B4A Day 2

[StuartM]

I guess this is the best place to post this

As someone who's written in 6502 assembler (BBC Model B ROMS), "sinclair basic", Fortran 77, RPG/400, PHP and most non-M$ things in between (but not COBOL, I'm not THAT old!) I've been looking for something like B4A for a long time to save me from the hell of native code

I tried B4A for a couple of hours last night, bought it today and I am now working through code snippets to figure out how to do stuff - like have a menu item bring up a dialogue to ask for a phone number & URL, save them and then use them later in the app.

I have to say both that the doc's are a little rough for newbies like me and don't include things like the above, but the system itself is brilliant and a massive improvement over any other tool I've seen for Android.

Once I figure out how to do things, I hope I'll have time to write some doc's to explain the things I'm finding hard now.

The system is brilliant, the doc's need work and some more libs are needed (like maps), but B4A does have the potential to make a step change in Android development. It is very, very, nice.

 

[Erel]

Did you try the help viewer tool? It is very useful for searching the forum and the documentation.

 

[StuartM]

Did you try the help viewer tool? It is very useful for searching the forum and the documentation.

Thanks, yes I did. But the "code fragments" from that are often, and usually, incomplete for newbies. E.g. when trying to use the RSS examples, none of the on-line (non-zip versions) mention initialising the parser... and just ended up with vague Java errors. Yes, with hindsight and 2 wasted evenings, it was obvious. But my point about limited examples for newbies stands.

I'm sure this will improve, but it's not an ideal start. The delay has, however, given me an idea of a better way of building the 1st app though, so not all bad.