Recommendations for Palm / Pocket PC App. Development Soft..

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

I'm about to begin work in the next month or so doing some Palm
development (to be deployed to a Sony Clie TH55) unit.

I've researched the myriad of app. development software that's out
there to do development with, and I would like to solicit the readers
of this newsgroup for suggestions/recommendations as to the software
that I might want to consider investing in.

Here are the development tools I've researched thus far:

--- CASL
--- NSBasic
--- Pendragon Forms
--- Intellisync MobileApp
--- AppForge MobileVB
--- HandBase

Any suggestions put forth to me are greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Sincerely,
Brad H. McCollum
bmccoll1@midsouth.rr.com

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

bmccoll1@midsouth.rr.com (Brad H McCollum) wrote:

>I'm about to begin work in the next month or so doing some Palm
>development (to be deployed to a Sony Clie TH55) unit.
>
>I've researched the myriad of app. development software that's out
>there to do development with, and I would like to solicit the readers
>of this newsgroup for suggestions/recommendations as to the software
>that I might want to consider investing in.
>
>Here are the development tools I've researched thus far:
>
>--- CASL
>--- NSBasic
>--- Pendragon Forms
>--- Intellisync MobileApp
>--- AppForge MobileVB
>--- HandBase
>
>Any suggestions put forth to me are greatly appreciated.
>
>Thanks!
>
>Sincerely,
>Brad H. McCollum
>bmccoll1@midsouth.rr.com

Having looked at most of these, I went with NSBasic for several reasons.

1. Lots of experience in various dialects of BASIC, from DOS to OS9 to Unix to
Windows (VB3/VB6) to the Web (VBScript).

2. It's more of a general purpose language than CASL and Pendragon (not as
form-oriented).

3. It uses a smaller runtime than AppForge.

4. It has an active support forum on Yahoo, with an NSBasic person on the forum
daily.

5. There are a number of add-in libraries (some included, some free, some
commercial) - bit manipulation, screen tweaking, TCP/IP, HTTP, etc.

6. There's on-going *responsive* development - today's release of version 4.2
includes a user-requested datagrid-type control - that I haven't had time to
play with yet :-(

7. Point releases (4.0 -> 4.1, etc) are free. The cost to upgrade between
versions (3.x -> 4.x) is very reasonable.

8. Uses Palm-native controls for the standard Palm "look & feel".

9. Supports keyed databases.

10. Can include the runtime and any shared libraries in a single program file.

11 Can include additional resources (databases, images) in the program file.

12. Less expensive than most of the others.

13. Includes support for serial and IR communications. Bluetooth is a special
case of serial. Low level TCP/IP library is also included - higher level access
(HTTP) by add-on library.

14. Has a small runtime for 68k (OS4 and earlier) and OS5 devices, as well as an
OS5-specific runtime is about 5 times faster than the 68k runtime on OS5
devices.

Possible negatives:

1. Uses p-code and a runtime as do AppForge and CASL (unless you buy the CASL
upgrade).

2. Uses Palm-native controls for the standard Palm "look & feel" - no buttons
with red background and yellow text such as AppForge can offer).

3. Slower than true compiled programs (CodeWarrior C [$400], gcc/prc-tools C
[free], CASL w/upgrade [$200], HB++ [HandHeld Basic $490 and up]) - also true
for any other runtime-based development tool.

4. Doesn't have the in-depth database support of HanDBase.

A number of commercial programs (and a lot of medical applications) have been
created in NSBasic.

If I sound biased, I probably am ;-) NSBasic has provided a very productive
environment for a new-to-Palm programmer.

Want some free samples? http://nsb.jecarter.com

=======================================

Long answer about Palm development tools, and a couple of links to performance
information. Be aware that performance information is subject to change as new
versions of the development tools are released.

If you want to develop programs for Palm devices, the following list covers
*most* of the available tools - both palmtop and desktop.

What programming language(s) do you know or want to learn? If you already know
a language, then you'll only have to learn how it's used on the Palm OS. If you
don't know a language, then you'll have to learn the language you choose and
it's implementation on the Palm. The implementation includes things like
remembering that your files are in RAM, so there's no need to read data into an
array for faster access (standard procedure on a platform with disk storage).

Do you want an in-hand solution (Palm-based) or an external solution (runs on a
desktop machine - PC/Mac/Linux)?

Desktop solutions are typically more powerful and compile faster than Palm-based
products (with the possible exception of Pocket Pascal, which is reported to
compile very fast on the Palm).

------------------

The following list includes free and shareware/commercial programs. Some of the
shareware is under $20.

1. C is the "standard" for the Palm : CodeWarrior from www.metrowerks.com ($$$
PC & Mac) or the free PRC-tools from sourceforge.net (PC/Linux). falch.net has
an IDE for the GCC compiler and tools.

