PureBasic Forums - English

blueb wrote: Made a few million with the business, so I'd say that I'm happy with the results.

Wow, we have here a Millionaire, maked with PB

So you can donate a little for PB development ?

Good question Walbus!

Would it change anything????

walbus wrote: Wow, we have here a Millionaire, maked with PB

Well, not made 'with' PB, but having PB didn't hurt!

blueb wrote:Made a few million with the business, so I'd say that I'm happy with the results.

Congratulations!

@HanPBF

Your question is very interesting

I think, this question is also the answer !

Back in 2012 it got a little quite around the team and some of us were concerned about PureBasic's future. So I initiated the "PureBasic Poll 2012" which was kind of successful with about 300 participants. I think it showed some interesting insights about us developers back then: Who are we? What do we want/need? What are we actually developing and for whom?

--> Check it out: PureBasic Poll 2012 (including visualized results in first post or here. Also the raw data has much more information but none bothered to analyze them properly...)

Maybe something like that should be done again? With the same set of questions?! Could be interesting to compare what changed in the last five years...

@Walbus

Indeed, was a rhetorical question; that's sad...

I know the answer is 42; but will that really last forever?

c4s wrote:Back in 2012 it got a little quite around the team and some of us were concerned about PureBasic's future. So I initiated the "PureBasic Poll 2012" which was kind of successful with about 300 participants.

Thanks for sharing, it's a very interesting and nicely done poll. However, i missed it completely

c4s wrote:Maybe something like that should be done again? With the same set of questions?! Could be interesting to compare what changed in the last five years...

Yeah, nice idea, but 300 is kinda low number and those people are probably the core of the community, the most loyal of all. If you want to do something like that in the future you may want to get more coverage somehow.

I can't comment on the Mac/Linux reliability because I only use Windows. However, it seems to me that, if PB is bad on those platforms, the solution is one that would benefit PB in general: more developers. But in order to get more developers working on it, the product probably needs to make more money.

I love PureBasic. Every day, I check the forums to see what new code people have put up, to see if there are any questions I can help with (which isn't often, since other people are better programmers than me) and to see if the next version has been announced. I always look forward to the next version of PB, to the new features.

The forum is definitely less active than when I first adopted PB in 2007. But I think that's largely because so many questions have been answered, and the code to do things has been shared in Tips & Tricks before people even realise they want to do those things. Hence, there's much less need for posting.

But it is obvious that there are some problems here. Fantaisie are dreadful at PR, and not great at keeping in touch with the user base. This means:

• not as much money is made from it as could be made
• nobody knows what the development roadmap is
• nobody knows which bugs are priority for fixing
• nobody feels "connected" with the creators of the thing they're using, which in this age is essential for any small company

There are things you can get away with when your project is a bedroom project, but not when it's a professional product. There are ways of working that are fine when your project is small and personal, but which suffocate it when it is trying to grow.

PB needs to grow. It's as simple, and as solvable, as that.

Personally I would recommend:

• revamping the website - it looks 2003 and is boring
• fixing the English in the documentation - bad grammar seems unprofessional
• introducing a bug-tracker
• introducing a mechanism by which people can vote for new features
• a Youtube channel
• some sort of community hangout (maybe a Google Hangout) several times a year, with Fred and Freak
• some kind of annual coding competition - again, it should go on the YT channel
• making it easier to donate (I'm looking for the PayPal button, both on the forum and the website, and can't find it!)
• changing the pricing policy so that people have to pay a small amount (say, $10) for each new version. Anyone who refuses to pay $20/year to maintain a product that they use every day is a waster.

Basically there needs to be more life injected into PB. I believe this would lead to more money, which would enable Fred to get more developers on board, and then the product could be improved faster.

I love PureBasic and will continue to use it for as long as it is maintained. I want the best for it, and for the guys who make it. But they do need to up their game.

Wise words Seymour, I think you are 100% right.

Spider Basic has not been mentioned much in this discussion. SB is still in it's infancy. I think it has great potential, made a simple 'Hello World' app for Android a few weeks ago and really enjoyed that little journey. The snag is, SB needs a lot of work, so it surely impacts on PB's development time?

It's a tough nut to crack but if Fred followed your advice I think things would get better for everyone, especially for Fred.

