI-92, which had a larger screen and a full QWERTY keyboard, and stuffed it onto hardware with a lower screen resolution and a typical calculator keypad, and made no real adaptations toward those limitations. The net result is way too much stuff crammed on screen with tiny fonts, and almost every function buried in some pop-up menu. There are so many frequently used symbols that had to be on the keyboard, that even the basic trig functions ended up being shifted, and common log wasn't even directly accessible from the keyboard until a later OS release (Diamond+7, FYI).

The alpha layout on the keyboard is pretty lousy. X, Y, Z, and T pulled out to the top row? Ugh. The alternative to using the menus - typing out function names - is just as unpleasant, honestly.

And what fool decided to have shifted functions on other shift keys? Diamond+2nd is Cut? Seriously? You can tell they were really hurting for keyboard space with all the symbols they had to provide. And alpha lock mode has a tendency to turn itself on and off at unexpected times, I've noticed.

I'd advise learning how to make custom menus, and also create kbdprgm1-6, which allow you to run programs with Diamond+1-6. You can have, for example, hotkeys that launch programs which load specific custom menus, or run your most used programs.

Oh, and the current TI-89 Titanium guidebook that's on the TI site is really bad. I don't know what happened, but the older 92 Plus/89 guidebook is far more coherent.

The programming language is admittedly pretty nice to work with, but two things particularly bother me: no nested lists (you can use a matrix, but you obviously can't have ragged columns/rows), and "data" variables, which are used in the stat editor rather heavily, are almost impossible to actually use programmatically. You can pull out a specific column as a list, but that's about it. I've never really figured out how to modify them, apart from ripping them apart, and using NewData to recreate one entirely.

On the plus side, it does have a rather nice CAS. But if I'm just doing some basic math, good lord no, give me a 32S or TI-36X Pro or something.