2. AppForge has an add-in ($800) for Visual Basic 6 ($$$ and harder to find
since the release of VB.Net). NSBasic has a stand-alone compiler ($149) that
runs on PC's (they also have compilers that produce programs for Pocket PC's and
the Newton). Both products have a GUI IDE.
Both generate tokenized programs that require a run-time library on the Palm.
NSBasic's runtime and executables are smaller and a little faster than
AppForge's.

3. CASL is a database scripting product (http://www.caslsoft.com/) that starts
at $85 (runtime version) and has a $200 compiler upgrade.

http://home.att.net/~frankscaslpag [...] sbasic.htm has a comparison of
CASL, AppForge, and NSBasic.

Handheld Basic (HB++0) If it lives up to its hype (native 68000 compile), it
should be faster than the other Basic versions and competitive with the C
compilers. It's the most expensive development tool ($800 - $1500).

There are also Pascal and java products.

In-hand solutions can be either interpreters (HotPaw Basic) or compilers.

1. HotPaw Basic (also known as ybasic and cbaspad at various times) is an
interpreter that's about as fast as some of the products that have PC-based
compilers and use a run-time - but there's no GUI IDE.

2. C programmers can use OnBoardC ("real C", produces stand-alone executables -
free http://sourceforge.net/projects/onboardc/)
or PocketC ( "sort of C", requires a runtime http://www.orbworks.com/ $18.50 for
in-hand version, $30 for PC version, $45 for both).

----------------------

http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/palm/ has a list of application development links
(about halfway down the page).

http://www.vb-helper.com/review_palm_ides.html has a brief review of most of the
products listed above.


More about me: http://www.jecarter.com/
VB3/VB6/C/PowerBasic source code: http://www.jecarter.com/programs.html
Freeware for the Palm with NS Basic source code: http://nsb.jecarter.com
Drivers for Pablo graphics tablet and JamCam cameras: http://home.earthlink.net/~mwbt/
johnecarter at@at mindspring dot.dot com. Fix the obvious to reply by email.

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

U'mmmmm, ahhh, "today's release of version 4.2"....?

4.1 is the latest thing I see on nsbasic.com. The last release they list
is 4.1.5a of the runtime on April 6.

Where does one go for this 4.2 thingy, anyhow?

the Wiz <look@message.body> wrote in
news:gl38a0lrmb21en4umtcvqo1a7ikrd97ldi@4ax.com:

> 6. There's on-going *responsive* development - today's release of
> version 4.2 includes a user-requested datagrid-type control - that I
> haven't had time to play with yet :-(
>

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

bmccoll1@midsouth.rr.com (Brad H McCollum) wrote in message news:<52031869.0405131356.1e24bd9e@posting.google.com>...
> I'm about to begin work in the next month or so doing some Palm
> development (to be deployed to a Sony Clie TH55) unit.
>
> I've researched the myriad of app. development software that's out
> there to do development with, and I would like to solicit the readers
> of this newsgroup for suggestions/recommendations as to the software
> that I might want to consider investing in.
>
> Here are the development tools I've researched thus far:
>
> --- CASL
> --- NSBasic
> --- Pendragon Forms
> --- Intellisync MobileApp
> --- AppForge MobileVB
> --- HandBase
>
> Any suggestions put forth to me are greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Sincerely,
> Brad H. McCollum
> bmccoll1@midsouth.rr.com


consider superwaba

Archived from groups: comp.sys.palmtops.pilot (More info?)

Alan Holbrook <holbrooka@nospam.charter.net> wrote:

>U'mmmmm, ahhh, "today's release of version 4.2"....?
>

4.2 was announced on the NSBasic forum on Yahoo:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nsbasic-palm/

If you're a registered owner, the download link for 4.2 is the same as the
previous version. However, you might want to wait a day or two to download it -
I've reported one glitch in the install package (fixed the next day) and three
glitches (two minor, one major) and one undocumented behavior in the new grid
control. The next version will probably be out by the end of the week.

I don't know when the demo version of 4.2 will be on their web site.

Just a user, albeit one that's good at pushing the envelope ;-)

>4.1 is the latest thing I see on nsbasic.com. The last release they list
>is 4.1.5a of the runtime on April 6.
>
>Where does one go for this 4.2 thingy, anyhow?
>
>the Wiz <look@message.body> wrote in
>news:gl38a0lrmb21en4umtcvqo1a7ikrd97ldi@4ax.com:
>
>> 6. There's on-going *responsive* development - today's release of
>> version 4.2 includes a user-requested datagrid-type control - that I
>> haven't had time to play with yet :-(
>>

More about me: http://www.jecarter.com/
VB3/VB6/C/PowerBasic source code: http://www.jecarter.com/programs.html
Freeware for the Palm with NS Basic source code: http://nsb.jecarter.com
Drivers for Pablo graphics tablet and JamCam cameras: http://home.earthlink.net/~mwbt/
johnecarter at@at mindspring dot.dot com. Fix the obvious to reply by email.