Wish A Call to Strengthen the B4X Community: Together We Will Make a Difference!

[Cableguy]

I've been here (b4x forum ) literally since day 1, migrating from the "old" b4ppc forum...
This forum has over 110k registered users.
I am not a statistics fan/man, but I guess at best, 10%/15% of that have used the suite at least once... this means about 10k devs.
Let's be optimistic and say that 5k of them have been using it in a regular basis...
In my book that's already a very good number for a suite lead by 1 man, and that has never seen big highlights by the big companies.
From these 5k devs, unfortunately, only a few dozens care enough bto make themselves seen and read, either being in asking or in answering. The rest are lurkers, that only use the knowledge base created by the active users, and contribute zero to it.
It has been so from day 1, and I guess it will stay the same.

The B4X IDE suite, AFAIK, is not at risk here, being it in further development with new versions/updates or being it in continuous support.
However, I do see a risk for the forum, where we always see the same "old" nicknames and really active users, and once in a while, a few new ones.
The risk is that, if some major contributors (not citing names, I may forget someone!) would suddenly stop being active in the forum, it would come to a complete halt, and the knowledge base would "freeze".
Erel does the best he can, but the best WE can do is to support him, not only financially, but specially by sharing our acquired knowledge with others.
Not many IDEs can claim to have survived 15 years with an active user base!

 

[BlueVision]

Nice topic, allow me to share my thoughts in my usual "short" form, correct me if I am wrong:

- Never trust a statistic you didn't fake yourself
- Google Trends only analyses the Google search data, the market shares of the browsers have to be taken into account (Google is slowly losing market share, but still dominates the market).
- Many developers simply no longer want to develop apps for ANDROID because Google is always putting restrictions into new Android versions. Many apps are simply no longer executable under newer Android versions because of the new regulations. This requires an unreasonable high service effort on the part of the developers to keep an existing app running on newer versions. The revenue for the developer is disproportionate to this. This may explain the drop in the B4A curve compared to the relatively constant B4X curve. That could be one reason for the decline in B4A-specific hits on the net.
- This forum is a very friendly forum with many developers who are happy to support. I don't know it any other way. English language or not, with a little patience, perseverance is actually always rewarded.

Finally: What else do you want to programme for Android? Another torch app or a new whatsapp? So the development of new apps is increasingly limited to very specific solutions that are not of public interest. Just look at all the junk that is released every day in Google's playstore. No one needs a pointless app that then only serves one purpose anyway: To bring advertising to the customer, for creating cash. Sure, there are still these unbelievable gems outside on the store, but they are becoming fewer and fewer. Mass instead of class. And a good programmer wants to make his gem for the eternity. We need new ideas for common problems, previously unrecognised problems. This creates the problemsolver and customers. (How could I live so far without having that!). We don't need repetitions, we need new ideas and we don't need AI. AI is counterproductive. It ensures that humanity becomes more and more stupid. This was the case with the pocket calculator (calculating with the head and the pen) and with the navigation system (reading a map). Many people simply can't do that any more. Am not a hater or a supporter when it is about AI. I have simply huge concerns. Who controls the controller, when the controller is to stupid to control AI? This is a great technology with great potential. But it is much much more dangerous than everything evented before...

 

[Sifu]

I think don't worry.
As long as Erel is not worrying, why should you.
Happy coding!

 

[aeric]

There is something I feel wrong in our community.

Most of the developers are working in silo or individual projects.

Even though many projects posted in the forum are not open sourced but there are some stated clearly they are fully open source and need more collaboration. Especially those "code snippets" with B4X code not build as library or b4xlib.

Take majority of what I have shared, I am actually anticipating and welcome anyone to take my code and make it better.

A few examples I can give are JWT and Velocity library. Only one or two developers has improved them.

What I really expect for healthy projects to grow better, they should get more and more collaboration from at least dozen of developers to join forces.

Guys, please show your interest and favor to some existing projects.
The original developers also should welcome collaborators to contribute in their projects.

Thus I take this opportunity to tell the community that I welcome any kind of collaboration. Being a licence project or unlicence, yours or started by me.

 

[Peter Simpson]

Hello y'all

However, year after year, I notice less and less activity on the forums.

I might not interact that much on the forum, but I'm actually on the forum almost every single day. You say that there's less activity on the forum, I'm looking at your statement in a completely different way than you are.

I'm not sure about how many new members join on a monthly basis, but I've not asked any questions on the forum in an awfully long time because most of the answers to my questions are actually already on the forum somewhere. It might take some time to find the answer that I'm looking for, but I usually find it. If I can't find a answer/solution, I go back to the drawing board and I code away until I create a working solution that I'm happy with. Luckily for me, most of the questions I would ask have already been asked and answered, so I just need to search the forum for the answer or I just recode/adapt the closest answer that I can find.

I presume that already answered questions is why activity is down on the forum, but I could be completely incorrect about that.

And yes, I have seen your Google Trends chart, I have no comment about that even though I personally believe that there's a logical reason for that, and it's clearly in your chart.


Enjoy...