Basic4ppc for Android, what do you think?

[IansResearch]

Major Boost

I am currently looking at MOTODEV IDE (from Motorola) for Android development which of course is centered on Eclipse IDE and JAVA.

I have years of C,C++ experience so understanding JAVA is not to difficult, but the development cycle is certainly longer.

If Basic4Android where available you would have many new developers, as well as your existing customer base.

Excellent news if it can be done.

Start the development cycle NOW PLEASE...

 

[BjornF]

Just to add my 2 cents, YES PLEASE !

As many others I have started to look around for alternatives to a WM device, and an android one seems like a good alternative. I'm using Basic4PPC applications daily on my HTC and I would be very sad to loose that possibility on a new platform

Björn

 

[JOTHA]

I'm NOT a friend of "changing a running system", but I think there will come a lot of tablet-PC's (like iPad) with "Android OS".

I would prefer tablet-PC's with WIN, but I saw some with WIN7 and so I understood, that it is NOT possible to develop code in Basic4ppc without some problems in the future?

... so it might be good to have Basic4ppc for Android!

If there is Basic4ppc for Android, some more developers will come to Basic4ppc.

 

[agraham]

I saw some with WIN7 and so I understood, that it is NOT possible to develop code in Basic4ppc without some problems in the future?

Why do you think that Basic4ppc will not work on a Windows 7 tablet? As far as I know there are no problems running Basic4ppc under Win7. Anything that works on Vista should work on Win7.

I too would prefer a Win7 tablet to an Android one - as long as the battery life under Win7 can be made reasonable.

 

[JOTHA]

Hi agraham,

Why do you think that Basic4ppc will not work on a Windows 7 tablet?

I did a mistake: It was not WIN7, I meant WINmobile7 (for Pocket-PC).
I read some roumors about support problems with .NET

... and about battery-life, you are right.

 

[Sergey Kravchenko]

What do you think about adding support for Android devices?
Do you plan to do Android development?

I would appreciate any feedback...

YES!!! YES!!! YES!!! YES!!! YES!!! YES!!! YES!!! YES!!!

 

[Merlot2309]

Hello,

Last week I bought an HTC Legend - Android and it was quite complicated to get everything together (no Java experience.....) to start with the "Hello world" example in Eclipse with the Android plugins, etc.

I found DroidDraw and this might be a nice GUI example to start with for "Basic4Droid".

Erel, one more vote:sign0060:

Greetz,
Helen.

 

[Mr_Gee]

Yes please,
I've ditched Windows Mobile for about a year now, went to Android 1.5 and then to the iPhone.
But I still use B4PPC for creating desktop applications

Android has matured a lot, so I got me another Android phone to play with
I have looked at Eclipse, but it is too much... i can't even get it to install properly, Basic4Android would be great

maybe I'll get a Nexus One to play with, once I can afford the astonishing prices

I got myself a 2nd hand HTC Hero in mint condition,
does the same thing and is a lot cheaper.
Flashed it with a custom 2.1 rom (through XDA developers)
the G1 & Magic also have 2.1 roms available, and only cost 100 euro or so.

 

[RandomCoder]

Although I don't have much free time these days, I still like to pop on the forum every now and then to see whats happening.
I'm still using a HTC Kaiser (Tilt & slide) that I've had for the last few years. This is because there are so few windows mobile phones available to choose from. Adding Andriod support to Basic4PPC would be great as it would open up a whole new set of handsets for me to look at whilst still being able to program my own apps.

I think that it's deffinately a good move forward.
I'd better start looking for a new phone :sign0137:

Regards,
RandomCoder

 

[ExcludeReality]

I would like to see Basic4ppc for Android because of the tablet support mentioned above. Almost 30 Android tablets were announced this year at Computex. It would be really cool to see what you can do with a tablet like that

 

[marathon332]

ExcludeReality:

I 100 percent agree with that... tablets are huge and the Android tablet market is destined to be a trend setter (IMO) ..

