I'm trying to find a modern environment similar to what I found great about QBasic but making up for the flaws. The purpose of this is to code with my 6 year old son.
I'm looking for an IDE that uses a modern language, has the ability to draw graphics and play audio, and doesn't force the User to jump around much between coding and running their application.
In QBasic you had basically two modes: Edit and Run. There were no third party libraries required for creating graphics or generating Audio tones (that I remember). You never had more than one "window" opened at a time.
Is there a modern day equivalent IDE which uses a modern language that provides what I'm looking for?
I don't want him to have to jump around between various windows, try to wrap his mind around window toolkits, understand the command line, or use OOP just to get started. My end goal is to create simple graphical games with him -- not printing text out to the console.
(Preferably cross platform or useable on Mac OSX since that's what we have at the house. Preferably Python based since that's my language of choice.)
QBasic is a great option. You can purchase an old PC from a thrift store and run QBasic on it. There is the option of QB64 which can run on both Mac and Windows. Hope this is helpful.
I'd suggest QB64, almost 100% compatible with QBasic/QuickBasic but runs on Windows.
You could maybe try Small Basic, it aimed to recreate the ease-of-use and educational purposes of the old BASIC languages build into home computers from the 1980s
The Small Basic project was initiated following this article on Salon:
Why Johnny can’t code (David Brin, 2006)
I want to generate some text from my bb10 app to give audio feedback to the user.
(But the screenreader like in the accessibility feature is not sufficient)
Has anybody already successfully got text-to-speech implemented?
There are countless open source projects that do this on PC platforms. You may have your best luck in fitting them to your needs. – Josh C
Any library you would recommend? It should have C or C++ interface and must work offline (no server based solution) and it should not occupy too much memory. – thowa
I had to check to make sure it was written in C++ which it is. It is called ESpeak. I heard about it nearly 7 years ago when I was looking for a speech synthesizer that was powerful/robust enough to sound like a human. I believe it was ESpeak, and back then it was a complicated task to get it to spew out realistic sounding speech.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/espeak/files/
This one looks promising as well; however it is written in java.
http://mary.dfki.de/Download/openmary-open-source-emotional-text-to-speech-synthesis-system-released
Found here https://github.com/marytts/marytts
My requirement.
Develop a ntfs/fat formatable raw virtual drive in windows - something like truecrypt. I want to know if there is C# implementation for this somewhere.
dokan, callbackfs etc dont exactly fit since the file system itself has to be implemented. filedisk, imdisk etc are in kernel space and the code appears to be complex.
Something like callbackdisk or the one provided by eterlogic is perfect, but unfortunately they are expensive, and I don't want to buy them just for a small project.
Is there any other freely available alternative like the above two. Preferably a simple C# wrapper that provide read()/write() callback functions in userland that I can code.
There is a solution, but you need a folder for that :/
Just look here and see if it fits your desires:
http://dotnet-snippets.de/snippet/erstellung-eines-virtuellen-laufwerks/712
It's in german, but you should see the div w/ the code.
The comments aren't that important.
Hope I helped you. :)
I've been developing for Windows and *nix platforms for quite some time, and am looking to move into Mac development. I am tossing up between using ObjC/Cocoa and C++/Qt4.5.
The C++/moc semantics make more sense to me, and improving knowledge in Qt seems like a sensible thing to do given that you end up with a skill set that covers more platforms.
Am I likely to handicap my applications by skipping Cocoa?
The sample Qt applications look pretty Mac-native to me, but they are quite simple so potentially don't tell the whole story. Are there other pros to the Xcode way that Qt doesn't have, such as packaging, deployment, etc.?
Here's an easy way to answer it:
If you were developing a Windows app with .NET or MFC, would you handicap your applications by using Qt? If the answer to that is yes, then the situation is likely to be the same on the Mac.
