Quote Originally Posted by Lifepower View Post
I think only Macs at this moment are stable, but still, I think they'll be giving terrain to mobiles continuously, with desktop/laptop becoming an elite only / developer-only tools.
It's kinda interesting and funny to hear you of all people stating this. Sort of a complete 180 from things you have stated a few years back if my memory is serving me well tonight. Maybe we are both just getting that much older or the computer world has changed that much huh?

To share in the irony; I myself was a Winblows user over Mac through-and-through, until Vista. (*throws up in mouth a little*) I never upgraded beyond XP, seeing how poor Windows was "moving forward" and with the passable improvement of Win7. I had been watching Apple since they moved to Intel chips and started actually looking into what Mac OS had become and what it was based upon. A handful of years back I bought a big-ass iMac and I'm never going back to MicroCrap land.

If not for the Windows requirement to be able to run Oxygene, I'd not have bought Win7. It's the only thing I use it for.

Quote Originally Posted by Lifepower View Post
On mobile front, Oxygene and Smart Studios are non-native and forgive me for saying that, they are no more useful than any other Java or HTML5 tools out there, even worse because they are not-native to non-native conversion tools (i.e. they are intermediaries). This is the same as Oxygene for .NET: you'd better use C# instead, as it is also a very good language. If I would develop games on non-native, I'd pursue HTML5 directly, but there are only a very limited kind of games you can make with that due to performance limitations, especially on mobile. For that, you *need* to go for XCode. FreePascal barely works on Android and iOS, albeit with RTL bugs and it's a pain in the ass to configure, not to mention that you need to develop everything from scratch, starting from keyboard input to window management, etc.
You are correct what you say about Oxygene for Java being on par with other Java-based tools, but that is kind of the point really. To that, I wouldn't say that Oxygene is "non-native" with what I have come to know of them. It is true that they do not generate native EXE or ELF executable code that runs on a traditional desktop OS, but what Oxygene for Java and Oxygene for Cocoa both do is generate code that runs 100% native to their respective platforms. Both Java bytecode files that run and operate exactly as any Java compiled code would and Cocoa projects that compile via XCode into native Mac and/or iOS apps that can be uploaded and sent directly to their respective App Stores.

After talking at length woth both Jim and Marc about their products they both portrait their desire to not trick or hack their compiler's output into some kind of equivalent, but rather to slide right in as a 100% authentic end product. So what you produce in the end is 100% as if you used the more usual tools. The difference is that potentially (they are still working on it) you can use the same code-base to compile to all 3 Oxygene compilers to support ALL platforms. And with the exception of Mac OS X and iOS the rest are interprited or managed technologies, of course.

As for HTML5, well... unless Google makes an HTML5-based OS... lol However I have seen some impressive things done with it in the Smart Mobile Studio graphics competition. Games competition is coming up too btw!