Many of the Android Tablets will have price points of $199 or less with as good or better features as the Apple iPad.

Erel, please get this product to market ASAP....

Forget WinMo which is a dead issue since MS dropped support for it.

 

[merli]

What about to think about not only for Android, but also iPhone, Maemo (Nokia N900) and WM7. Look here Home | Airplay SDK. But my answer is definitelly YES. Android is fast growing platform and to have easy and fast developement tool as B4PPC really would be great!

 

[BjornF]

Update?

Dear Erel,

doesn't it seem that there is are quite a lot of us that would be interested in an Android version?

Could you tell me/us if you are seriously thinking of going ahead with this, and perhaps even give us an idea of when a first version would be ready?

all the best / Björn

 

[derez]

People
Let the man work, he is developing it right now !! have patience :sign0089:

 

[Erel]

That is correct. I will post more details in the next couple of weeks.

 

[BjornF]

Sorry, I didn't mean to stress you Erel. We are all just looking forward to it :sign0060:

(just imagine how boring it would be if no one cared... )

all the best / Björn

 

[BPak]

Was looking at Titanium system yesterday as I wanted something to develop for Windows Desktop and Mobile and it was impressive and today I see this on B4PPC.

Look forward to what you are doing in this area indeed! :sign0087:

Allan

 

[DavidN]

Yes, please.

Although I wonder if B4A will support gestures and multitouch and haptics and cameras and zoom and text to speech and voice recognization...

Seems like you could use some folks to develop these libraries for you...

I can dream...

 

[agraham]

For those of you with access to either Android emulators or devices this is a "sort of" B4Android application and is a scripting application based on my http://www.b4x.com/forum/additional-libraries/3045-scripting-library-b4ppc.html#post17029 where you can find scripting help in the archive. The application can save and load scripts from a "BasicLib" folder on the SD card which it will create itself on first use. Although there is no file picker a list of files in that folder may be displayed. Filenames do not need an extension when typed into the filename box, the application adds a "src" extension automatically.

The underlying program structure and the UI were initially created by the embryonic B4Android desktop IDE, although the GUI was defined programmatically in B4Android code and not with a Designer. I have added "by hand" automatic control size scaling for different screen sizes and orientations. That will come later in B4A itself.

The scripting code is a port to Java of my BasicLib scripting library and as the B4A library support is currently non-existent it is hand-wired to the UI control events.

The package is signed as a debug application but runs OK both on the emulator and on my Eken M001 tablet to which I wirelessly connect via adb for debugging in Eclipse. This works well and is faster than using the desktop emulator which I find unbearably slow when debugging.

Please note that this by no means indicates that B4Android will be here anytime soon. Timescale is for Erel to comment on but this application is only at the technology demonstrator state and B4Android is still a long way from being able to replicate this without added hand coding.

 

[Erel]

Although I wonder if B4A will support gestures and multitouch and haptics and cameras and zoom and text to speech and voice recognization...

Basic4android will have very strong support for external libraries. I don't believe that all of the advanced features will be ready on the day of release, but eventually it will all be supported.

About the timeline... I hope to release the first version around December 2010 or January 2011.


I will post many details in the following weeks. For now I can say that it is going to be a very powerful environment.

Basic4ppc started as an interpreter and only later, in version 6.0, a compiler was added.
Support for external libraries was only added in version 3.0.
The requirement to be backwards compatible adds a lot of complexity and overhead, and limits the possibilities for new features to integrate in a clean way.

Basic4android starts fresh. Many lessons learned in the last five years since Basic4ppc was developed will be implemented in Basic4android. For example, all types are "first class citizens"
The following code is valid:

...
Dim i(10) as int
createButton(i).text = "Click me!"
Dim b as Button
b = createButtonSub(i)
...
Sub createButtonSub(a() as int) as button
...
Return btn1
End Sub

There are many other improvements. I will just add that the visual designer will be by far better than existing android visual designers (I'm familiar with two).

A little bit of patience is required now...