Wish B4i for iwatch development

[Markos]

Hi Erel

I did not see a wish for iWatch support in b4i so I thought Id officially place the wish for consideration. I think the sooner it is implemented we can get some great new Apps in before the market is saturated.

Thanks for your tireless improvements and evolution of the development b4x suite

 

[LWGShane]

Agree. B4i also needs iOS Extension support along with support for Project Catalyst.

Sadly without these B4i is light-years behind other IDEs such as Xcode and Xamarin.

 

[Erel]

Sadly without these B4i is light-years behind other IDEs such as Xcode and Xamarin.

Reaching such a conclusion based on a single feature is purely wrong. There are many many features that you need to compare to understand which tool is better and for which tasks and which developers.

 

[LWGShane]

Reaching such a conclusion based on a single feature is purely wrong. There are many many features that you need to compare to understand which tool is better and for which tasks and which developers.

Single feature? Actually there's also dark mode and iOS extension support that are missing from B4i; and like Apple Watch support, those are pretty major features.

I do agree about the advantage of being able to take the same business-logic from B4A and/or B4J and having it run without modification. However, there are other tools on the market that enable this and have B4i's missing features.

 

[Erel]

Single feature?

You mentioned app extensions (this is required for watch apps) which is an important feature however most developers will never use it.
Dark mode will come. You can already enable it right now.

Developers are free to choose whichever tool they prefer. Are you actually developing with Xamarin?

 

[LWGShane]

You can already enable it right now.

Is there an ETA for the hosted builders?

Developers are free to choose whichever tool they prefer. Are you actually developing with Xamarin?

No; I've been an exclusive B4X user ever since it was a WinForms apps. I just would like to see B4i have feature parity with Xamarin/Xcode.



Also, the reason I always use Xamarin as a comparison product is because it has the same capability of B4X; which is writing cross-platform apps.

 

[Erel]

Also, the reason I always use Xamarin as a comparison product is because it has the same capability of B4X; which is writing cross-platform apps.

Developer tools are very complicated and extensive. There are many conceptual differences between Xamarin and B4X.

Is there an ETA for the hosted builders?

Builder1 is already running Xcode 11 and Builder2 will be updated next week. With Xcode 11 you can enable dark mode. I don't really recommend doing it for now. Please start a new thread in the questions forum for further discussion about it.

 

[Dave G]

I've been developing with Xamarin since 2013. Primarily Android for a commercial application (30,000 lines of VB.NET Windows Mobile converted to C#/Xamarin). I also converted a small app that I developed for US Army to B4X and Xamarin Forms. Xamarin Forms worked well for this app in that 95% of the code was implemented using XAML with very little platform specific code. The B4X version also went well with most code in the shared class with conditional compilation handling differences. I especially like the Hosted Builder as Xamarin requires a Mac (which I do have) and uses XCODE on the Mac to create the IPA. Xamain iOS is tightly tied to Xcode which requires that I constantly install new versions of Xcode which can take hours! Bottom line: I much prefer B4X to Xamarin and NSbasic. I don't mind maintaining multiple layouts for a small project.

On the topic of watch development. I've created a proof of concept using Xamarin Android Wear. Pretty easy, but very heavy (13MB). So far unable to build a B4A version as the watchface library isn't compiled for AndroidX.

Thanks B4X.