A few negatives I can think of off the top of my head:
Licensing
Qt apps, while good, are not completely a native UI experience and there's things a native UI designer can do in Cocoa which boggle the mind. While I can't be sure that all the same functionality isn't available in Qt, I doubt it.
Qt is always a little behind. If Microsoft or Apple come out with a great new technology, you have to wait for the Qt developers to update Qt.
However, with all that said, only you can determine the business value of using Qt. If you think cross-platform development is going to be a major part of your development, then Qt might be worth it, despite the issues mentioned.
Ask yourself: how many of the best Mac applications that you know of use Qt instead of native Cocoa?
For our robotic systems, we originally wrote our control software in C++ using the cross-platform wxWidgets library (we avoided Qt due to some licensing concerns), because we felt that we had to target Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms for our end users. This is what we shipped for over a year until I started tinkering with Cocoa.
Right away, the thing that most impressed me was how quickly you could develop using Cocoa. Eventually, we decided to drop support for Linux and Windows and rewrite our entire control applications in Cocoa. What had taken us years to put together in C++ required only three months to completely reimplement in Cocoa.
Aside from the "lowest common denominator" interface issues that others have pointed out, the rapid development allowed by Cocoa has become a competitive advantage for our company. Our software has advanced far more quickly since our conversion to Cocoa, and it has allowed us as a new company with one developer to pull even with 10-year-old competitors that have 20-man development teams. This appears to be a common story in the Mac development space, where you see a lot of small teams who are able to create products that compete with those of much larger companies.
As a final note, using Cocoa gives you the ability to stay on top of the new APIs Apple is continually rolling out. We're now working on a new control interface that will make heavy use of Core Animation, something that would be painful to deal with using Qt.
I'm currently developing both with QT (actually PyQT, but it makes no difference to your question) and native Cocoa app. For me it's no brainer, I'd chose Cocoa. It's really worth time to explore Cocoa in general, there are many great concepts within the Cocoa framework, and Objective-C 2.0 as well.
I'd use Qt if you want this to be a crossplatform application.
You can have a look at the QMacCocoaViewContainer class. It acts as some kind of wrapper for generic Cocoa views, so you can also have Cocoa elements which are not officially supported by Qt.
Of course this means learning a little about Cocoa and Objective C and how a Cocoa UI would need to look like. But if you already know Qt well and if it’s not like your application is all and only about the GUI this could be a good way to go.
And don’t forget about the QMacStyle::WidgetSizePolicy or you won’t understand why your tables come out so huge.
Obviously, the best option is to use a cross platform suite that supports native widgets.
With QT4 you can build your base user interface. Then just add native support for your specific target platform.
Sure, Cocoa has a lot of fancy stuff (and you can still use them trough QT4), but let me be clear. I see a lot of fancy Apps on the AppStore, pretty ones, but most of then are just crap, expensive.. what ever. I really missed my Kate text editor, my okular viewer, my krita drawing software... those are just better than the commercial and expensive alternatives and are free. so i just tweak the source code a little bit too have a REAL native and great experience.
What if i have to use a linux app on my main computer with is a mac os x? or windows? or whatever? only?
For example, why on earth i have to buy a expensive ,fancy but far less featured image editor software for my mac like pixelmator when i can use a full featured real image manipulation software like Gimp? YES Gimp is gtk2 based which is a pain on any platform, specially on Mac because is really ugly. Gimp should be ported to QT4. Inkscape should be ported to QT4 too, and it would feel so great.
Is so simple to do.. gosh!
http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.7-snapshot/demos-macmainwindow.html
Even you can add support for the the new native lion fullscreen feature, unified title and toolbar menus, etc
I , as a user, i really care about efficient, featured, good and cross platform apps, i don't really care about developer's convenience or laziness .
I do a lot of cross-platform development (Mac, Windows, Linux), and for some projects use Qt. It is a fine framework, and provides a rich class library. If you need to deploy on multiple platforms, cannot afford to spend the time/effort on platform-specific front-ends, or the "generic" support for each platform is sufficiently good, then use Qt.
