Kudos - Other development tools considered

These are unsolicited comments from people who have used NS Basic/Palm. The most recent comments are at the end of the file.

"Really great language. My program is looking great in only one hour!!! Try that with CodeWarrior on the Mac...." -- Brandon Amison

"First, a quick background. I've been experimenting with Palm development tools for months now. By trade, I'm a Delphi/SQL programmer with a few years of Visual Basic experience. I've also got a touch of ANSI C++ from college. I thought that I might be able to work my way into using C (either in GCC or CodeWarrior) to create Palm apps, but the learning curve for me was a bit too frustrating. That was mostly because I can usually spend only about 30-60 minutes at a time coding at home.

In addition to GCC/CodeWarrior (and a few of the visual IDE programs that use GCC underneath), I've looked at Quartus Forth, PDAToolbox, and CASL. I eventually bought CASL, and have been working on a program for the past three or so weeks. Then I came across NS Basic. *grin*

I was a little leary of spending $100 without really seeing the product, but I trusted that the 30-day return policy would be honored if I didn't like it. I ordered my copy last Thursday, and decided to have it shipped express. It arrived Friday, and after flipping through the manual, was pretty excited about getting started. Well, to make a short story long *wink*, as of Wednesday night (5 days after receiving the software), I have a usable program! It's not completely finished, as I need to store a couple preferences and load them at startup (which I attempted to do, but had some problems), and I just thought of another feature this morning.

I'm pretty pleased with the product. There are some quirks that need worked out, mostly in the IDE, but it's a young product that I'm sure will get better. I have found a couple of language bugs, but also discovered work-arounds for them. I am compiling a list of issues that I intend on sending in 'any day now'. This product is easy to use, does what I want it too (mostly...still need a table object and modal forms), and seems pretty stable. Oh sure, it would be nice if we could compile self-contained prc files (which I hope is something on the drawing board), but for version 1.01, this is a great tool.

Thanks NS Basic. If there are any CASL developers reading this and considering looking at NS Basic, do it! You won't be sorry."

"Personally, I have an incredible amount of respect (and awe) of individuals who can build development tools. Am having a good experience with NS basic. (had nsbasic for my Newton and was delighted to see it for palm.)

I'm using nsbasic and hoping life can get a little simplier. (Have Satellite Forms but got frustrated with "new" owners marketing strategy. Have CodeWarrier - apps run fast - but take a lonnnng time to build/debug for someone with limited c).

With NSBasic - glad to see that the standard palm data format was used (less categories, which can be a lot of work). It makes it easier to do conduits. NSBasic is easy to install, even with the runtime element. The challenge is to get the last 10% (like the modal form), to do basic apps.

Keep up the good work and best luck for success! " -- Alan McCarty

I should take a moment to say that I have been an admirer of your products since the Newton days. Though I worked with NewtonScript back then and never actually used NSBasic I marvelled at its conceptual elegance: BASIC on a Palmtop! As I started with BASIC on a GE timesharing system over thirty years ago, the existence of NSBasic on Newton perfectly represented for me the progress of the intervening decades. Today, not being in a position to tackle the CodeWarrior learning curve for the project at hand, I am happy to have an excuse to join the NSBasic camp and write in BASIC, if not on my Palm, at least for it.

And thank you for providing an old fashioned printed manual. You would think usefulness was a dirty word these days.

"We have compared a lot of dev environments for the Palm platform and we are impressed by your product. Especially when compared to such expensive (and buggy) software as Satellite Forms" -- Kambiz Darabi, Germany

"TBTW, Fantastic product, I was battling with Codewarrior and C to develop a prototype for my Boss, I spent a month working on (Lack of C knowledge) but ordered NSBasic and knocked it up in 4 hours!!! Many many thanks!! " -- Chris Priest

"You guys have an amazing product... I look forward to a great career with it! I am trying to put together a Palm Programming class for a local Jr. College here... I was going to just do PQA's because of the ease of use... and leave the CodeWarrior stuff for another level... but your software might make it easy to include that too!" -- Frank Blau

"I think that NS Basic/Palm is an excellent product and I'm really enjoying using it. I had assumed that I would have to use Codewarrior or Satellite Forms, but NS Basic does the job perfectly. In only an evening I got the bare bones of my application working! I had anticipated weeks!" --Jeremy Bass, Ireland

"Maybe this isn't the appropriate place to post, but I just wanted to say how pleased I am with your product. I've been struggling with CW/Palm for months. Without having any background in C, it has been impossible for me to get anything close to a real working app. I received NsBasic last Friday afternoon, by Sunday morning I had the app I've been dreaming of for months. The IDE is a little quirky, but that's the only "criticism" I have. Many kudo's for developing this breakthrough product for us weekend programmers! Thanks a million."--Rick Tharp RxKinetics

"I have Satellite Forms Enterprise - if you need a conduit ie. you can't write your own or you haven't got one already, it's the best option.

