Hollywood special offer to celebrate 2018

[dirkzwager]

I couldn't agree you less You probably haven't understood what Designer actually is.


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.



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.

pVC thanks for the very good explanation.
Now i understand what Hollywood and designer is.