EZGUI - getting nosy...

[ReneMiner]

Now I read post 4 above: You're right about dot-net. that's why I say vb6 is best what MS ever released- all others as vb-dot-net equals with Johns opinions I was angry that MS went the dot-net-way- there was the direct (x/input) way open in 2003 also- but they went the .net-way... instead of going for the grail... dot-net is as cumbersome as callbacks... so OpenGL overtook in easy handling when Vista and 7 were released. But there's no language that comes close to vb6 (only basic4Android can stand the competition - and getting better) on windows-systems for my kind of there's currently nothing better than thinBasic available- I searched long and I was willing to pay a few bucks if it were good- none can fulfill my expectations. TB has greatest core and cool 3d - but UI is currently... lets say sumptuous... There's a big gap on the windows-driven-desktop-pc-market that no available language is able to satiate - MS trapped themselves caught between MS Small Basic and vb.net which both are far away from main-stream (where the money is) - either for minimalists or (free vb-net-express) for pro-professionals that code for a living and have to deal with the stuff that MS commits or are willing let MS overtake their computers ( on Win8 you have no more rights- you have to ask MS before you install software and have to accept any of their updates unasked...- just kidding!) but they left a large hole when they stopped support for vb6 because they did not release any better follower but just filthy dot-net which is cumbersome dirt-crap that none wants to use if not urged to with a shotgun

[ReneMiner]

until I was done writing my posts there are a few more already- I have to study at least half of them

Edit: Thanx for the videos- but your designer is that easy- no video needed. Designer is well documented - and I found everything but the button to create app without help. The problem is on the other side (while runtime) - i have not found any explanation how to change caption or size of something...I just wanted to see if my button-click gets recognized- but it does not even END if I write END into the Button-Click-Event. And END is valid pb-method to end program as in the good old times

...
In PowerBasic to set a controls caption for example would be like this:

CONTROL SET TEXT hDialogHandle&, ControlID& "Some text"

???

this can not be called easy.
Easy would be:

myButton(123).Caption = "some new caption" ' (within same code unit)
' at maximum:
myDialog.myButton(123).Caption = "another caption" ' ( from other unit/module/anywhere)

[zlatkoAB]

The time has come...
tick tack...
please Eros remove this idiot one and for all from this forum ...

[Chris Boss]

Rene,

As a VB 6.0 user you find this blog article of mine interesting:

http://cwsof.com/blog/?p=608

The title is:

Classic Visual Basic’s end marked a key change in software development

Now as far as my commercial EZGUI product (EZGUI 5.0 Pro) is concerned, those who have never used it just don't grasp the power of this tool.
The power is in the GUI engine, not the designer.

John is incorrect in calling EZGUI too low level. The new Designer is very good and is a decent RAD tool, but the real power is in the GUI engine and that is not entirely low level. It does have low level stuff so you can do almost anything (by customizing), but it has many very high level features, you won't find in the PowerBasic compiler nor in any other RAD tools for PowerBasic.

The 2D Sprite engine for example is very powerful.

The 3D scripting language for its OpenGL based 3D control is very, very powerful. For example it can load STL 3D models (3D printing model format) with millions of polygons in a few seconds and displays them instantly.

For example:

model4.png

This model has over 138,000 polygons in it and it loads and displays instantly.

Unlike gaming model formats which are low polygon count models which fake realism using quality texture maps and shaders, EZGUI gains realism, even in a single color, with models because of the high polygon count. I have loaded models with over 2 million polygons in a few seconds and they display instantly.

It is these kind of things which make my product different. It is more than a visual designer.

[Petr Schreiber]

Begin off topic

Unlike gaming model formats which are low polygon count models which fake realism using quality texture maps and shaders

This is currently changing, with more horse power it was not rare to see just characters modeled with 50 000+ polygons 3 years ago... 2 last GPU generations with tesselation units can pump it up even more. With dawn of physically modeled materials there is lot of nice things to look forward in gaming arena
But I agree everything rasterization based is faking by nature, that's what makes it fun to code hehe.
End off topic


Petr

[ReneMiner]

yes- we got a little away from ezgui here- very interesting reading on your site- and not just the vb-article. There were a lot of unaccomplished promises alike "OK, we create another language that will be as easy as classic vb and it even will be built-in to Windows8" - what did they do? "MS Small Basic" - supposed to be "a language for beginners" but is just another MS-crime... enough about that...