I also have JBuilder Mobile - I use JBuilder a lot, but this version is a real turkey! No wonder they give it away.

I have tried CASL but it didn't feel right. The documentation was very poor although it may have improved of late.

Codewarrior was our first purchase. We are still trying to figure out the user interface - very Mac, very not for us.

We bought NS-Basic about 8 weeks ago. By the end of the first weekend I had converted 3 of our applications from Delphi. By the end of 6 weeks I had all 5 converted. The reason it took so long to get the others done was because I tried to write my own conduit. I then bought EnviCon's conduit which does all the work for you and the rest was easy.

For the money, NS-Basic is just fantastic. Just buy it, you won't be disappointed." -- Walter Anderson

"I also got Codewarrior Palm, but found NSBasic so much easier I'll probably use NS Basic for all prototypes and maybe for all products that don't take blazing speed." -- Mark Keith Webster

"I spent most of the weekend trying to learn Palm OS programming with the "C" based tools. What a frustrating and tedious process. I was very glad to find NS Basic. Within a few mintues of installing the package, I was able to put together a very simple program and run it. I write Visual Basic applications for a living and making the jump over to NS Basic has been very easy, so far. Keep up the good work." -- Mike Huffnagle

"On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the best for technical support, I would say that NSBasic is the best at 10, CASL is about a 7, and Satellite Forms for the 795.00 price tag is a 1. I own all 3 products as well as Pendragon Forms and a few others. For the technical support alone you would probably do best with NSBasic." -- Neil Fallon

"It is really easy to make applications with NS Basic!!! KVM got more difficult after J2, so it's nice to have NS Basic." -- Kidera, japan

"I have enjoyed programming using NSBasic for the Palm. Its a terrific product and one that I think will mature into a competitor for Metrowerks." -- Wayne Taylor

The learning curve is a LOT shorter with NS Basic. The expense is a LOT less with NS Basic. The people on this listserver are pretty darn responsive and extremely helpful. NS Basic is extremely easy to pick up. You could have an Application ready for Production within 1-2 weeks. Try that with CodeWarrior. NS Basic is intuitive, unlike CodeWarrior. The NS Basic personnel are extremely helpful and they understand what Customer Service is. -- Lester F. Callif

Ditto on the "proud of your team", "GREAT product", but the "This is the first time..." part I can't agree with... I've had NSBasic since December and there have been several releases since then. There have been a bunch of releases of the NSBRuntime for those of us playing with the SysTrap API calls. This isn't the first time, its the 5th, 6th, 7th, 43rd (who knows...) time to produce timely updates and bug fixes. I'm very impressed. I used to work for a software company that released new versions once a year, twice if you were lucky. George, and crew, I love your "release often" attitude. Thanks! -- Ron

Thank you, I greatly appreciate it and also the prompt service. Thank you for a wonderful LIFESAVING product for us Visual Basic developers out here who don't want to fry our brains with CodeWarrior! -- Bob Hodges

I just want to say... Ohmygod! I just looked at Appforge... Sorry, But I needed to know. Do you know how big their runtime is? Jeez! It's 334k!! Needless to say, I think I'll stay with NS Basic. try telling someone they need a 334k file PLUS the size of your program installed. They even have the nerve to call it small! Must be a bunch of WinCE heads. ;)

Anyway, just telling you that you guys have a great product and I'd love to help make it better. -- Wes

Just a quick note. I've had NSbasic (registered, yes!) for about a week and a half now and I just have to say, "I love it". I've got Codewarrior ver 8 and like programming in "C" but I have to tell you, for getting something up and running quickly, NSbasic is tops. You folks deserve a lot of credit for coming so far in such a short period of time.