However, Qt inevitably suffers in some ways from the lowest common denominator syndrome, and sometimes does not feel quite native enough. There are also certain features that are either difficult to support, or are simply not provided in the Qt libraries. So if you can afford the time and effort, or your app really demands the attention to detail and fit & finish, then developing separate front-ends may be worth it.
In either case, you ought to be writing your back-end (aka domain) code in a platform-neutral and front-end neutral manner. This way, the front-end is easily replaced, or modified between platforms.
You could always start with a Qt front-end and go for a quick time to market, then develop a native front-end down the line.
In practice, I've noticed that a Qt app on Windows looks most "native", while on Mac there are certain subtle telltale signs that make it look/feel not quite right. And Mac users tend to have much higher expectations when it comes to UI/UX!
Since posting this, i've been learning the Cocoa / Objective-C way, and have been quite impressed. Despite what I initially thought was quite a quirky syntax, Objc appears to be a very effective language for implementing UI code, and the XCode sugar - things like Core Data and bindings - make short work of all of the boring bits.
I spent a while with the QT examples and documentation before digging into cocoa, and tend to agree with what has been said above w.r.t being slightly behind the curve and less 'aqua-ish' - albeit from a fairly trivial inspection. If I absolutely had to be build a cross-platform app i'd probably use QT rather than trying to separate out the UI code, as it seems like it would provide close-enough visuals, but for mac only purposes, Cocoa seems like a definite win.
Thanks all for your responses, they've all been very helpful!
DO NOT use Qt for a Mac app. You will get no hardware acceleration for 2D rendering, and you will not be able to deliver ADA compliance.
Depending on what kind of apps you want to write, another contender is REALbasic now called Xojo.
The move from C++ is pretty easy (I have 15 years C++ experience) and the framework and IDE extremely productive. You have the added bonus of being able to deploy to Linux and Windows with trivial effort. Their framework compiles to native code and uses native widgets so you don't have an emulated look and feel.
The big reason for learning Cocoa and coding in Objective-C is if you want to hone your iPhone skills or are chasing a really fancy user experience. If you wanted to rival the cutting edge of WPF development then I'd recommend Cocoa.
I have the following requirements:
I need a api that works on CE (x86) + .NET Compact Framework to play videos (Similar to CorePlayer API... Just free)?
Is their anything else available or must I use CorePlayer?
You could use the MediaPlayer with COM interop. Have a look at this and this.
Also, Media Player may not be installed in your device.
You need to use DShow and have the codecs for whatever media you intend to play in the image. COM interop for WMP 9.0 (which is what ships up through at least CE 5.0, maybe also in 6.0) is a non-starter for managed code.
If you don't know DShow, it's a fair amount of work - even in native code - as DShow is not a fun or friendly API set.
The plus side is that you don't need WMP at all in the image, so you can typically use a Core CE license (Pro is required to use WMP). I know of a commercial DShow control, but you said you're looking for a free solution and I'm not aware of anything other than rolling your own. Depending on your level of familiarity with COM interop (which you'll need for the DShow stuff) and the use of DShow and filtergraphs, I'd allocate at least a week or two to getting this working.
One added note - the complexity also changes depending on how you want the video displayed. If it's just full-screen then it's a bit less work than getting it inside a Window within your app. Not a lot less, but at least a little.
DirectShow?
Check out this page for a starting point.
Provided that DirectShow is present on your CE, which I don't know...
EDIT: Since you can use DirectShow, I'd like to add a bit.
As ctacke notes, it can be a lot of work if you do everything manually, but it's pretty straightforward if you can use IGraphBuilder (see the sample I linked above).
I don't know much about DirectShow versions, but the one included with Windows Mobile 6.0 lacks a splitter for MPEG audio. It means, e.g., that out of the box it won't play .mp3 files unless you wrap them in RIFF headers.
I bet you can convert some of DirectShow.Net to run on CE if you are looking for a C# solution.