jump to navigation

Open letter to the software developers of Texas Instruments Wednesday, 20 December, 2006

Posted by themadmathematician in Press, TI.
trackback

Let me begin this letter by saying that the TI-84 is the best calculator I have ever seen and that the basic philosophy of listening to educators, viewing the tool as an educational instrument rather than just a calculator and the connectivity with computers, and therefore software and the Internet really sets it apart. Its user friendliness and what I call its “internal logical ergonomics” where everything seems to be easily linked and connected as well as the ease of programming makes it - to me - an invaluable tool for both my education and for my private mathematical interests and economy.  

This letter is not, however, the result of your success with the TI-84 family, but rather your failure in software programming.  

The event that finally triggered this letter happens to lie with the TI-Navigator system. Having had trouble with it for a long time we tried upgrading to version 3. At one stage in the procedure (which still wasn’t fault free) I have Network Manager up and running, all hardware detected. To troubleshoot I start the “configure network adapter” dialog, all the time intending to press cancel. I do this just to make sure I haven’t missed any settings. After a few screens I press cancel, the dialog disappears and the Network Manager window refreshes only to say that I’ve lost contact with the Network adapter and access point.  

Now, at the age of 43, having busied myself with computers since I programmed a rotating hypercube in basic in the late 70-ies in my fathers home in England and having loved and used graphing calculators since the first HP-28 saw daylight in 1987 as I walked the grounds of CERN in Switzerland, I have never, in any circumstance, seen a dialog which applies hardware settings before you press cancel!  

As I said this was only the triggering event, but rather as a drop of water can make a beaker, filled to the brim, to spill, so is this only one of many little observations that have irritated me over the years. I can only sum it up as follows: 

The persons responsible for a lot of the computer programming connected to calculators are not doing their jobs well enough. In fact, somewhere along the line there must be a great deal of incompetence involved.  

Let us continue with Navigator. We have had severe problems getting Class analysis to automatically collect answers from Learning Check assignments. It seems as if Class analysis does not talk to TI-Navigator. Support has been unable to resolve this. Then there is the issue that certain names of network adapters do not show in lists because we are using the Swedish version of Windows. And the IP-address of the access point has to be added manually, in the Swedish version of Windows.  

But then, communication between devices has not ever seemed to be the strong side of TI’s programming staff. Even TI-Connect, sturdy and functional as it seems at first displays some odd quirks. It is difficult at best to maintain all installed programs (installers/creators) in a state where TI-connect can call them. Some I never managed to install “properly”. And what causes the delays in the file transfers? Time-outs? 

As a teacher you can make observations about students that reveal their lack of knowledge far easier than you make observations concerning the knowledge they actually have. In a similar way I cannot easily judge what the TI-programmers/system designers actually know, but I can tell very clearly what they do not know.  

One of these observations concerns the new TI-nSpire software. It may seem like a small insignificant point but when you start the software (on the computer) you get a new “untitled” document. Then when you open another document the first “untitled” document is not closed as it is in every other Windows application I have ever seen.  [This is not mentioning the hopelessly unfriendly, unfinished user interface of TI-nSpire as a whole but since there is still development going on there we may hope for some improvement - I have forwarded my opinions on TI-nSpire through the T3-network already. ] 

To me this point tells me that either the TI-nSpire team: 

- are hopelessly undermanned, or- lack a basic understanding of user friendliness or pride or both, or- have their priorities totally wrong- are working with previous poor decisions hanging over their heads 

I would have thought that any programmer seeing this would fix it instantly because it disturbs almost every single user almost every single time and, as far as I can judge, must be a relatively easy thing to fix.  

As for having support personnel constantly referring to whether we have the possibility to test the software on an English installation of Window, I either suggest TI to test things properly before they ship, or clearly state an English operating system as a system requirement. We have paid for the product and expect to be able to run it in a local language environment like every other piece of software. Microsoft recommends that Office be installed in the same language version as Windows. Does TI suggest that we change both Office and Windows to English in a

Swedish
School for Swedish students taught by Swedish educators? Again I have never seen or heard anything remotely like this before.  

So how come the TI-84 is such a success? I do not know anything about the inner company structure of TI but the evidence suggests that they are compartmentalized with little common philosophy between different teams and that some teams, notably those involved in TI-84, are more competent than others. An other possible explanation is that the management/system designers have made poor strategic decisions on how to design the different systems, especially communications between different components. 

I hope this letter has some impact on the right people. I am not a programmer or systems designer by profession but I believe I have some skills when it comes to making systems user friendly and tweaking systems and overall (non-technical) design. I would appreciate feed-back from this letter - be it from those that agree or those that disagree. For if nothing happens, I fear TI as a company is doomed once something better than the TI-84 comes on the market from a competitor.  


Stockholm, December 20th, 2006 

Sincerely 

Jonas HallEducator, yr 7-9, School development, T3-instructor

Mörbyskolan, Danderyd

jonas.hall@personal.danderyd.se

www.morbyskolan.se

Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)

Comments»

no comments yet - be the first?


*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture.
Anti-Spam Image