VB TO ANDROID (PC TO PHONE)

With the wide use of smart phones and tabs (Smart Gadget in General), the need to migrate destop (PC) softwares to these platforms has become a necessity. Research has it that sales of PCs for the year 2012 has dropped significantly as compared to smart gadgets (source: News-forgotten the station).

In this light, more and more software developers were inundated with the task to learn new languages that support phones and tabs like android for google, IOS for Apple, Symbian for Nokia, windows phone for Windows, Not forgetting Mozilla OS for Mozilla and Ubuntu Os for Ubuntu. Here again, the ease of migrating from your original, fluent language you know, maybe a C++ developer or VB.Net programmer or any other language developer, now going to learn Java, (Java Coders are safe)? What about those your desktop softwares you will like to bring to smart phones and tabs, is it easy and quicker to import those projects into java?. Well, with Basic4android, a VB programmer can in less than 20mins be able to develop a fully functional android calculator or in less that 1 mins be able to develop a hello world app.

Well the solution is here, Anywhere software was able to create an IDE to enable Visual Basic programmers to easy code in their own environment yet still developing for android. Other company’s like have also developed other IDE for other languages, for example and open source Xamarin (Mono-project.com) also developed IDE for C# developers, with this, they can code for android, ios, and windows phones. Other sites are also doing the same for other languages but I will dwell more on VB and Basic4Android.

ANDROID APP DEVELOPMENT WITH B4X (B4A – BASIC4ANDROID) – A visual basic like IDE

Above is the look of the B4A IDE and can be downloaded from this link.

DOWNLOAD HERE

Basic4Android software, Installation and Tutorials.  

Installation Videos and how to setup the emulator can also be viewed on youtube.

Features And Benefits :

• Simple and powerful RAD tool for developing native Android applications without time-consuming Java / Eclipse programming
• Complete IDE and programming language 100% focused on Android development
• Compiles to native bytecode. No runtime libraries are required. APK files are exactly the same as APK files created with Java / Eclipse
• Performance is similar to applications written with Java
• Object oriented programming language (syntax similar to MS Visual Basic)
• No need for XML programming
• Highly extensible with support for custom Java libraries
• The only true WYSIWYG visual editor for Android. The visual editor supports multiple screens and resolutions
• Powerful designer scripts feature. Lets you easily create sophisticated layouts
• Basic4android UI Cloud service. Test your layouts on a cloud of real phones and tablets
• Supports all Android phones and tablets form Android 1.6 and up to Android 4.x
• Modern IDE with autocomplete, built-in documentation, internal index and other advanced features
• Powerful step-by-step debugger
• Large set of documentation with a custom online search engine and offline search engine tools
• Built-in code obfuscation
• Supports all Android core features including: 
  

    SQL databases including encrypted databases

•     GPS
•     Home screen widgets and live wallpapers
•     Background services and broadcast listeners
•     Bluetooth (serial ports)
•     Phone features: phone calls, sms, contacts, call logs and others
•     USB host / accessory modes and MTP
•     Web services
•     Camera
•     XML, JSON, XLS (MS Excel), MDB (MS Access) and CSV formats
•     Views animations
•     Multitouch gestures
•     NFC
•     Http Server (based on Jetty)
•     Arduino ADK
•     Video and audio playback / recording
•     Networking (TCP, Wifi Direct New!, UDP, FTP, SFTP New!, SMTP, POP3 and SMB/CIFS)
•     Push notifications (GCM and C2DM)
•     Text to speech and voice recognition
•     AdMob ads and other ads platforms
•     OpenGL
•     Graphics and charts
•     Sensors
•     Files I/O
•     Integrate with services such as: Parse, Google services, Twitter, Facebook and others
•     Google Play In-App Billing service
•     Objects serialization
•     Sip / Voip
•     Device Administration apps
•     And many more…

Join me, lets share Ideas on how to use VB to develop android apps through Basic4Android. Am not an expert in b4a, am also a beginner like you but am hoping through this blog and forum, we can be become experts in no days. Join me lets start Coding…….