This is really annoying reading and gives potential new awesome users a negative 'first impression' of a nice development tool
with an great (small) team to back it up.

How many 'NEW and exciting' posts are you expecting to see here per month?
There are 56.168 subjects and 463.537 posts in this forum.
Furthermore, PureBasic has a French and a German forum with lots of code, questions and answers too.

Leaving is a personal decision - so just do it, don't blame the language for your current inadequacy
to solve a problem the 'easy way' every time.

If the programming language doesn't suit your needs, use another language and simply fade away.

I use c++ as my secondary language and even those fora/forums are oozing with low activity for long periods of time.
The PureBasic forum is actually much more active than most of the other language fora/forums out there.

And concerning low activity: This subject already has more than 1100 views, which suggest that the activity is much higher
than you think.
A programming forum is a "leecher's"~(label) paradise and the silent majority are logging on, only when specific problems arises.
The majority is not here to post new ideas or great code examples.....That is (apparently - as with all other fora) a job for the minority.

@Seymour Clufley

Anyone who refuses to pay $20/year to maintain a product that they use every day is a waster.

Thank you for that lable. What about those using it once a week? Twice a week? Once a month?
What about those without any earnings or those who simply uses it for fun?
These kind of arguments and solutions pi**es me off and will scare a lot of users away!
NOBODY keeps you from donating! The button is right there when you log in!

https://www.purebasic.com/securedownload/Login.php?

Now...give the team a break and let them do their thing.

Bye

Seymour Clufley wrote:revamping the website - it looks 2003 and is boring

True. The SpiderBasic.com website is modern, though. Perhaps PureBasic.com should use the same template.

Seymour Clufley wrote:fixing the English in the documentation - bad grammar seems unprofessional

That's just down to Fred having English as a second language (he's natively French). Not a biggie.

Seymour Clufley wrote:Fantaisie are dreadful at PR, and not great at keeping in touch with the user base.

This is true, but it never used to be that way. Fred was very active in this forum a decade ago, but now rarely makes his presence seen. I miss seeing him responding to posts quickly. In the old days, he'd be all over this thread on the day it started. I know times have changed (he's married now, and has SpiderBasic to develop) but there needs to be some sort of official PureBasic presence here. Whatever happened to Berikco? He's still listed as an Administrator in his profile, and he used to post all the time, too.

Seymour Clufley wrote:changing the pricing policy so that people have to pay a small amount (say, $10) for each new version.

Fred has stated before that he'll never change the pricing policy, so this won't happen. Besides, when I bought I received lifetime free updates so such a new policy wouldn't apply to me. The "Donate" button appears on our personal user accounts when we log in to download the latest version, so anyone can throw some bucks in at that time if they wish, such as myself. I note, however, that SpiderBasic doesn't have lifetime free updates; so perhaps Fred has learned from PureBasic's "mistake".

Lastly, don't forget that Fred said PureBasic is his fulltime job; he makes a living from it. It's obviously paying well, so all this "donate" stuff probably doesn't concern him. Maybe he could respond to stop us speculating about the financial side.

Well, it's very unfair to focus on a few bugs and throw all the stuff away. We have 1800+ commands on 3 OSes and the vast majority are working fine.

for example, we can't even define the user agent for our HTTP queries. Yeah, it's 2017, we live in a web-driven world, but we still can't do anything with it besides very basic things.

Well, you can do it so I don't know what you mean: http://www.purebasic.com/documentation/ ... pfile.html

Regarding external libs shipped with PB, we only build it with the component needed for PB command, to have smaller executable. If you need more, then you need to use your own lib as you will use API anyway. I don't see anything wrong with it, if you want to deal with API, uses your own external lib. It's not because you want a specific feature than everybody want it. You can't having both way: small footprint and all feature included.

BTW, forum activity doesn't means anything: from my sale records, PB is still doing fine. I never complained about it. Everytime, someone wakes up and tell the world than PB is bad and dying, that's the same story going on from years. The reality of it is it still is actively supported, got major releases and bug fix releases and support Windows x86, x64, Linux x86, x64 and OS X x86, x64.

If PB doesn't fits your needs anymore, no problem we never claimed it was the perfect tool for all situation. But it's still a valuable product with a lot of power in it, ease of use and reliable.

I'm locking this topic because it won't go anywhere.