Please, don't pull a Microsoft booboo. Continue to make NSbasic robust without adding every feature that can be packed into the package (ala Microsoft). You have something great going (and should probably charge a little more for it in future releases). Make NSbasic "bulletproof" and word of mouth alone will make it mandatory for anyone owning a Palm OS device to own NSbasic (just like everyone had to have GWbasic for DOS). Keep up the great work!!!! -- Bob Stout

I first came across NSB for PalmOS before it was called NSB and thought it had a lot of potential. However, it was buggy to no end but again it had potential. Then the name was changed to NSB and the first iteration was an improvement but still there was a long way to go. I never plunked down any money as I was just trying demo versions that were available to determine if the cost was justified.

In the mean time I started to "use" CodeWarrior demo (painful) and GCC tools (painful but free) and I bought the Palm Programming Bible an awesome piece of work. The book shows how things are done using GCC and CW and I learnt a lot. But the development process was slllllooooowwww.

Downloaded Appforge and compiled a couple of programs. While the integration with VB is cool the implementation of interface on the Palm is IMHO hideous not to mention the 300+ kilobyte runtime.

I had being turned off NSB for quite a while because I could not gauge the progress of the software as no demo was available. However, last week I did download a demo and my reaction was holy s*** this thing has really matured and I plunked down my $99 for version 2 and I haven't stopped coding since.

This really is a remarkable piece of software when you consider the C way of doing the same thing with CW or GCC.

Anyway, thanks George and the crew as NSB Corporation and all posters to this group that I've being lurking in, on and off, for the past year or so. -- Gary Christian

I also own AppForge and it does allow you to use the same code for a Palm and a CE, I just tell it which to compile into. That being said, it did cost $800 for the dual-compiler capability, it cost $10 for every CE run-time module (free for Palm), it has a HUGE footprint on the run-time modules, I've found it less stable than NS Basic, and it's slow. It did look like a Palm screen on a CE, but with what I'm developing and my circumstances - that's OK. They're also tinkering with other things where there would be distribution charges on some planned 'super' capabilities - so they're going to goof themselves up if they're not careful. Their customers are developers, not customers of the developers.

So even though I have both AppForge & NS Basic, I develop in NS Basic (but prototype in AppForge). For a user community and support, there's no comparison with AppForge & NS Basic. NS Basic is miles ahead. -- Mark

If you've used Basic, VB and C to program for windows, you should find the differences between them are similar with the Palm/OS environment. (Did that make sense??) Meaning that if you choose to code in C then you should expect:
Compile to a fast executable.
Have more control over what you are doing.
Better access to APIs.
Tougher learning curve..
Much longer development time.

Using the VB approach, you would use something like NSBasic and have:
Interpreted executable and a runtime. This isn't bad though, because it's a small runtime and you can build it right into your executable and create a "fat app".
If you have programming experience, then the learning curve is almost nil.
Application development is blazing fast.
NSBasic handles most tasks reasonably fast with good optimization. If you find that you need something done faster, or find a task that NSBasic isn't handling the way you like, you can always write a shared library in C and call it from NSBasic. -- BillC

I have both CodeWarrior and Falch.net. They both have their advantages. I have only CodeWarrior v7 and I understand that version 8 has some wizards that make developing GUI applications easier, but Falch.net is definitely easier to use when developing GUI apps than CodeWarrior v7. CodeWarrior, on the other hand, has fewer quirks in the compiler than the GNU/prc-tools backend of Falch.net. I personally find that CodeWarrior is easier to use when developing shared libraries than Falch.net.

As for the price, whats the cost of your time? I've spent many hours, if not days, figuring out the quirks of GNU/prc-tools. Things that just worked "straight out of the box" with CodeWarrior.

So, it all depends on what you want to do. Nothing I've used, however, beats NSBasic for ease of use and speed of developing apps. Add a shared library to speed up certain operations or perform the impossible, and you've got a combination thats hard to beat. Besides, using this approach, you don't have to buy CodeWarrior or Falch.net - just download and install GNU/prc-tools. I've got some template files that make this fairly easy for a C programmer. Just my 2 cents worth, -- Ron

I too have been playing around with NSBasic over two upgrades and have looked into other environments.

Over the last few evenings I have very quickly put together the beginnings of a nice app which works flawlessly at this point. Based on my readings, other websites, magazines, and the forum, I firmly believe that I could not have done this in anyway as easily without NSBasic AND MIKES BOOK.

