Just wanted to say...

I agree. The current iOS WebView/Safari engine is a badly limited toy. And on top of it, Apple forbids the use of anything else.

But that is the Stalinian shadow of Steve Jobs, here. He wanted to do that with the Mac but it was a bit early. He succeeded closing the hardware and got rid of extension cards, but could not go all the way to a closed OS. With iOS devices, he was able to really get a tight totalitarian system, with no possibility to escape Apple’s rules. Heck, between the hardware with no real standard connectivity, the jailed system, no permission to initiate child processes like shell or helpers, and the sandboxed apps, the computer no longer belongs to the user but to Apple :wink:

Android has all the advantages of Windows in that instance : everything goes. Meaning acrobatic programming is possible, which means innovation, ease of installation with a simple APK, but the flipside is the same as Windows : without the police state rules of iOS, hackers, pirates, spyware and all sorts of malware have a field day.

It is amazing to see how today Windows cannot live without a horde of antiviruses each sporting tens of thousands of virus signatures, and still there are regular accounts of zombified PCs. The same seems to happen to Android. On the other side of the fences, Mac OS X still seems quasi immune, and of course ultra paranoid iOS too.

In a way, Apple has the same policy as Rolls Royce : the customer should never, ever lift the hood. See the Genius bar if the jewel starts acting up. Android and Windows, on the other hand, look very much like the car of my youth : take it apart, put it back together, throw a set of tools in the trunk, and if it starts acting up, get your hands dirty, you’ll be alright.

Young people don’t buy R&R. Old and rich people do :wink:

Yes. In the past it was a high priority for me. iOS is just not a market for me and maybe to many others, but I am surrounded by Android devices. Here and in many places, companies solves their mobile problems using those “cheap devices” that employees sometimes drop on the floor or something. If broken, they request another one, copy the app installer (APK) to the device (USB, network, blutooth…), install and go.

Discardable devices? Yes, as iPhones are, but only cheaper. I had iPhones, never used one more than 2 years without looking for a newer model. People discard or give away not so old functional devices. :stuck_out_tongue:

Android is just one OS you can put in ANY mobile device. As an user, choose your option wisely. The OS quality? Please… Awesome (we are at 5.0.1, please don’t compare with 2.2 and lower). For years you can choose even the look and feel, even mimicking iOS if you like such interface style.

Why I don’t care about iOS? Right now I am not focused on the App Stores, iOS or even Android, my country doesn’t rank well in such markets. :wink:

I see mobile devices as I see a notebook without a keyboard. If people want something in this format, I just want to produce and deliver directly to them. Android IS the solution for such kind of market, not only here, but everywhere. The company can install an App Locker in the device and avoid users modifying the environment and using them to other purposes, like playing games and downloading and installing new apps.

Young people buy anything possible for their acquisitive power, but the rich ones prefers Ferraris to R&Rs.
Old rich people buys anything, including companies, computers, tablets and software but don’t wish to burn money doing it. :slight_smile:

3.5 years working coding daily on mine and I have had one blue screen-level crash in that whole time. My rMBP would kill for that record, I have locked it up probably 7-8 times in the past 2 years that I have had it, and I code a lot less on it than I do my Windows 7 machine.

My anecdotal contribution is that in 6 years my MBP never locked or kernel panicked - not once.
My Vista & XP boxes blue screened regularly.
My new rMBP has locked up once (yesterday in fact) since I bought it over a year ago and when I looked at the logs I found the culprit.

One of the reasons I like working on OS X is actually its crash logs :slight_smile:
They’re far more useful than anything built in to Windows.
And that I can so easily work on OS X, Windows & Linux at the same time.

YMMV

I made the point because Windows gets picked on about 10000x times as much as the Mac around here for some reason (very odd on the forum of a Cross-Platform tool vendor). They are not the horrid machines that so many here make them out to be.

People do have very strong feelings both ways about which they prefer.

I tried to make that point several times without much echo. Portable devices are de facto the leaders of the total computing devices market share. Microsoft admitted recently it now accounted for only 14% of it http://www.geekwire.com/2014/microsoft-exec-admits-new-reality-market-share-longer-90-14/ . That is less than iOS…

Of the total, Android has about 50% by itself. That is about four times the current Windows. Kevin Turner himself, Microsoft CEO, does not seem to believe Windows 10 or Windows RT as being able to change that fact.