Thank god there's such thing as thinBasic - otherwise I probably would have given up on coding already and just play games - My "current project" is to create some multiple useable GUI to TBGL: I have it done in "manual mode" already but the difficulty is for the visual-design-mode I need to use "UI"-module mostly because the designer should not use the user-chosen fonts in the designers menus, tools, property-lists, trees etc. And there's the hook- everything else I get done without any problem - I have my very own windows inside TBGL-window- with controls, menus, focus, zorder, properties and events -all written by myself- but when it comes to use callbacks and UI-controls, that have no real properties which can be set, but just a dozen different handles - I'm screwed.
Now I await yearningly next tB-version because I want to rewrite it using some new memory-functions that will save lots of currently useless allocated meemory since I used some Union for all controls- means a small Timer-control with just 2 Properties - 8 Bytes needed - allocates the same memory as a treeview - which needs a few hundred bytes. Thereafter I want to start again creating some visual designer for my "in-TBGL-window-windows" which has to be done using real windows-controls.

Thats why I was nosy how EZGUI works - if it probably creates "pseudo-classes" that make those dialogs & controls some kind of objects and generates clearly defined events so one does not have to bother with "the stuff underneath".

Because thinBasic already has a lot of useful core-functions to emulate objects (this still missing for perfection) and already has a lot of controls available in "UI"-Module, I think it would be possible to create some "UIPlus"-extension-module for the lazy ones, which provides some visual designer including a code-skeleton-generator for rapid-application-developement - even without having real objects nor classes and supports the user-written-code with some automatic parsing callbacks to events, updating changed properties etc.

Eros already did an important step lately, adding Dialogs-names - which are part of later functions- & properties- i.e. "private" variables-names. UI as currently is, can still be available for users that love to use callbacks or want to keep their apps small & "cpu-usage-footprint" low - whatever that means - in my apps using UI with more than 2 controls always ends up in an unreadable large noodle of code.
I imagine it would write one "Ini-File" per Dialog that just holds the dialogs & controls names & layout ( so they can easy be reused or changed) and a code-generator that just generates a new or browses some existing script for function-names and adds the missing or the needed Ini-file-names (if more dialogs added) to some "protected" TB-UIPlus-StartUp-Function which overrides TBMain if present.
Maybe it can be set during design to some Property-List which default-events to generate - and still be possible to add/remove them later manually.

It would be a big win-win-situation because all users would not just gain the time, that they would need to create all this repeatedly used stuff over and over again but also the time they need to learn and understand stuff that they're not really interested in. Some astrophysician might want to write some table about the moon influencing asteroids that will hit the earth - but if he had to understand what microsoft comitted before he can start to write it might be too late...
It probably will attract a few others to use tB for creating their windows-apps - because its so fast 'n easy. In any case they could create their stuff in less time, which means they can eventually create more apps during their lifetime - and life is short - so have to begin as soon as possible and in any case before that asteroid hits the earth.

[Chris Boss]

Open Source does not make a development system any better than a commercial tool. What matters it the organization behind the tool. Few opensource software projects have real potential unless they have a large organization behind it which has some resources behind it. One good example is Blender. Very good organization behind it.

Now while I am sure Oxygen is a great tool, it is just a one man operation like many other open source software projects and the commitment, while there today, could easily be gone tommorrow. At least when software is built by a small company (or one person) when it is a commercial operation, it has a greater chance of commitment since they depend upon it for a living and it won't be just dropped if they lose interest.

The truth is that no software company is guaranteed long term success. Among small businesses, the majority fail in time. This is just a fact of life. Among large companies, a few wrong choices and even they can at minimum lose market share or even fail. Look at Apple. They almost went bankrupt at one point and if Microsoft hadn't helped bail them out, they may have.

And even of the software developer stays in business, they may make choices at one point which can overnight make there software obsolete. Look at classic Visual Basic and all the resources invested in it by developers and when Microsoft just dropped it in favor of managed languages (aka. VB dot.net), it nearly destroyed thousands of developers who could not make the switch to dot.net.

