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PGWARE
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 14, 2011 2:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It's about as userfriendly as delphi from early 2000's, or about as good as delphi 7 was. The ide isnt that nice to look at but its also not as bad as some of the ide's i have used on newer dev envrionments. xcode on osx is pretty horrible and that was just recently rewritten, I'd say freepascal is alot easier to use.

World marketshare #'s - Windows has over 90% on desktop, osx is around 5-6%, and linux has under 0.1% with other os's all splitting up the difference.

Like I said it may differ for where you work, and the people you know but those are the #'s. If you can find a niche selling to smaller OS's its never a bad thing but you may be spending more time trying to make cross compatible software and finding you have to lose features to make it work across all os's rather than focus on one os. Also I've found alot of thse cross compatible dev tools dont pump out the most optimized code.

Some things you have to take into consideration when going cross platform:

If you use the registry in Windows, theres no such thing on Mac OS - you use plist files. Now you can also choose to use ini or xml files to hold settings in Windows but remember there are certain folders you can write to under vista/7, the same security applies to osx on where you can write to without admin privileges. Some api's arent available on osx, and the same for windows. Versions of windows have differences, the same for osx, you need to code these variations into your application - use alot of comment blocks in your code; helps keep the code clean and easier to debug later on.

user interfaces - you cant use the same user interface across multiple os's without users being quite upset. most osx users wont appreciate a windows looking application running on their system; while it works just fine esthetics are important and you have to pretty much rewrite the ui to suit the userbase.

support - you should be very familiar with both operating systems as you will have to provide end user support to both user bases, especially knowledable about security considerations and compatiblity issues.

deploying - need to depoly the application to each user base, using multiple installers, need to support each of these and make sure they work correct across different versions of the operating systems.
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Garrett
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 14, 2011 2:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Mobile is obviously the latest trend with Android based systems at the top as of late 2010, Symbian in second, Apple in third and RIM pulling in 4th. Windows at the time of these stats was rather low in it's percentage.

But as we all know now, Symbian is going the way side and MS is poised to make a huge comeback after it's absorption of Nokia. Provided MS doesn't some how stumble on this one.

Don't count out WebOS either. HP's buyout of Palm may propel this platform up. Provided HP doesn't some how stumble on this one.

So, for safe bets, make apps for Android and IOS. RIM's QNX based platform is cool and has a good sized market(but faltering right now) but it's users are typically business users who are a bit more frugal on app purchases compared to the common users of Android and IOS.

Tablets are on the rise and making apps for those might be a good place to hang your hat also, or for both smartphones and tablets.

Windows PC based development as we know it is changing direction of course. With Windows 8 drawing us closer to the cloud based concepts that have been creeping up on us all slowly. Developing for Windows 8 can be achieved using Web-centric development languages such as HTML 5, CSS and Javascript. Soon enough, software development as we have all known it may no longer exists on the Windows platform and either we'll have to adapt to developing apps for the cloud, or jump ship to another OS.

Software development languages either need to follow along or get left behind. Live-Code as mentioned in this thread did just that. Traditionally a desktop software development system, they have adapted and moved their system to allow for mobile software as well as cloud based apps.

...

Old man rambling!!! I could go on for pages honestly, but this is already getting verbose and I don't think everyone wants an in-depth report from me. Sorry for going on an on with this subject. I read tech sites and blogs every morning along with global, national and local news, so sometimes I can be a wealth of info, and being a bit of a geek by nature, where do you think I spend most of my time reading.... That's rhetorical!!! Razz

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PGWARE
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 14, 2011 5:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have a Windows Phone 7 phone (htc hd7), its a very nice device. It's hard to see MS take any significant marketshare as they seem to have waited too long, but then again mobile is very volatile.

