- Quickzoom: the best graph zooming utility out there for TI-89/T
- 14 Jun 2025 03:22:05 pm
- Last edited by twisted_nematic57 on 15 Jun 2025 12:01:50 pm; edited 1 time in total
With CPUs of many architectures having gotten exponentially faster over the decades, it's become feasible to enable features like click-and-drag on online graphing calculators and even TI-Nspires, making graph views instantly respond to window changes. As a result, users now expect their graphing utilities to make it as easy as possible to zoom and pan graphs without having to meddle with window coordinates manually.
This used to be a big problem with the TI-68k platform in general - the various built-in zooming tokens just didn't provide enough info about what the graph will look like post-zoom, so whenever you wanted to adjust your graph view you were semi-blindly throwing a dart, having no clue what the borders of the new window would look like. With ZoomBox, your graph's aspect ratio could be really messed up and you'd have to regraph it once again with ZoomSqr, making zooms take double the time – this could even result in a certain part of the graph you wanted to see going out of bounds, especially if you aren’t intimately familiar with ZoomSqr behavior. And panning was very uncomfortable even with Trace. To top it off, there was no easy way to load or store multiple zooming windows – you could only have one saved.
All of those problems are now gone thanks to one of my newest creations, Quickzoom. It draws a box on the edges of your graph screen which you can then resize and move however you like, even to areas outside the current window (to pan the view). Its aspect ratio always matches that of the Graph Screen, so you can be absolutely sure that your graph won’t look weirdly stretched out. Even if your window is set up to not have perfect square coordinates, it will still keep its aspect ratio the way you expect it to be.
It also includes a number of convenience features that will almost certainly be useful. It has its own version of ZoomPrev which lets you revisit the last graphing window, assuming you don’t ever manually modify the window or do that with the OS’ built-in commands. It also lets you reset the box to the edges of the screen again without having to restart the program.
Last but not least, you can store up to 9 different window configurations in “zoom slots.” So if you want to save a certain spot on the graph to come back to it later, you can do that quite easily with Quickzoom. Zoom slots store all 6 max/min/scl vars, so you can be confident that zoom slots will fully preserve the window settings at the time you save them. (In graphing modes other than FUNCTION, no other window variables will be saved.)
Quickzoom supports all 2D graphs that the OS supports natively. As a “bonus,” the package that Quickzoom is distributed in also includes a 3D graph rotation program, Spinner, that moves the camera solely on the Θ-axis so as to “rotate” the graph and not distort it from camera tilting.
In conclusion, these programs should enhance the graphing experience for every TI-68k user, greatly so in 2D and at least a little in 3D.
This used to be a big problem with the TI-68k platform in general - the various built-in zooming tokens just didn't provide enough info about what the graph will look like post-zoom, so whenever you wanted to adjust your graph view you were semi-blindly throwing a dart, having no clue what the borders of the new window would look like. With ZoomBox, your graph's aspect ratio could be really messed up and you'd have to regraph it once again with ZoomSqr, making zooms take double the time – this could even result in a certain part of the graph you wanted to see going out of bounds, especially if you aren’t intimately familiar with ZoomSqr behavior. And panning was very uncomfortable even with Trace. To top it off, there was no easy way to load or store multiple zooming windows – you could only have one saved.
All of those problems are now gone thanks to one of my newest creations, Quickzoom. It draws a box on the edges of your graph screen which you can then resize and move however you like, even to areas outside the current window (to pan the view). Its aspect ratio always matches that of the Graph Screen, so you can be absolutely sure that your graph won’t look weirdly stretched out. Even if your window is set up to not have perfect square coordinates, it will still keep its aspect ratio the way you expect it to be.
It also includes a number of convenience features that will almost certainly be useful. It has its own version of ZoomPrev which lets you revisit the last graphing window, assuming you don’t ever manually modify the window or do that with the OS’ built-in commands. It also lets you reset the box to the edges of the screen again without having to restart the program.
Last but not least, you can store up to 9 different window configurations in “zoom slots.” So if you want to save a certain spot on the graph to come back to it later, you can do that quite easily with Quickzoom. Zoom slots store all 6 max/min/scl vars, so you can be confident that zoom slots will fully preserve the window settings at the time you save them. (In graphing modes other than FUNCTION, no other window variables will be saved.)
Quickzoom supports all 2D graphs that the OS supports natively. As a “bonus,” the package that Quickzoom is distributed in also includes a 3D graph rotation program, Spinner, that moves the camera solely on the Θ-axis so as to “rotate” the graph and not distort it from camera tilting.
In conclusion, these programs should enhance the graphing experience for every TI-68k user, greatly so in 2D and at least a little in 3D.
