by TimStone » Sun Apr 17, 2011 7:06 pm
Randall, Otto,
First, I think its great if you can do it all in FWH / xHB. Its just that so many changes are coming in the tech world, and the vast majority is focused on .Net for business, and Apple for personal. I'll skip Android because I think that product is way to fractured.
The marketing issues is actually quite simple. Apple allows you to market through their App store. They take 30% of the price which I believe is quite fair for the exposure and ease they offer. Microsoft is now aggressively helping developers market new products, and its a free service. Once the logistics are finalized, watch for them to have a store similar to Apple's App Store. Both of these make it easy to market products, and updating is much easier.
Right now I could do the integration on a good ADS network. Portable devices, away from the business location, can have clients access the server via the net. Thus, a well written network program will function quite well.
I think phones are generally too small to conduct business. But tablets will have the same network connectivity.
The key issue will be the web interfaces. I used hosted servers, and they will be cautious about me putting any running programs on there. However, the Microsoft capabilities are fully supported. Microsoft also has an excellent set of website development tools ( Expression Studio ) which coordinate with Visual Studio.
Otto, you pointed out that other developers comment negatively about xbase products. So do tech support people who are critical of .dbf files. This comes from their own lack of knowledge, and it is sad. But, it is a reality, and when a potential client hires a consultant, I often do not get a serious look because I'm not using the tools they expect. I've come to a point of saying that it is a C based program which, like every other program, compiles to machine code. So, when marketing, my choice of development tools makes for a harder sale. Most of my clients are not informed enough on computers to know the difference, so they take the word of friends and "so called experts" who are similar to the people you encounter.
My main point is that my current income is to be derived from my xbase product, but for future development, I believe the only way to remain competitive will be with .NET compatible products. A perfect example of this is the move to the Codejock Calendaring system. We now have several FWH people using it successfully, but it is a lot of work, and we have to do more work to make it function then we would using Visual Basic or C#. Our clients want tools like the Outlook style/compatible calendar, but there is not enough funding in the xbase development world to make such controls available to us directly. I wish it were different and that I never had to make a change, but that is not the reality we now know.
Of course, when it comes to multi-device applications, Apple has the solution. To take full advantage, however, you will need to use their development tools, which are free, but that also means a lot of learning.
Tim
