?
SHOOOO Masses and masses of suggestions and opinions on how to get Out There.
I have noticed that there are a number of new registrations on the forum, so
@Erel reports this as well, over the past months. Whether that is part of the lockdowns or not is largely irrelevant.
The whole advertising debate is fine, but, whether a cost benefit analysis will prove the advantage will require an amount of cash to be spent, which may be just a waste of time. That advertising has to emerge better on the landing page, where else, I haven't seen a computer magazine on a shop shelf for years. What's the cost of advertising in the online platforms? Its still about cost benefit.
The way to this has to be just to get the web site looked at by people )yup that old chestnut(. Then this has to have some currency :
I doubt those names are there without authorisation, Anywhere isn't that dumb. So what could change here is that each of those names becomes clickable and points to projects that these have used the IDE for. There is the SHOWCASE link right at the bottom left of the landing page, that could be made more prominent so viewers can go and see the sort of projects that have been done. (I used to tell my worker representative comrades we don't get enough kilometers out of our successes.)
But, getting those viewers past that point is like trying to force the horse to drink at the water trough. If the
@Peter Simpson competitioand its follow-up, as I have said here before, were what people read about that is an evidence based view of the speed etc possible. That thread could be made more visible as a "Why Use B4x products - read this link..." more prominently on the landing page. Maybe edit and shorten it a bit to focus it more.
As we probably all know, programmers are fairly embedded in their approaches to the work and the language in use. Every, language is just : if-then-else, while until, for-next, and so on. Have a look at
this page (posted in another thread) and go to the examples themselves. You will notice that
many of these examples look pretty much the same as each other [
they just scroll away so press the down scroll and watch the patterns], the layouts, the Begin End, curly-bracket, etc.. Same. Every now and again someone, probably in an academic department, thinks there is a new dedicated way to do something, a lot of these "innovations" are barely practical. Object orientation, class structuring blah blah. Most students
struggle like hell to grasp this sort of thing.
So impressing on someone you know/ don't know that if they cut the hogwash they can get to a platform that is NOT that hard to learn, NOT that difficult to find information about, and, to boot, has loads of examples that are available. And, its here in B4X.
I've been using B4A/X for just over a year now and would never have developed 4 apps in that space of time with some other fangled thing. CERTAINLY not Android Studio which is where I started, and, I can't get my stuff back out of MIT A2! Incidentally, if I remember my old brain took about an hour to get the hang getting something to appear on my phone -> what can I say?
I haven't found it difficult to find information, or to ask for assistance on some pretty idiot stuff, and complex stuff. If you can Google, why can't you use the forum and the booklets. I also do a lot of technical writing and editing of manuals and such, well the project to reorganise the information would be interesting and take a long time. But, its not in such bad shape, really.
@Cableguy was attempting to do this with ABMaterials to bolster up the documentation. Not sure where that went but I looked at attempting to help and its a BIG job, involving the same search and digest strategy one uses on Google. Its just as quick as reading the manual that comes with other languages or using the IDE help with their package. Have you tried the Arduino IDE? Hello B4X documentation, you're welcome.
Its not that this grass is any greener than over the fence, but where I live we class veld grasses as sweet or sour, animals will go for the sweetveld. Many have commented here that B4X is BETTER than Kotlin, Android Studio, MIT A2 and so on. I found these all over on the sourveld paddock.
We need to put out some nonsense projects that show new prospects how to learn about B4X and its probabilities; I put one in a thread
Guess whose been extended with lockdown converter as an example of such a thing. Took an hour or two including looking up and searching the forum and couple of shots
@klaus 's documentation. {O, hang on, there's the Tutorials and Examples Forum, what was I thinking?}
I am working on a teacher or two to bring this IDE into their primary school teaching programmes.
My money is on working on those sons and daughters, anyone looking around, and even the hard wired friends who have their noses in the air at "BASIC !".
We have to tell them it's NOT THAT BASIC, its basic as in easy. Make a challenge page: Go here to challenge yourself to a
@Peter Simpson style challenge, just you and yourself. The page will have a few suggestions - write a program to input a number in decimal and covert it to base whatever. Write a program to calculate the seconds between your birthday and today. Any other offers?
Read
this link if you haven't about COBOL: a geriatric of similar vintage to BASIC, both apparently still going strong. Some object oriented perspective lessons.
Most of all remind these people not to be lazy, too many use things because they don't know anything else, forced by the brainwashing of their education.
Be a hacker.
Shoooo Lockdown is verbose ? we've just come to day one of the extension . . . .