The book/upgrade to 3.0 was definetely worth it. GET THE BOOK. -- Mike White

It's an excellent environment with surprisingly few limitations - I used to program in assembler and later in C so I don't like limitations.

I personally have found NSBasic to be excellent value, considering the amount of time I would have had to spend to get up to speed with something like CodeWarrior.

And I wouldn't like to class NSBasic as a subset of VB. It is not disimiliar, however you don't want to approach every problem as though you were coding in VB. There are quite a few differences which require some lateral thinking. -- Brian Hughes

As a recovering AppForge developer I can tell you first-hand that AppForge has shot itself in the foot not to mention the terrible treatment it gives it's own customers.

They require access to certain proprietary PalmOS Source in order the develop the PalmOS Booster Runtime.

For a year now, AppForge has been telling developers that it can't provide a Booster for OS5 because PalmSource won't license Booster from AppForge. This is completely false.

The reality is that PalmSource has an exclusive arrangement with another company for SDK source code. AppForge will not be supporting further version of PalmOS and they refuse to admit this to their customers.

The irony is that the AppForge product was first developed for PalmOS support. When they went from v1.x to V2x they radically altered the object model and the runtime environment and became dependent on PalmSource for proprietary source code.

I switched to NSBasic after it became clear that you can't even get a direct answer from AppForge about their plans for OS5 Support. I have had shouting matches with AppForge corporate officers because of how they treat customers that made their business. I even Cc'd John C. Dvorak to get the word out to the development community not to get suckered by empty promises from AppForge.

I'm much happier with NSBasic and have no intention of ever giving AppForge another dime. Regards- -- Tim Markoski

Werner,
I've been programming with NSB since the very first release... as a programmer who hadn't cut any code for 15+ years, I was only going to give it a go "for a laugh"... since then I've written a number of programs which make my every day work easier. I hope I've helped others through this forum from time to time... and I've had a huge amount of fun doing so... and no... I haven't sold a single line of code.

Just recently I've started (trying!) programming in C on Linux just so that I can make some of my NSB programs run a bit faster. Boy... after NSB, C is a real stretch!

You'd be surprised where your *small* investment might take you... Good luck Werner Regards -- Andrew

Here are my main gripes with the other packages. By the way, I happen to own several. I have been writing programs on the pda since 1998, so I have a little practice at it.

Also, I make my living based on the programs that I sell. Mostly Field Service applications. So, I need my tool to work for me and to progress over time. Actually, we create full scale, multi-tiered client server programs. We use both the hotsync for local synchronization via cradle and Scout Sync for remote syncs via cell phones in the field. On the back end, we always have MSSql server, Oracle or DB2.

Here is the story in case you guys want to hear it. Its a little long, but its worth mentioning.

I have tried most of the tools out there over the years and I will give you my opinions. I currently have several applictions, some rather involved, using sat forms and/or appforge. I even use the Scout sync from Aether to sync multiple palms simultaneously over the internet. I have lots of money invested in this because it is how I make my living. So please understand that there is a lot of merit with what I am about to tell you.

Pendragon forms is cheap and easy to work with. It is very capable but is the low end development tool. If your requirments are simple, will stay simple and you are not the most experienced programmer, then it is a good choice. I started with this one but had to move up because my requirements became more sophisticated. This is not a high end tool.

Then I moved to SatForms, version 2 at the time. It was 1998 then. It was good and the programming model was more traditional. There were a lot of bugs initially, but they worked them all out. I still primarily use it. The performance is really good considering that it is an interpreted language. The real benefit is the sfx controls you get from www.palmdatapro.com. Why build features when you can buy them. And its cheap to buy the controls. But, SatForms itself is now expensive, the support is amongst the worst I have ever experienced. But this was a while ago. It was so bad that I determined that I would never attempt to call for support ever again. This bad support trend started when Pumatech bought the product from SoftMagic. But a more stable product means that support is no longer needed. With the scripting language, you can code around most things. SatForms in an excellent tool in my opinion.

So I stayed with SatForms for the past 4+ years, all the time cursing the lack of support and communication from Pumatech.