Theres very little money to be made in mobile and tablets, you need a really stand out app and a decent marketing budget otherwise your app is drowned out by the thousnads of apps released daily. Typically most developers on iOS (iphone,ipad) make back what they spent developing but never really make a profit, only a very small number of devs have ever made substantial profit on mobile. The reasons are because of hte very low price point of apps - most people either expect free or 99 cents, you have to sell high volumes and thats very hard to do with so much competition between apps. Or you could plaster your apps with ads = yuk! Where you can make money is working for contract for other companies developing apps for them. apps for mobile are the current fad but the reality is it's just not economical for most businesses to make any money from. but if you arent intersted in making money but want to maket fun apps then certainly this is where you want to target.


windows 8 was speculated to only allow html, css, ajax for development, thats not the case at all. Theres several articles out there with people taking apart the windows 8 beta and seeing that you can still use standard tools to develop apps for windows 8 using traditional programming tools; if you want to deploy apps for the new user interface in windows 8 then you will need to use html/css and likely microsoft will have c#/.net for that as well. Css and html was promoted as an OPTION so it becomes very easy for users to develop, but if you want rich applications you will still need to use c#/.net, silverlight. HTML 5 is still not standarized and there are no real heavy dev tools to make large desktop apps/games with so MS isnt about to flip the switch when their dev tools are very strong. If you want to make applications for windows 8 you will want to use c#, xna or silverlight since windows 8 will run on x86 and on arm processors (arm for lightweight laptops, slate/tablets/phones) and (x86 for desktop and laptop).

Microsoft is unifying their platforms - windows phone 7, windows 8, xbox 360; these three all have a few things in common - c#, xna and silverlight. They arent about to dump those when they are adding those features into the xbox 360. The idea is program once and deploy to multiple devices; have an ecosystem that is available to all of their devices. They also eventually will all run off the same Windows kernel instead of a separate of desktop, mobile and xbox - it will be the same underlying OS with different user interfaces and running on different processor types (arm, x86, powerpc).

I always prefer to learn a new langauge rather than try to shoehorn one langauge to mutliple operating systems - especially for mobile. On mobile (arm processors) you dont have much horsepower so you want your applications to be as optmized as possible, theres always changes to api's too on these mobile platforms and unless the vendor you use keeps up you may find your apps are no longer compatible with newer versions of the OS. If you coded using the native prefered langauge you can easily update your code - you arent reliant on outside vendor; rather you are relying on the vendor who creates the OS and they very likely are updating their dev tools as they update their OS.

Translating between programming languages is not that complicated at all, and building a user interface for specific devices is what you want to do. When I wrote my game for the iphone I first wrote most of the logic in delphi because I was familiar with it. But then I started learning Objective-C and found it was pretty similar in syntax to some code in Delphi (especially the logic portions like if then else, repeat, while, variables) and it was pretty easy to do a conversion from delphi to objecive-c. The user interface portion was actually the hardest part because XCode is really a piece of garbage and has a designer from 1995 built into it - you have to drop objects then go back into your source code and add links to them manually, type out each object name then go back into the designer to assign them to controls - very backwards!! But the learning curve isnt bad once you start figuring things out; and if I need to update the app/game its very easy as Apple supports Xcode/objective-c and not some 3rd party tool.
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cnodnarb
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2011 11:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Guess I better fess up, I've been using KBasic ;p

KBasic will soon be replaced by Q7Basic, and is awesome. Compiles for Windows, Linux and Mac.

KBasic is fantastic if you have any experience with Visual Basic (6 or .NET).

It's basically the Delphi/VDS equivalent of Qt/KBasic.

That's not to say I've dumped VDS, it's just to say that I use Linux Mint alot now, and just got done with my Hackintosh, and KBasic compiles on everything I use excluding my phone (for my phone I've been using Android App Builder).

However, VDS is still a fast valid way to come up with quick solutions for Windows (and Linux with WINE). I still love VDS.
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Garrett
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 16, 2011 5:53 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

KBasic is actually pretty good now.. I was following when it was first being developed and the IDE was an ugly nightmare to use. It uses Qt in fact. KBasic reminded me greatly of Gambas, which I do really like a lot, but Gambas is Linux only Sad Wait! No, that's right, someone finally got it compiled for Mac not too long ago.

Another cool one is Jabaco (http://www.jabaco.org/). It's a VB style language but produces Java apps, which can also be easily ported over to other platforms, but I'm not sure about mobile or tablet devices.

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Rubes_sw
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 16, 2011 9:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well im still about, i still do some stuff in VDS... but mainly use it to communicate with PHP & MySQL.... I mainly develop now in PHP, MySQL, Jquery etc....

