LiveCode 5.0 Released

[mwieder]

Corona looks quite nice and full-featured. The downside is that once your subscription lapses you can no longer build apps. You're not buying a development environment, you're subscribing to a service. If something happens to the company (it goes out of business, whatever) you're out of luck.

[Mark]

Hi,

Yes, I don't like that about Corona either. That's why I use Phonegap. I wish more of such open-source initiatives were around.

Meanwhile I've also looked at A4B. Turns out I can buy it for 25 euro. I think I'll buy a license, even though the development environment works on Windows only (as far as I can tell).

Best,

Mark

[paul_gr]

Yes, I don't like that about Corona either. That's why I use Phonegap.

Adobe has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Nitobi Software, the creator of PhoneGap and PhoneGap Build.
Will be interesting to see what Adobe does with Phonegap...

cheers
Paul

[jacque]

There is no sign of LiveCode for Symbian and Blackberry.

Nor should there be. Those two operating systems have only a small fraction of the market, and after Blackberry's recent blackout people are leaving it in droves. I'd be unhappy if RR invested any time in them, and I think it's a losing strategy for developers too. Those platforms will be insignificant or dead within a year.

http://news.techworld.com/operating-sys ... s-nielsen/

"Android's market share has received a boost from recent adopters as 56 percent of users who reported buying a new smartphone in the past three months said they got an Android device. By comparison, 28 percent reported purchasing an Apple iPhone while just 9 percent of recent smartphone buyers reported purchasing one of Research in Motion's BlackBerry devices. "

That was written before last week's Blackberry blackout. Since then customers report they want to abandon that OS, and the numbers have been falling steadily over the last year anyway. The URL above doesn't even mention Symbian, but something I read about a month ago places their market share at about 1.8%, and still falling. There is no good business reason to develop for those two platforms, and I'd be very surprised if RR is unaware of that.

[Mark]

Hi Jacque,

Symbian is pretty big here. It had a market share of 20%, but sales have dropped by 50%. It was bigger than Android, which has grown to almost 30%. iPhone has a market share of roughly 50%. I know at least as many people with a Symbian phone as with an Android phone, even if those Symbian phones are a bit old. In Asia, more than 50% of the smart phone users has a phone with Symbian! As soon as Nokia releases a new really cool Symbian device, the landscape will change completely again.

I think it is wrong to say that there shouldn't be a Symbian version. There should have been a Symbian version already and by now LiveCode should be ready to move on to the next big thing, but RunRev seems too slow to keep up. For example, it seems that RunRev started with Windows Mobile 6.5 and had to abandon it while it wasn't finished yet because 7.0 came out and now they're not ready for Windows Phone and it will probably take a long time until they are.

Market shares say nothing about my needs and the needs of that one big company that asks me to do a project for an obscure operating system. Also, the discussion wasn't about market shares. It was about cross-platform capabilities with regard to mobile devices, which LiveCode doesn't have. I did a Symbian project and was sorry I couldn't use LiveCode. So, I created a little app for Symbian, Android and iOS using Phonegap instead of LiveCode.

Kind regards,

Mark

[jacque]

Understood. It's good to have choices, and if one product doesn't serve your needs then you have the option of using something else.

[paul_gr]

I don't think RIM, Nokia, Microsoft, etc are going to give up mobile then roll over and die just yet...

Windows powered handsets will be launched by Samsung, HTC and Nokia in the near future. Google purchasing Motorola will make some handset makers realise that relying on Android for a mobile OS might be a mistake.
I expect more fragmentation in the mobile space, not less.

Paul

[Terence Blyth]

wow livecode for Android looks like it is still missing alot of android functions. What is the road map for this run rev ?

Thanks
Terence