Palm OS Programming Tutorials

First, Free trial doesn't mean free: What happens when you get good with that developer platform and the trial period is over? Most of the C compilers SDK and tools can be obtained for free (From PalmSource actually, or if you want to be "light" using something like OnBoardC, to compile straight from your Palm).

Second, PalmOS native language is C, for which all libraries, SDK, documentation are written.

There are many reasons to use C. First and foremost is that it's a very nice language that gives you a lot of power without a whole lot of overhead (so you don't have resources taking up space doing things like garbage collection, interpritation of scipting code, etc.).

Next C compiles down into very nice, small, and efficient code. Where a BASIC program could be a megabyte or two a C program would probably only take a few hundred kilobytes at the most.

Third you can do almost anything in C. With something like Visual Basic you are restricted to features the language offers. You can use it to create your own custom drivers for a piece of hardware or write your own low level API.

Yes it is slightly more difficult to learn then something like Visual Basic but in the end you have a much more powerful tool to write software. You can do almost anything with C, heck most operating systems are written in regular C.

So there you have a few reasons that people still use C. Personally I would always opt for something like C over something like Visual Basic because I like having good efficient code as opposed to easy code.

Scott, the HB++ site says about the trial version that "All features are enabled, but nag screens will randomly appear in all the applications compiled with HB++." That's a bit more "encouragement" to buy the license that just a splash screen. But since you've been developing your thumbboard with HB++, I assume you know from experience what the limitations are :)

Oliver

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