At one point I was so frustrated with the support at Pumatech that I tried everything possible to get away from them. It was quite uncomfortable for me to base my living off of a product that had so many bugs and a support staff that was largely unresponsive (again, this has probably changed). So I bought NSBasic 2. It was and still is great. I would rank it almost even with SatForms in terms of capability and ease of use. As far as support goes, the NSBasic crew provides an unbelievable level of support and response, including issuing patches to fix problems. In all my days, I have never seen any company stand by their product like they do. But, Satforms and NSBasic are so much alike, that it was not worth my while to switch. My apps have anywhere from 35-70 tables and forms and there would be no benefit to changing. If I were starting something new and did not want to spend $1000 on a development tool, there is absolutely no doubt that I would go with NSBasic. It it better than Satforms today because it fully supports color and it supports all versions of the palm os including palm os 5.

Appforge has all the external appearances of a company that has their finger on the pulse. They have a truly unique cross platform development tool for palm, pocketpc's, nokia, etc. They have an enormous runtime but that is only an issue for older devices with only 2mb of memory. It is large but you never seem to run out of space. They have a set of user interface controls that is excellent. They have Fancy grids, dropdown boxes, etc... and they use custom fonts. SatForms and NSBasic uses only the standard palmos fonts and controls. Your user interface will always be much more attractive using appforge. BUT, the external appearance fades quickly because you cannot code to the palm os 5 devices. Appforge charges a runtime, which is ok for me since all of my apps are commercial and I roll the costs in to my product price. Its usually 10-25$ per device. For palm os prior to 5, Appforge somehow got palm to pay them money so that they wouldn't charge developers for it. So, we never paid for runtimes on palm devices, only the others. With palm os 5, AppForge is trying to hijack Palm Inc. into making another payment to support the the tungsten device. Obviously palm refused. Therefore, appforge is now telling everyone that they cannot support palm os 5 devices because Palm Inc has not agreed to pay the fee. So, as good and as powerful as appforge is, it is USELESS because it lacks support for the new palm pilots. I would rather that they make the runtime available for a fee so some of us could get our work done. I have just finished converting my appforge application to SatForms so that I can run it on palm os 5. I probably won't take another look at appforge ever again. (money wasted)

So, I ported all of my AppForge programs back to SatForms because I was most familiar with it.

All of my customers are companies that tend to have older equipment (palm 3's and palm os 3.0.1). One of them bought a Tungsten device. Well, the version of Sat Forms that I was using did not support Palm OS 5. So I purchased an upgrade for $695 and converted my program. I installed it on the new device. It worked fine, but then I lost support for all my devices palm os 3.5 and lower. There was no backwards compatibility. To top it off, there were annoying little bugs that were not evident upon first using it. Naturally, Pumatech issued a email to everyone letting them know that there were known bugs and that they would send out a patch by the end of the month. It is not good for a guy like me to have bugs out there, but I had no choice. To make the customer happy, I went out and purchased 3 Palm M505 for them to temporarily use since these devices still ran on Palm os 4.1. Then I rolled back the version of SatForms to use. (I was trying to save face at this point, remember, I make my living on these programs that I sell for about $300 per user.) You might think that I could simply have two different PRC's, one for OS5 and one for OS4.1 and below. But that would make me look foolish to my customers. They are bound to load the wrong PRC on the wrong device. It is a support problem waiting to happen.

That was over three months ago that I started waiting for the next patch to SatForms.

So there I was with a $1000 appforge package and a $1000 Sat forms package, neither one being either forward or backwards compatible

Sat Forms is really an excellent tool and is equivalent to NSBasic is many ways. But do I tell all of my customers to throw away their Palm 3 and Palm 3E devices. What about the Handspring visors that many of them have.

I had been following this group over the years and I realized it had an excellent community of followers and contributors.

So, I have decided to make the switch and port my applications over. A couple of things prompted the timing on this. 1. I am out of money for buying upgrades for products that don't work. 2. I am "feature saturated" on my current programs and am now on a six to 9 month upgrade cycle. I have until the end of the year before I have to roll out a new version. 3. I have sold the source code to my bread and butter program to my biggest client. They are hiring their own programmer and Sat Forms is now their problem. But they will be happy with it for now. 4. I have started development of 2 new applications that I think will be my bread and butter for 2004.

So I am giving NSBasic a chance. I am also looking forward to building PocketPC programs for the first time. Honestly though, my customers really don't care about devices. They focus on the application running on the device instead of the palm os vs. pocketpc issue. Most of them just think "pda". I like palms becuase they are cheaper and easier to use. But I need to have options. NSBasic Palm and NSBasic CE are an attractive combo.