So what is a developer to do ?

Make choices which work for them, at least for the next couple years. If PowerBasic disappeared today, I would have at least 3 to 5 years before I felt the loss from it. Why ?

Because I write for the WIN32 and know how to leverage it so I can write apps for all versions of Windows. The WIN32 isn't going anywhere anytime soon. But what about my potential customer base ?

I have already started to make the shift from a tool developer to a developer for consumer apps. The market for addons for anything but the "big" development tools (aka. Visual Studio) is small at best and limited in scope. Now, actually if PowerBasic were to disappear today, it would actually likely benefit me to some degree, since existing PB'ers would be looking for resources , no longer available from PowerBasic and I would likely be one of the few third party developers who has one of the richest set of resources which could be turned into all sorts of tools for PB. I could break up EZGUI into smaller tools if I wanted to. The point is, there would be some kind of market for me for at least a few years, giving me time to find alternative markets. I am also current researching options for developing end user apps, which won't be limited by whether PowerBasic exists or not.

In all honesty, I rarely need any of the new features in each new iteration of PBs compiler, because I can write most advanced features myself. I don't need DDT. I don't currently need the COM, but may use it in the future. I don't need the PB graphics or print engine. Actually PowerBasics new GUI features have always been behind what I have been doing.

Yet the quality of their compiler can last me for years to come. EZGUI 5.0 almost was written in PB 6.1, rather than a later version, but the only reason I switched was because I tapped out the limits of the 6.x compiler (just too much code to compile). I then switched to PB 9.x for EZGUI 5.0 and it should be good for me for at least the next five years or so. I also have PB 10 too, but am only using it to write SLL's write now.

My goal right now is to switch to consumer apps, rather than tools, but keep my tool development going as an aside, rather than the primary thing. I will need better stuff for building consumer apps, so I will continue to improve EZGUI and I will make the new versions available to my existing customer base (and any new ones, as long as PowerBasic is around). My customers using EZGUI make it better, because they provide valuable feedback about it and test it to the limit. This will make any consumer apps I develop better, because I too will use my own development tools for such software.

I really don't think a compiler like Oxygen is really a decent replacement for I currently have. All I would need is a few core features missing and I would just have to wait until its developer added the features. I don't need to be a beta tester for an open source developer right now. I need a dependable programmign language with a solid history. OK, PowerBasic (the company) is not perfect and at times they have made mistakes, but who hasn't ? Unless you are one of the big guys (Google, Microsoft, Apple) , all software companies face big challenges.

As for OpenSource, it has one big problem !

It is FREE !

Yes, that is a problem for one important reason. Those who use OpenSource tend to always want things free, which means they tend to not want to pay for any software. This is one reason why Linux has been hurt. One programming language developer , who use to write a compiler for Linux and Windows (cross platform), told me that Linux was a problem because they want everything free and it was hard to sell that market a compiler, when they could get one for free. He wanted to switch to a purely Windows compiler , which is why we talked because he was considering getting me to to help with a GUI engine (he was using a cross platform engine). Sadly he died a number of years ago and nothing became of it for me, but I learned something valuable from my conversation with him.

FREE (or OpenSource) doesn't always mean better. The old saying "you get what you paid for" holds true.

I have paid good money over the years for the PowerBasic compilers (and have even had some happy customers get together to buy me one version too) and have never been disappointed. I got what I paid for, a quality native code compiler. I am not a C programmer and I dislike the dot.net stuff, so BASIC is my primary language of choice and PowerBasic is my primary BASIC compiler of choice.

[ReneMiner]

... Unless you are one of the big guys ...

No- we're certainly not. But there's a lot of folks left in the dark since 2008 - when MS dropped supporting classic vb. Folks that as myself never could become friends with dot-net that urgently search and only find on android-systems.Or in tB - I'm screwed because I bought a Windows8-computer that is so much married with Win8, that if the harddrive dies (partition D: on main-drive) - it'll be of no use any more since a win8-update to newest standards will take 7 GB or 1 and a half days to update...and not be possible with a dead HD, ...the only way will be switch to linux then. But as someone not mentioned said: tB is running fine on "wine"