My latest side app is for a company my friend works at. It's at beta stage but I should be getting a little money soon, and hopefully a load more once they sell to the companies that buy software from them. It's totally a business app with multithreaded (ie. it doesn't all freeze at any point) access to their online databases.
Best thing is I can tweak it just how they like, and it will (almost) work exactly the same on all the intended devices (Android/iOS/WebOS - Would be really (although unlikely from what I've read here) nice for Win8 (hint)!).
Worst thing is replicating core OS functionality. GLB is made for games, and doesn't link to much of the back end APIs. The result is having to simulate keyboards, intertial scrolling, touch zones, dragging, and numerous other things you take for granted in the OS. It's like using Visual Studio if you didn't have access to any of the objects and having to make them from scratch (which I have done in VB6 for custom stuff, but is a total pain in comparison). Some things are nicely coded as plugins by forum members (eg. the iAds plugin worked pretty well), but there isn't much out there, they go out of date and stop working correctly unless maintained, and unless you really know what you are doing are very unlikely to be modified by yourself (which kind of defeats the point of using this language in the first place).
Overall though, mainly because I want multiple device targets without learning a load of new languages (and because I've used a version of BASIC for decades and it fits like a glove) then it does it's job well. If you only want to develop on one device and want to quickly produce a lot of business type apps then it might be better to use another language.
Cheers
Best thing is I can tweak it just how they like, and it will (almost) work exactly the same on all the intended devices (Android/iOS/WebOS - Would be really (although unlikely from what I've read here) nice for Win8 (hint)!).
Worst thing is replicating core OS functionality. GLB is made for games, and doesn't link to much of the back end APIs. The result is having to simulate keyboards, intertial scrolling, touch zones, dragging, and numerous other things you take for granted in the OS. It's like using Visual Studio if you didn't have access to any of the objects and having to make them from scratch (which I have done in VB6 for custom stuff, but is a total pain in comparison). Some things are nicely coded as plugins by forum members (eg. the iAds plugin worked pretty well), but there isn't much out there, they go out of date and stop working correctly unless maintained, and unless you really know what you are doing are very unlikely to be modified by yourself (which kind of defeats the point of using this language in the first place).
Overall though, mainly because I want multiple device targets without learning a load of new languages (and because I've used a version of BASIC for decades and it fits like a glove) then it does it's job well. If you only want to develop on one device and want to quickly produce a lot of business type apps then it might be better to use another language.
Cheers