So, this weekend, I jumped right in and built a small 8 form utility using NSBasic Palm. I figured out the database stuff pretty easily. I even built a large 2000 record table with sample data to test the access speed. It is insantaneous when accessing it by key. I am writing a little more code that I used to with Sat Forms, but that what programmers have to do.

The look and feel of SatForms programs and NSBasic programs are about the same, so it will not be difficult to build the interfaces that I am used to. I am looking forward to the use of color on the screens. I am really excited about being able to manually load my popup lists manually instead of binding them to a table. I am really looking forward to not having a proprietary pdb format an being able to have palm database that I can easily share between programs. I also look forward to eventually becoming a contributing member of this group (after I learn a little more)

However, I will miss the filters and sfx controls with SatForms. I will also miss that Sat Forms had a built in ocx that automatically integrated with the hotsync process. But it is not worth keeping just for those.

The IDE in Sat Forms has a few little things that I am sure will mature over time. For example, if I get an error during compile, the bad line of code is highlighted, but I cannot type over anything until I click it. (this is insignificant in the grand scheme of things). After one weekend, I can clearly see that NSBasic apps run faster and I have significantly more control over the code.

So, there is the story. I have been quite successful over the years with sat forms. Me and my family have been eating and our bills are paid. But knowing what I know now, I have decided to transition to a tool that will take me into the future.

I now have to figure out how to build a hotsync process that will allow me to connect to a MSSQLServer database directly. (Any recommendations would save me the trouble of trying them all)

I also have to figure out how to convert the signature string into a windows BMP. I am sure that I will find and example somewhere. (By the way, storing the signature as a string is a genius idea)

Exchanging data with corporate databases (local or remote) and signature capture are the keys to selling applications to corporate customers. I now have to figure these things out.

Thanks for reading... -- Maurice Dorris

I want to let you and everyone at NS Basic Corporation know how impressed I am with the product and the level of support available from yourself and the Yahoo forum.

Your product has made the migration from AppForge an easy one. I never thought working with Palm databases could be this easy. The NSBasic IDE is incredibly easy to navigate.

The quality of your product has saved me well over 100 man hours in porting the AppForge code to NS Basic.

The best part is that code execution is fast and the compiled *.prc file is now almost 50% smaller than with AppForge. NS Basic even reads the AppForge converted *.pdb files!! AppForge can't read any database file other than it's own.

I can't wait to dive into NSBasic/CE !! Thanks again for a stellar development tool!!

Regards- -- Tim Markoski, CNC Machinist Software "Software Tools for Today's Manufacturing"

IMHO

AppForge is the path of madness (and in my case, unemployment!). Go with NS-Basic or re-implement in C/C++.

you did ask.. -- David M

Thank you. And please pass on my thanks and appreciation to your developers and team for developing this product. I have managed to develop in less than a week, an application that my organisation needed, having previously struggled with other applications over the last month, and thousands of pages of documentation. Your tools is easy to use, friendly and doesn't require a rocket science degree.

Palm SDK - didn't want to download entirely and support from Palm was almost insulting;
Code Warrier - didn't even want to start properly;
PDA Toolbox - simple to create basic apps, but rather limited for anything useful;
AppForge - difficult to follow, although allowed a "bolt-in" to .Net Developers Suit;
WinSoft Pocket Studio - looked very promising, given I am a Delphi man, but very limited documentation and functionality was totally different to normal Pascal;

Your product was well documented, and clear to follow. I just need to figure out how to create a Conduit now for my PC application, and am trying to use the Palm Conduit SDK ... again, hard to follow -- Paul Elliot New Zealand

But consider that they have always targeted the corporate developer, typically producing custom applications for in-house use. In this context, time is money, and their claim to fame is being able to take VB developers and transition them to multi-platform handhelds with a minimal amount of being aware of OS specifics or variations. Indeed, what they try to acheive is project platform independence, where you design a project once and compile to either Palm OS or PPC executables, allowing the company to develop their own application and deploy to both platforms at once.

That's a nice goal, and in a large corporate environment, may well justify the costs for the tools. The real problem is that it doesn't pan out quite so well, from what I understand. Part of the problem is that to be platform agnostic, they have to avoid using many of the OS services and tradtional user interface objects. So AF forms don't have real text fields etc. Instead, the entire form is comprised of gadgets (from the OS perspective), and then there is this massive "booster" runtime which performs all the gadget magic and makes them appear to be a text field or button or label or checkbox or whatever.

