DavidF. wrote: ↑Wed Sep 13, 2023 10:51 pm
I probably count as one of those newbies who has gone, so I thought I might chip in. As a hobbyist programmer, I gave up on LiveCode when the pricing came in.
I'm sure you're not alone on the pricing thing David. I think I worked it out as 100% more expensive than my old Indy licence, which IMHO was the price point to aim for. Making Indy the price point for everyone
may have improved retention and new uptake (pure speculation - ultimately only LC knows their numbers). But for sure the Starter plan's 'your apps will expire' seems universally viewed as something best avoided which perhaps defeats the point of this (again, only lC knows for sure).
XOJO is cheaper, but personally I don't get on with it in spite using it since the era of REALbasic. Or more correctly, I loved REALbasic but since they switched to XOJO the IDE became nigh on unusable. I've not known many languages/IDEs that have sparked an online forum where devs could b*tch about it (
https://ifnotnil.com), and it's telling that many steadfast and commercially active developers have in recent years completely abandoned the platform (you'll find many of them posting on INN
)
There are many good free alternatives for cross-platform development - if sticking with BASIC I'd probably recommend
B4X rather than XOJO - completely free except for iOS (and even then, the most expensive tier is $145 for a perpetual 'enterprise' licence) - the sticking point is that the IDE is Win only (you'd have to run it in Wine, VirtualBox or similar on Mac/Linux), but does create apps for all desktop and mobile platforms (you can even create a fully native iOS app without needing access to an actual Mac), seems to be loved by their users, is maintained by a dynamic and involved developer, and by all accounts it's very good.
As for LiveCode Create (the new, and think everyone would agree - better, moniker for Xavvi) - think of it as a different and in some ways much improved LC IDE. Web based with a lot of automation if you want (or just code the normal way). Being web based opens up the possibility of using any device (tablets etc) for LC, which in itself is exciting. I think Create will likely be a hit, but remains to be seen I guess...