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Author Topic: Hollywood special offer to celebrate 2018  (Read 5898 times)

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Offline pVC

Re: Hollywood special offer to celebrate 2018
« on: January 11, 2018, 06:57:56 AM »
Quote from: Gulliver;834914
I cant agree more on the sentiment that whilst Hollywood sounds great with all its features, it has no sense at all without Designer to use it.
I couldn't agree you less :) You probably haven't understood what Designer actually is.

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Would you buy a compiler for a propietary computer language without any GUI for ease of use?
Hollywood itself is a programming language, which is bundled on all platforms with a simple GUI to run, compile, and view source codes, but for real programming you need a text editor, or more preferaably an IDE. Hollywood comes with a native IDE for Windows, but on other platforms you need to get that separately (for Amiga compatibles CubicIDE is great and has full support for Hollywood).

Designer is NOT an IDE, and it doesn't help at all in practise with the actual software development. Designer is fine for making presentations (in style of Scala or PowerPoint) and compiling them to all platforms, but Designer doesn't help you when you want to code a GUI based application, making a game of any complexity, or anything which isn't a page by page based presentation. Although you can embed custom code into Designer scripts, Designer itself only uses fraction of Hollywood's features.


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It makes no sense to buy Hollywood alone (without Designer). If that is the case it would be much better to get a C compiler like GCC 6.x which has even more portability options and it lets you even learn and develop in a programming language that is used almost everywhere in the computing world. And if you need multimedia, you can either code it from scratch or just reuse one of the hundreds of libraries available.
If you want to code yourself, you don't need Designer. I have both and I've only done couple quick presentations with Designer, but mostly I haven't used it for anything. But I code with Hollywood almost daily otherwise. It makes perfect sense to buy the Hollywood alone without Designer if you're not interested about presentations, but would like to do easy and quick programming.

I've tried to learn C whole my life every now and then, but I never quite got familiar with it and I still don't trust my programs would be clean and wouldn't trash the memory :) And it's really hard and time consuming to make everything from scratch, and not to talk about going multiplatform and learn all initializing quirks on each platform. I never would get anything done that widely.

On the other hand, I bought Hollywood two years ago, learned it already pretty well within couple weeks, and I've already done many complex programs I'd never got around with C. Hollywood is really well documented with lots of examples, graphic routines are high level and you don't need to spend days coding simple graphic effect which can be done in one line in Hollywood, and even though Hollywood is really high level language it's still surprisingly fast. You have all kinds of functions from networking to audio and video playing in Hollwood already there, just get to the actual point of your coding without spending an age preparing code for "secondary" things. Hollywood programs also run "sandboxed", so it's very safe language for beginners and especially suitable for our Amiga platforms which don't have memory protection. With all the nice plugins it's also easy to get into MUI programming etc.

And the cross-compiling really is a beast. It couldn't be more easier, no need to setup complex cross-compiling environments and do platform dependent code at all. Just compile the program for any of the supported platforms (except Android) from the platform of your choice, no need to configure or get anything.

I really wouldn't hesitate buying the compiler alone, if you are interested about easy and rapid software development no matter if you're a beginner or more experienced programmer. If you don't have 24/7 time to learn some lower level languages and tinker everything yourself, but would want to get something done, get the Hollywood and have fun :) It doesn't get any easier than this.
« Last Edit: January 11, 2018, 07:00:07 AM by pVC »
Daily MorphOS user and Amiga active.
 

Offline pVC

Re: Hollywood special offer to celebrate 2018
« Reply #1 on: January 12, 2018, 09:14:11 PM »
Quote from: amigasociety;834966
@pVC, nice convincing job.... reading your text made me take the plunge.  ;-)

Purchased just the Amiga version for now and see how things go.

Hehe, good :) I just feel that Hollywood is a bit underrated and misunderstood by many. It just deserves more love and with it it would be possible to revive software development on our platforms.

BTW. Crash Course to Hollywood Programming tutorial is a good starting point for beginners.
Daily MorphOS user and Amiga active.
 

Offline pVC

Re: Hollywood special offer to celebrate 2018
« Reply #2 on: January 13, 2018, 08:50:24 AM »
And one killer feature I forgot to mention is Hollywood's RapaGUI plugin. It takes the multiplatform support to a level never seen before.

The portability of C was mentioned, but with C it means that program has to be written portability in mind, and even then it means basically of porting command-line only programs or programs with custom graphics output or UI. And if a coder has used fork() or similar stuff (like almost every Linux coder does), then it's practically a no-go for Amiga.

And even bigger issue arises when there's a program using native GUI of an operating system, because then you should write the whole GUI from scratch for each platform you would want to support. In most cases it practically means that you write almost the whole program again. Ever seen any GUI based programs from mainstream platforms ported to Amiga successfully?

But with the RapaGUI plugin you just can write one program with just one GUI definition, and it will work on all platforms with their NATIVE GUI toolkits as it is! If you run the program on Amiga, it uses MUI. If you run the program on Linux, it uses GTK. If you run the program on Windows or Mac, it uses their native GUIs too. You as a coder don't have to know anything about different GUI toolkits on different platforms at all!
« Last Edit: January 13, 2018, 08:56:37 AM by pVC »
Daily MorphOS user and Amiga active.