The benefit of this is it allows them to mimic properties which don't officially exist, such as color attributes for specific fields etc. And it means the apps can have the same look and feel regardless of handheld used. That can be a benefit in a corporate help desk situation, but it also means the apps may not have the look and feel of a traditional Palm OS application.

One nail in AF's coffin was the transition from OS4 to OS5. Their "booster" runtime which handles virtually all the form processing would not easily port over from the Dragonball m68k cpu to the ARM architecture used by OS5 devices. It took nearly a year (as I recall) for AF to even introduce the OS5 booster. During that time, corporate users of AF who might otherwise have been early adopters of high-end OS5 devices, could not run their AF based apps at all.

And even when they did get a OS5 booster, it didn't have the advantage of real OS based user interface objects which ran at an optimized level deep in the OS.

Corporate developers are a vastly different market than hobbyists. When key executives are wanting to get a new fancy OS5 device, and after many months are still being told the applications won't run on them unless completely rewritten in a new language, the IT department can take a lot of flack. It is no wonder that AF developers have many unhappy campers among the lot. JMHO, Doug Handy

You may find the history of our products interesting. They have both been featured as a case study for AppForge (http://www.appforge.com/corp/case_studies/datakinetics.html and http://www.appforge.com/corp/case_studies/soccer_assist.html) (in fact, I still have the Lava lamp that AppForge was giving out to the companies that were the first case studies on their site). We have been using AppForge from the original release. As you probably know, we have spent thousands of dollars on the AppForge products.

What has lead us to redoing our products using NS Basic are the recent changes by AppForge. After we upgraded to version 5.1, a few months later a new version was released (chargeable). In addition, adding a fee for the runtime (Crossfire client) is just a $25 profit hit per sale. Also, with the new OS's not being supported by the Booster that we use (forcing an upgrade), we decided to rewrite the application completely using NS Basic rather than continuing to invest in the AppForge "money pit". Fortunately, most of our code can be ported with minimal changes. -- Mark J. Hogan, Pharm.D. President MDK, Inc.

From what I can tell, the author of HB++ has a very high opinion of himself and the product. I have tinkered with HB++ and like some things about the interface, but he is charging 10x more for the comparable product to NSBASIC and charging to support it (for God sake support software without charging to work around errors in the software).

I switched from Appforge (VB 6 is my favority IDE). I have found NSBASIC powerful, user friendly, and constatly improving. The support is the best I have ever seen...from what I can tell, the author of the most used reference and the help desk folk are on this community board always.

HB++ and Appforge are literally an order of magnitude more expensive..are they an order of magnitude superior...for me NO!!!!!!!!...but, that's ultimately for you to determine. -- Tom Powell

Hi, I am a CodeWarrior user since 2000. I recently upgraded my Code Warrior to version 9.2, and was working on updating a program which has been in place since 2001. I'm ok with C++, but I really needed to get the new version of my project out ASAP and Code Warrior was the slow boat to China because the rules had all changed and it is frustrating to relearn.

As I was doing research on the "New" code warrior I found NS Basic. It solved 2 pressing issues.

Firstly it was a faster way to get the job done. My project is about 50% done in 2 days. I was about 15% done using Code Warrior after 2 weeks.

Secondly, you have a version for Windows CE which I feel I can reuse much of my Palm Code for when I am ready to come out with a CE version.

So far I am pleased. Because we just forked out $400 for Code Warrior, I will have to produce a working version of my program before my boss with fork over the $150. I'm sure a week will be enough to get me to a beta version.

Thanks for a usable tool! Tim :))

As for the differences between NSBasic for Palm and CE, I am sure I'll be able to figure it out. The actual code in my app is not that complex, the hard part is really just developing approximations to the flight performance charts, which I do with MATLAB and Excel. I think I will just go ahead and order both versions of NSBasic so I can take advantage of the $50 off. I'm also excited to see that there are many other developers that make tools for use in NSBasic.

OK, I've taken enough of your time. You've got a great product, I'm looking forward to getting lots of use out of it. Cheers -- Scot Seaton, US Navy

"I have been programming since the 70s lost interest after Dos faded. Two years ago I discovered the Palm and loved it. I tried several programs one free others I bought, I then discovered NS Basic. Thank you for developing such an excellent program for the Palm. " -- LeRoy Olson