Omnimaga
Omnimaga => News => Topic started by: DJ Omnimaga on April 24, 2014, 05:39:50 pm
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Due to the Easter rush, life duties, wondering why people in Quebec now park their car like this (http://zone911.fm93.com/actualites/accidents/item/18415-une-voiture-entre-dans-un-immeuble), 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 (http://img.ourl.ca/1398279810.gif), the following calculator news has fallen under my radar: As announced on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/HPPrimeCalculator/posts/792374354107707?stream_ref=10), 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.
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Due to the Easter rush, life duties, wondering why people in Quebec now park their car like this (http://zone911.fm93.com/actualites/accidents/item/18415-une-voiture-entre-dans-un-immeuble)
Lulz. XD
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 (http://img.ourl.ca/1398279810.gif)
/me wants. NAO. :P
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Dang, those drawing commands make it seem like they really want to help programmers who want to work with 3D. This is awesome!
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I wish there was a tutorial on how to use TRIANGLE somewhere and what format it uses, though. I am curious if it's possible to easily convert a Blender model to HP PPL, for example.
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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.)
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What would be cool as well is if images could be rotated. This could be handy for various things, not limited to saving space on images by re-using the same one multiple times (arrow graphics, for instance). Isometric tilemaps, anyone? :P (although it can already be done, sort-of, but rotating maps would be cool)
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Wasn't there a rotation demo a while ago? It seemed slow, however.
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Yeah it was very slow even with a 20x20 tile.
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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..
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Ah right I didn't think about that.
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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.
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Flipping would definitively be a good addition.
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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 ?
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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 ?
There are—GROBH and GROBW. I think what Tim was thinking was an in-place transform, like INVERT, but I'm not sure. I think going with matrix transforms with a BLIT like syntax would work fine, however.
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Now you lost me. :P
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Do you have a Prime? I've been presuming you do and can look at it.
If not:
Almost every drawing command has two variations: a Cartesian and a pixel version. Pixel versions are suffixed with _P; for simplicity's sake they will be dropped as the positions do not matter here. GROBH(G) and GROBW(G) return the height and width of G. BLIT copies a GROB from one buffer to another, but with optional regions and optional alpha color: BLIT([trgtG],[dx1,dy1],[dx2,dy2],srcG,[sx1,sy1],[sx2,sy2],[c]). (Unless otherwise specified, optional GROBs default to G0.) INVERT inverts a region of a specified GROB in place: INVERT([G],[x1,y1],[x2,y2]). If the rotation was in-place, that would make calculations of position hard. I think Tim was thinking of something like that, but I'm not sure. Hence my suggestion of bitmap matrix transforms that can be sent to another GROB. There's a MSDN article on them in the context of DirectX that is pretty useful anywhere: DirectX Factor - 3D Transforms on 2D Bitmaps (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn630652.aspx). It also discusses how 3D or 4D transforms can be used to do fanciness in a 2D or 3D plane if you're careful. It's awesome. It would actually be really cool if we could muck around with up to 4D matrix transforms and just specify optional values for z and w cross-sections, defaulting to 1 or 0, whichever would work better. (I'm getting sleepy and trusting my judgement here less.) Exemplī grātiā: MATTRANS([trgtG],[dx1,dy1],[dx2,dy2],srcG,[sx1,sy1],[sx2,sy2],matrix,[zPlane],[wPlane],[color]). We should be able to convert the 3D matrices from back to 2Ds with a z of 1 with some depth stuff, but the non-affines are worrying me, as they pull from values in the matrix. New idea: what if we could get and set a matrix of RGB values from and to a GROB region, such as GETMAT([G],[x1,y1],[x2,y2]) and SETMAT([G],[x1,y1],[x2,y2]) (with respective _P variants)? Then we could take a bitmap out, transform it, and...wait...array of 2D coordinates doesn't leave space for RGB values...how about returning 3D matrices with the z being the color?
/me refers back to the article
So, how about {GET,SET}MAT([G],[x1,y1],[x2,y2],[dimension]), where dimension defaults to 2 and the output/input is a q×(dimension+1) matrix (with the last part holding color) and q is the number of pixels. That should allow for the offloading of heavy transforms to the matrix functions and allow for easier custom transforms (like 3D→2D flattening).
So Tim, when you read this, something to consider. It would allow for some pretty cool stuff. :3
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Tl;Dr. :P Also I don't have a Prime unfortunately. :/
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Yeah if you add a _P at the end of some drawing commands it uses pixels. I find those more handy, although cartesian can be handy as well if you manipulate window settings I guess and for 3D.
Basically, think of the HP PPL language as xLIBC-enhanced TI-BASIC on steroids. You can draw circles, rectangles (filled or not), sprites and transparent text with the color of your choice. However, it's several times faster and in addition to that, you can even scale up/down sprites/images, you have 10 graphical buffers for double, triple-buffering or more, plus you can also draw translucent polygons.
The following video showcases what you can achieve in HP PPL with no ASM/C nor any other hacks. For example, the thing during the title that looks like Mode 7 is actually just displaying two images split into 120 chunks zoomed in at different levels. Something similar is being used for the Supersonic Ball logo:
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The new firmware comes now...
HP Prime rev. 6031
Download link: ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/calculators/Prime/ (ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/calculators/Prime/)
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Heya and welcome here. Thanks for the link by the way. :)
I was worried last week because people on the HP Museum acted like the firmware update is fake and will never happen when in fact it was just because they thought the announcment about it last month was official, only to be revealed as non-official by one of the team members. I didn't mind any delay, though, since it meant a more polished firmware and the last update from this Winter brought in a lot of improvements.
I'll definitively give this one a try soon :)
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Thanks...I saw this firmware 1 hour ago on HP Museum forum and installed it on my PC after this...and the first testings gave a "bug" on the new firmware on HP Prime Virtual Calculator...I see the apps doubled on Apps screen... Why does this happen??? Is it a issue???
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The only issue I noticed on the emulator personally (after finally installing it successfully by manually updating) is that my Tunnel game now crashes the emulator until I open the code then close it. Afterward it now gives Syntax error.
My apps are fine, though.
Also, another issue is that on both calcs and the emu the Send button is now missing, so I can no longer use the emulator to transfer files. I hate the connectivity kit for file transfer because it's so slow to detect anything at the start (about 60 minutes to detect 600 KB of programs)
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The Apps screen back to normal after restarting Virtual Calculator...Issue fixed.
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Good to hear.
As for the missing Send button, I think HP just got rid of emulator transfer abilities, but I could be wrong. On the other hand, it seems that the new connectivity kit is much faster at detecting files now. It used to take 60 minutes and now it was done within less than one.
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Tim Wessman says about some issues on earlier versions of HP Prime calculator on release notes of the new firmware...
About the Connecting Kit doesn't recognize the emulator, i am supposing the issues related to the Connect Kit in earlier firmwares...