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How to promote Prime (and not only in the school)

The success of the HP Prime in the student area will depend on the availability of user-developed software.

If you look to any TI-related site, you will see a wealth of software created by users, and that can be used by students for their own work. This has helped a lot to get as wide marketshare as they have.

The HP Prime is faster than most other calculator, thanks to its compiled basic. The graphic functions of the HP Prime allow it to produce good games - even in Basic. There have been several simple programs made in Basic where students can see the code that produces such results. But I think that other languages should be available for Prime, so that serious programmers put their hands on the machine. And there should be some money to be made by programmers, if anyone apart from amateurs is to be involved.

Can there be a market for apps, organized in the same way of the iOS App store or the Android App store? Width and breadth will be far from them, but some clever programmers may make some money and therefore be interested in developing for the HP Prime.

Can I share with you which apps I would like to have?

  • An app that make the HP Prime to act as a numeric keypad for a computer. Apart from the numeric keyboard, there is a very useful up-down-left-right button, and several writing aids can be programmed with the user keyboard. The USB connection is there!
  • A financial suite. We have written some programs for that, but it is still far from what is achievable - in particular when integrated with the spreadsheet app.
  • Games! If you want to make sure that youngsters buy the Prime in huge numbers,you need to make sure that there are game apps, much more comprehensive than what we have now. While the screen definition is not “retina”-level, is still very capable for creative graphical applications.
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