![]() Whilst App Studio uses the BASIC language, it is so far removed from VB when you start wanting to do anything interesting that it makes the comment “Visua Basic-like” a mockery at best and misleading at worst. Do you remember the days when IBM clone-makers were saying that their machines were compatible to the IBM PC and it turned out they meant they both use a 5amp fuse in the plug? Well that is how App Studio is to Visual Basic. NS Basic bill App Studio as a Visual Basic-like environment. There were times when my team and I wanted to blow our brains out in frustration, mainly with the woeful documentation and zero support offered by NS Basic. The equivalent in almost any other environment would have taken a matter of weeks. We recently completed a project (not the way we wanted to due to the limitations) using NS Basic App Studio and it took a whole year to make. I speak as a professional developer of 30 years experience, having developed on all sorts of platforms. If your intention is to develop anything that remotely resembles a professional application then I am very sorry to say you will have to use something else. This makes App Studio a ‘development’ system for amateurs. The moment you want to dig deeper there is no help for you and even the writers of App Studio say “Search the Internet for answers”. ![]() The documentation supplied with App Studio is truly appalling, covering basic commands and functions only, and even then, not fully. NS Basic App Studio has some major failings, number one on the list being documentation. If you plan to do any kind of development which you want to look professional then forget App Studio. I have been working with NS Basic App Studio for two years, since launch. android apple basic google iphone mobile ns app studio sqlite Nevertheless it is interesting as a proof of concept, and shows the capability of these mobile browsers as a pre-installed application runtime. Most developers would find a modern JavaScript IDE more productive. The IDE is very simple, but also very lacking in features. I found it confusing that the property listed as “text” in the visual grid was “textContent” in code. I changed the name of the form in my Hello World project, for example, but found generated code that still referred to the old name, causing a JavaScript error. I got the impression that the product is not yet mature. By contrast, with NS App Studio you code in Basic but debug in JavaScript, with all sorts of potential for confusion. ![]() You are not expected to puzzle out the generated JavaScript, but just work in Java. The question though: why would you choose to use Basic rather than just learning JavaScript? I can make sense of the Google Web Toolkit, which compiles Java to JavaScript, but Google’s effort is more sophisticated. Further, the FAQ notes that you can wrap your web app with PhoneGap to create an app that you can distribute through the App Store or Android Market and this or similar capability may eventually be included in the IDE. You can create a shortcut to a web app and even run it offline, making it behave somewhat like a locally installed app. Apps have access to local storage including SQLite databases, since this is available to the WebKit-based browsers on iPhone and Android. What NS App Studio actually does is to translate Basic code to JavaScript, so the end result is a web application targeting mobile browsers, rather than a mobile app. Still, something like Visual Basic for iPhone and Android sounds interesting. It is all a bit retro, especially when you discover that the company (NS Basic Corporation) has the leading Basic on the … Apple Newton. I was intrigued to discover NS Basic/App Studio, which offers a simple Windows IDE targeting iPhone and Android mobile devices.
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