PowerBasic Forum down (20.07.2013)

[Theo Gottwald]

@Gary, thats why i asked you to regularly make Offline Backup of the PB Forum.
Soon I'd had asked you to give me the most updated copies.

But well now lets see if there has something changed.

Our website was only supposed to be down for no more than 2 hours last Saturday.

Major issues with our new ISP ensued, and they did not have us on priority, especially through the weekend.

It took me to go to their main HQ - big trip - to get actions finished.

Our phones are up, website normalized, and with that the last action is to get our mail server (for the forums, feedback, etc...) completed.

I do regretfully apologize for any inconvenience, and will next time have the foresight to post at least a week in advance for any changes or service to be made.

There has been a lot of discussion on other fora regarding PB. We have moved into a larger area, and have acquired more personnel for DOC building, tech support, and marketing.

Rest assured that PB is not going away, BETA forums will be restarted for a few new projects that are top secret .

If there are any other questions, please email me at jim@powerbasic.com

There is no planned scheduling of server maintenance that may leave the site down for more than 5 minutes in the future.

Thank all of you for your loyalty in PB and with our direction I am sure all of you will be pleased and surprised with future products. As always, our no-vaporware policies deem that I can not give you a date, I can only tell you that we are going to be beginning beta testing on our new products in the next month / month and a half.
__________________
Jim Bailey
PowerBASIC Staff

Source:
Statement from Jim/PB

[Patrice Terrier]

Speaking of "top secret" is ridiculous, especially when people are asking for a clear road map...

[John Spikowski]

Isn't that the definition of crazy?

Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?

[Theo Gottwald]

WINDEV today nearly at half price!

Get it John, no need for you to look at PB.
You just need a picture of a Delphi CD to get this special offer!

[Patrice Terrier]

You can always benefit of the concurent deal price, it is just a matter to provide a legitimate proof that you own another compiler.

Thus the saving is very huge, the first time...
then, you will have to pay each year a minimum of 450 € + VAT to get the lattest WinDev version
(and more to get WebDev and WinDev Mobile).

But for that price you well get a gift each year, plus plainty of nice girls on all the flyers and documentations...

Added:
PC-Soft has one of the most agressive marketing strategy i have ever seen.
And they have a clear vision of the feature --> WinDev is the first programming environment fully translated to Chinese Mandarin, this alone says much on their will to capture a large part of the world-wide programming market.

[Mike Stefanik]

To be honest, even at the discount pricing, I don't see why someone would choose WINDEV over an MSDN Subscription with Visual Studio 2012 Professional. Is there something that I'm missing that makes it a vastly superior development platform?

[Patrice Terrier]

Mike

I own both, and i can tell you that they do not serve the same purpose.

I am not pushing WinDev, i just use the best tool to perform a specific task, and when it comes to create ultimate looking application there is no comparison. You should see some of the applications i have created with it, in combination with my GDImage to change the full GUI on the fly, using custom skin theme i did for WinLIFT.

And their grid control is a real piece of anthology (i use it a lot).

...

[John Spikowski]

Get it John, no need for you to look at PB.

I have been burnt too many times with commercial languages and prefer open source. Thanks for thinking of me!

My focus is on scripting APIs, JIT virtual functions and a multi-threaded smart callback/message handler. ScriptBasic for Windows and DLLC provides most of this functionality already.

OT

I find it interesting the karma feature of forums. Is this a modern day way of saying I disagree but I don't want to go on record by posting my opinion just in case I'm wrong? You may not like the sugarless variety of my comments but I don't see anyone posting that I'm wrong. It's no secret that Bob and I didn't get along in the end but that has been a growing trend with many of his longtime loyal customers he used along the way. 

[Theo Gottwald]

John, this is still a Forum for People who like PowerBasic.
Now if youz go to a Mercedes Forum and tell that you think that Mercedes is bad for whatever reasons, your Karma may be in the neagtive. The same happens here.
Its not personal, its just that the people LIKE PB, and they do not like people who do not like PB.
This is very normal. Also i get mails from users asking me to ban you.
You can try that anywhere. If you to gardeners forum and you tell them that gardening is dangerouse, and hard work, the same may happen.

[Patrice Terrier]

My opinion is that this forum should not be considered as a PowerBASIC forum extension.

I spoke of WinDev, C# or C/C++, as well as PB, because they are all part of my programming arsenal, and they are complementary Tools.

However what could realy make the difference here, is people posting source code or programming tips that could help others. And that is the real value of this forum and what could affect your karma

...

[José Roca]

As I have said, John can talk about Script Basic and O2 as much as he wish, but not hijacking other people's threads. His off-topic posts discouranging the use of PB and trying to promote the use of SB and O2 cause the same irritation that when you're watching a movie and it is continuosly being interrupted by the publicity. Clicking the smite button is a way of showing disapproval without messing the thread with more off-topic posts.

Charles Pegge has his own subforum and there he has talked about Linux, FreeBasic, O2 and other things, and nobody has disapproved him, and he has a positive karma.

John's aggresive campaigns don't work. He should have learned the lesson from what did happen in other forums such PB and FreeBasic.

[John Spikowski]

John's aggresive campaigns don't work. He should have learned the lesson from what did happen in other forums such PB and FreeBasic.

Some people find joy in swallowing swords and breathing fire, I enjoy a cold beer and an occasional spicy taco if I'm feeling brave.

If you feel that PB has value and prepared to accept the risks, help Jim reinvent PowerBASIC to be relevant and justify it's asking price.

[Edwin Knoppert]

>John's aggresive campaigns don't work. He should have learned the lesson from what did happen in other forums such PB and FreeBasic.

At the other hand, in the case of PB, usually the negative topics where a serious no-no while Bob was alive.
By 'hiding' the negative messages no one will understand where a language like this remains, how people actually feel about the product (and what really should change).
I have first-hand experience of being negative about this product and people didn't want to know.
(I was overly negative about anything during that time though)

You can easily say make a move to another language but that isn't that trivial if your daily work requires that tool.
For me, and luckily, this is no longer the case.

I have to agree that this programming language is always behind, someone said 5 years, i say 10.
There are some sorry implementations done since PB5, PB5 would currently earn more respect than the following versions.
All features after that simply degraded this fine compiler, wrong syntax implementations (object call and forcing the use of variants for one), poor window mechanism, to silly for words.
Of course many hobbyist will not complain much, it seems they hardly use any real feature.
As long you go that road you'll have an excellent BASIC language compiler.
If you are a professional you can have tears in your eyes of the features being implemented since PB6 and up.

Again, i suspect for most of the prospects this language will do and perform nicely.
That's all fokes, i left the building for 99% anyway, just minor modifications and pressing F5 in PwrDev will do just fine for me.

[John Spikowski]

My take is folks are tired of the Bob Zale no vapor-ware  (translation: I can't talk about things I don't understand) method of marketing the compiler. As fast as the industry is changing we need to know what direction the tools we use are headed. If PB is happy with their QB+ compiler with a basic COM foundation and they think there is still a market for that class of product, it might provide a side income for someone for a while. Zale couldn't stand the thought of even killing off the DOS product which continues to sell today.  The motto at PB is nothing dies, it just becomes a classic version at a discounted price. (like EZGUI)

I think PowerBASIC will do well as a hobby language but if drastic changes aren't made, it has little chance of making any grounds as a commercial grade compiler business would use.

[José Roca]

Basic COM foundation? What a joke! The current compilers have one of the best low-level COM support in any language. You must be thinking in COM Automation, that M$ no longer uses since VB6 was abandoned. Unicode support and dead code removal are also first class. But how are you going to know it, if you don't use it?