It would be foolish to ignore the potential of Android devices for “serious” and corporate applications. The prism of the iTunes App Store and Google Play, with their overrepresentation of toyishware, should not mask the fact that a modern tablet today is in fact a computer just as powerful as any standard laptop a couple years a couple years ago. And the lack of keyboard is much less an issue for Android, which has a standard USB interface which accepts gracefully PC keyboards and mice, and even provides a mouse cursor.

I am busy getting my first app in the iTunes App Store, with all the pain and suffering of jumping through the hoops of Apple monopoly on sales, after struggling (successfully) through the limitations of Xojo iOS. But when it will come time to create “serious” apps that print and use datagrids, Xojo iOS is not up to snuff yet, so I probably will look into Basic4Android as my first venue. After experimenting with other solutions, I still find it to be the closest to Xojo in terms of RAD and language.

Until a few years ago I was a diehard Windows fan but once I tried a Mac I was hooked and won’t change back as long as OS X is more pleasant to use. BUT, my clients are 99.9% Windows users, and I don’t see that industry (Civil Engineers) changing any time soon.

So one of the reasons I like Xojo is that I can develop on my Mac and deploy to Windows. My app is pretty straightforward so I don’t notice flicker and there haven’t been any show stopper bugs so…I’m a happy camper! Well, except for that darned enum change. LOL

I work in a shop where we have far more than “a” Windows system. In fact, our lab currently has Windows NT 5.1 dating form 1997 still running on an AMD 733MHz system. We see far more than an average user’s share of BSOD and other Windows glitches during our various testing and development operations, but no more than we see on the various Macs (28 at this point) that we have running 10.4.11 (on an old G4 1GHz Xserve) through the latest developer prereleases. On the other hand, we have a large number of Linux systems that have uptime values in the range of years. As a point off the curve, We have a collocated Linux system still running Red Hat 3.0.3 (circa 1994) as a private FTP/SFTP server that has now been up for more than 6 years (which is a statement more to Go Daddy’s amazing power filtering and management because of the crappy power we get from APS).

All of these systems are used in ways that end users would never use them. We code within the kernels (yes, even on Windows via device driver injection), attach and detach storage devices while they are active to force errors. Run multiuser tests with over 2500 users on some systems, overheat them, cool them, hard power them off, and many other torture tests (one of my favorites being a bump and drop test of a 1/2 rack unit full of 24RU of systems (324 pounds) to test a new shock mounting system - it passed).

The only constant in all of it is that none of the lab systems (with the exception of the collocated system) have access to the outside world.

  • Which do I prefer for my day to day personal business use? My Mac.
  • Which do I prefer to use for RS/Xojo work? My Mac
  • Which do I prefer to use for Java work? My Mac
  • Which do I prefer for editing video? My Mac
  • Which do I prefer for Music Editing? My sandboxed Windows 2000 Pro system (no network connectivity offload projects via CDRW).
  • Which do I prefer for games? My Xbox 360 ;).

The key there being these are the platforms that I prefer. You should find what works for you and run with it and only seat of the pants experience will tell you what that is.

Where do my Xojo apps get deployed? All three (maybe 4, now) :D.

Very rational thoughts. But keyboard/mouse isn’t the current main feature desired right now. They just wish people carrying a small device to make sales (touching menus) or consulting some status like tracking diagnostics of someone sick being monitored, that kind of simple use. As a fully desktop substitute it will take a bit more time. :wink:

My experience with B4A has just been a small phone dialer I placed in the Play Store to see the process through. Yet if I was to compare with what I am going through right now with iOS and the iTunes Store, it was by far easier.

The Play Store does not require 25 screen shots plus optionally 5 different app video preview, and the vetting process remains tolerable, without extraneous fuss.

Better yet, if you address corporate clients, you do not need to go through tacky provisional profiles for ad hoc requirement, and can hand or send by email an apk installer to your customers. If you already have clients manifesting the need for particular applications, it looks like a good idea to satisfy that need, before someone else does.

I really wish Xojo considers supporting Android eventually. It is hard to pass such a huge market.

Theres no “Yes” and also no “No” about it
More like “maybe” as we have some things we know we need to look into

[quote=154082:@Norman Palardy]Theres no “Yes” and also no “No” about it
More like “maybe” as we have some things we know we need to look into[/quote]

It was merely a wish, not a demand. After all, writing a letter to Santa this season never hurts :wink: