[OFF] The Competition

[Richard Gaskin]

Mike Kerner wrote:
> If any of you have been keeping track of the competition, RealBasic is
> about to change names, licensing schemes, and will have their version of
> iOS app building available in December.
>
> There is no word on Android.
>
> They are also changing their name.

Links or it didn't happen. ;)

But seriously, I see mention of "Xojo" in their blog, but it's not clear 
whether it's just a name change, or an acquisition, or what exactly the 
practical scope is beyond just new pricing.


> So by my math, they are about 3 years behind as of today.  Of course, if
> they have all-native controls then they are ahead on that front, as they
> are on Cocoa support.

Cocoa is a biggie of course, but what exactly is a "native control"?

On the desktop LiveCode takes a hybrid approach, using the OS routines 
to draw most of the object while using its internal text engine to 
render the label into the control's buffer.   This has meant the label 
is sometimes off by a pixel or two (which I hope gets addressed soon), 
but provides us with a consistent way to address controls across all 
platforms, completely unaffected by any OS-specific considerations.

On mobile, LiveCode has even more truly native controls, but in this 
current transitional state we have to write a lot of (frankly kinda 
dumb) scripts to use them.  Kevin has noted that the plan is to have the 
engine map those scripted properties to the OS-native objects directly, 
so all those scripts will go away.  In the meantime, it's merely 
tedious, but at least possible.

On both mobile and desktop, LiveCode provides an intermediary layer 
which gives us a consistency independent of the specific target OS APIs.

So just how "native" are RB's controls?  Do they also put in the effort 
to provide a hybrid multi-platform solution for their scripters as 
LiveCode does, or do they merely provide access to the native APIs and 
expect everyone to write everything from scratch using the OS calls?

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
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