Other Beginner Questions

[Tranquil]

Hello Forum, hello Devs.

I'm "new" to B4A, bought a licence years ago but until today, never used it, and now I try to get a bit into it.
I made my first steps with Android SDK and ADT Eclipse followed by Android Studio.
After getting into these platforms I came across B4A, with the following questions:

1.) The IDE/ Visual Designer of B4A seems a bit "old" for me. Is it possible to use another one, maybe Eclipse instead? Also the Visual Designer does not seem to support all types of available objects and their properties. Also the fact, that the VD strongly needs fixed positions for objects will lead to different problems when it comes to different screen sizes with different DPIs. Any (good) way to improve this?

2.) Is there a direct help within the IDE (like STRG+SPACE in Android Studio) which can be used offline?

3.) Is it possible to compile (and optionally debug) by command line?

Sorry if these questions are maybe asked in the past but could not find and answers to it by google.

Thanks in advance.
Mike

 

[Erel]

1) B4A visual designer is probably more powerful than the eclipse designer. You need to learn how to use its features (anchors, auto scale and designer scripts).
If you like you can use a different designer and load the XML layouts with XmlLayoutBuilder library. I don't recommend you to follow this approach.

2) https://www.b4x.com/android/forum/posts/294156/
3) It will be possible to compile (not debug) from the command line in the next version.