Pity, VDS has lost so much over the years, i feel it will continue to be a legacy product with no future development

Nathan
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arcray
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 19, 2011 9:36 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I am still around, and code all day in VDS. But I have been looking at other languages, and the one I am most in favour of is REALbasic, which, when compiled, is cross platform (i.e. PC, MAC, web). The Enterprise version is a bit pricey, however! BUT there are deals if you subscribe to their mailing lists.
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Boo
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 19, 2011 9:43 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi arcray!

Be sure to check out LiveCode too:

http://www.runrev.com

Wink

Cheers!

- Boo

P.S. I have explored both and prefer LiveCode... So powerful.
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Tommy
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 07, 2013 11:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Fat as topic bump! I'm not back, just popping by. Amazing to see people like Skit, Chris, Garrett and Nodnarb are still around!

Currently my focus is on some work at the computer science department of university and other work at maintaining the whole range of technical equipment in bars/clubs. I am not a student anymore. Just like Prakash I don't have a copy of VDS installed. VDS would still be quicker for some tasks, but in most cases I try to solve things using Delphi to keep up my skills.

I'm surprised that the object model used by C# is quite similar to Delphi's one, so it's quite easy to step up to that language. The big downside is comprised of all the version problems and huge size of the different .NET runtimes. Compared to the VDS runtime, I think the .NET framework is utter crap. Unfortunately however Microsoft is the industry standard for many companies and the syntax is very clean and easy to handle. If it would compile native Win32 executables while maintaining access to the .NET object model, it would be my language of choice too. But until then, Delphi it will be. There aren't many things that can't be programmed using Delphi 7.

I have a place of my own now. This helps me to rearrange some of my physical stuff, but certainly also virtual stuff. Perhaps it'll provide me a chance to resolve some needless issues, like releasing a freeware key for VDSDLL 3 and perhaps releasing some source code of projects.
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Garrett
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 08, 2013 5:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It's nice to hear from you Tommy, long time no hear from you and I'm glad to hear that you are doing well there Smile
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LiquidCode
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 09, 2013 2:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yes, glad you stopped by and thanks again for your help. Very Happy
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marty
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 22, 2013 12:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Tommy, glad you stopped by and doing good.

You are right about Delphi, still a good choice, even the version 7 (which I still use) is perfect. But I also did try and use VB.NET and it is really nice and stable. Quite simple and fast to build up an application. The internet community is so large for it. I always find my answers in a couple a minutes with Google. I usually force my VB.net apps to strictly use the .NET 2.0 libraries which are smaller (about 20 meg) and are included with most XP OS (comes by default with 7/Cool.

But as for .NET 3/4 well different story.. 4.5 libraries are 100 meg download. Way to big unless you are using Windows 8.

Good to hear you might be releasing some source code, I remember the code I bought from you for a Macromedia Flash VDS extension. Your code helped me build other VDS extensions afterwards. In fact if it was not for you and PG I would have not started coding with Delphi a couple of years back. Thanks guys.

VDS... VDS.... so out of date now with all the possibilities in 2013. Really too bad that CR never really cared about it in the last few years. But will not drop this forum that has old friends. Smile Unless it disappears.
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PGWARE
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 23, 2013 4:19 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

You can target .NET 4.0, so it works on all platforms, and its 40mb for the x86 and 64bit version in one file: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=24872

4.5 wont work on XP, it only works on vista, 7, server 2008; its already installed on windows 8 and server 2012.
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Boo
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 28, 2013 3:32 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi All!

For those who might be interested, please note that LiveCode is about to go Open Source! Also, as part of the related KickStarter campaign, RunRev is offering the opportunity to acquire a lifetime commercial license, but you must act now!

See: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1755283828/open-source-edition-of-livecode?ref=live

Sincerely,

-Boo
Gulf Breeze, Florida
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Boo
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 25, 2014 7:40 pm    Post subject: LiveCode Community Edition (Free)! Reply with quote

Hi All,

For those who might be interested (and for those who might not have heard), the FREE Community Edition of LiveCode is now available! (Thanks to the Kickstarter campaign last year.)

See: http://livecode.com/

LiveCode is also hoping to implement HTML5! Deploy apps via the Web!

See: http://livecode.com/livecode-to-html5/

I hope everyone is well.

Cheers,

- Boo
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