newbie looking for dev tools

[clieZilla2]

I'm a newbie to palmOS development and I'm trying to decide on my tool... would you recommend codewarrior 9 (@ $399), the prc-tools w/ cygwen (free), or falch.net's developers studio (@ 229)?

anyone tried more than one? sound off on your experiences before i make this kind of investment!!!

thanks!!

[foghead]

Personally, I would recommend CodeWarrior. It is the "official" dev tool, 'tho lately they have given much better support to the PRC tools.

If you want to save a little money Falch is great, but when you look at all of the extra stuff that comes in CW now, (including Falchs resource editor), I still think CodeWarrior is a good value.

[clieZilla2]

I heard rumblings that the falch tool has a much better interface? what's your take on this?

also what about something like NSBasic (heard a bit about this but not much)...

do you need to install cygwin for the falch tools or just the prc-tools?

[foghead]

I would have said that prior to CW9. Falch is still a little better integrated in much more of a Visual Studio sense. Everything takes place in a huge MDI window. CodeWarrior still has the resource editor running external. However, the CW IDE now has command completion and prototyping as well as decent context sensitive help. This is all a huge step into the 1990s for MetroWerks and makes the product much nicer to use.

Cygwin is a set of UNIXish command line tools to control the development tools and provide emacs-like editing and debiggong capabilities. They are completely replaced by the Falch GUI.

I have never and will never use NSBasic. Without trying to sound too snobbish, I am not interested in low performance toy environments. I know that there a lot of people that like the product, but the executables are just too big and slow to be interesting. If you are going to write useful apps, learn to use tools that are capable of producing them.

[clieZilla2]

The only thing i worry about is i have experience with VB and little to none with C or C++... what would you consider the learning curve for a software engineer by trade (like me)?

I also looked into appForge but they have no plans (!!!) to support os5 because they can't reach some agreement with palm to pay for the development of their runtime... so i guess that's out of my choices!!!

[clieZilla2]

ps - how "slow" are NSBasic apps? I'm not worried as much with the runtime because an extra 100k these days doesn't amount to much... but speed is an issue for sure.

[clieZilla2]

Originally posted by foghead
I would have said that prior to CW9. Falch is still a little better integrated in much more of a Visual Studio sense. Everything takes place in a huge MDI window. CodeWarrior still has the resource editor running external. However, the CW IDE now has command completion and prototyping as well as decent context sensitive help. This is all a huge step into the 1990s for MetroWerks and makes the product much nicer to use.

on last question (probably not) my friend, so it sounds like you're saying you would prefer codewarrior over falch.net?

[hobart]

If you want to program in C and can afford it, Codewarrior would be a good choice. Check out www.codewarrioru.com for some tutorials and www.palmopensource.com for examples in C.

If you want other options, check out this long but thorough page for an idea of whats available and the performance hits you can expect. It really depends on what you're trying to accomplish...

Don't forget to scroll to the end of the page for the graphs :)

http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~winikoff/palm/dev.html

If you know Pascal, PocketStudio is kind of nice. I've used Satellite Forms, which is easy as dirt to create with, but very very slow.

I had the same experience with CASL. CASL Pro seems OK, but I've never tried it, and it's pretty expensive now.

I also bought NSBasic 1.0, but didn't bother upgrading it. Too slow, but I've heard 3.0 is a little faster. Check out the graphs at the above link, d/l the demo and test it out yourself for your own needs.

[foghead]

Originally posted by clieZilla2


on last question (probably not) my friend, so it sounds like you're saying you would prefer codewarrior over falch.net?
I perfer CodeWarrior. Partly because it is kind of the de facto dev environment for Palm OS. On the PC, I still prefer Borland C++ Builder over Visual Studio, but I have never found a large company that didn't prefer the MS tools.

My recommendation would be to download the demos for both products and see which one you like better. Keep in mind that the CodeWarrior demo is still version 8 (last time I looked). V9 has the Falch resource editor, Object Library (POL (http://www.aqpoint.com/pol/)) an installer for configuring conduits and complex Palm apps , support for OS5 ARMlets, and various UI enhancements.

Choose the one that you like, not the one that I like.;)

[clieZilla2]

what about satellite forms? at a whopping 900 beans it's not something i'd consider but people seem to clamor about it a bit.

[jackson]

Check into Codewarrior for Palm OS, which is cheaper than the full-blown CodeWarrior for all purposes.

Educational prices seem near $139?

Jackson

[jackson]

Originally posted by clieZilla2
ps - how "slow" are NSBasic apps? I'm not worried as much with the runtime because an extra 100k these days doesn't amount to much... but speed is an issue for sure.

I saw an simple beginners app the other day (guess the number) coded up in NSBasic that was over 400K.

Ouch ! Don't know if there is a "debug" and "realese" choice of modes (as C and C++ compliers oftern do), and if it was "debug"?

Jackson

[clieZilla2]

I'm leaning towards falch.net devStudio... i think it might trump codewarrior

[clieZilla2]

I've downloaded NSBasic (decided i'm out for that) and falch.net's dev studio - which i have to admit i do like. i can get academic pricing for codewarrior though and i hear rumors that their support etc. is much better than falch.net's.... i'd love to TRY codewarrior before i buy but i can't find a demo download... IS there one??

[hobart]

Try hitting the bookstore.

"Palm os programming from the ground up" has a CD with Codewarrior 6 Lite on it.

"Palm os programming bible" has a CD with Satellite Forms trial version on it.

My copies are kind of old. They might have updated them....

[Eric S]

The second edition of the PalmOS Programming Bible did away with the CD entirely. Too bad, I liked having it in a searchable PDF format.

[clieZilla2]

so what's the general feeling between falch.net and codewarrior? i want to buy one or the other but i've only been able to demo falch.

[hobart]

Try this site:

http://www.metrowerks.com/MW/Secure/Eval/Palm/default.htm

[IanP]

Shame its still version 8. :rolleyes: