CASLSoft.com

Probably like many, I was dissapointed to read in this forum of the possible sidelining of CASL in view of the next generations of devices (i.e. phones) not supporting it, and even the resultant demise of the PDA. In view of the fact that most of my income's been derived from CASL programming over the years this comes as a very bitter pill.

One of the difficulties during this time is that with the pure concentration of effort on the programming side and on certain devices available, little attention was paid to the 'latest hardware platform' side of the equation. In other words, so long as my applications worked on whatever hardware was currently available it did not really matter. I was grateful when I realised the simplicity of using the Pocket PC platform through the IDE and the speed of program modification testing compared to the Palm, but Blueberries got bypassed for instance.

My problem now is that whenever a prospect contacts me asking "will your program run on an XYZ?" or "What device should I buy?", I cannot truthfully answer! The lovely HP5550 (with serial connectivity no less) seems to be a dinosaur in the PDA world despite only being a few years old!

There is no way I can afford to buy each new device as it comes on the market just to see if my software will work. I could lately have been saved some embarrassment when a user posted me his beaut new phone device in order to get the program working. It looked great when loaded but I soon realised that it had no touch screen!

Is it possible therefore to start a topic in one of these forums with a list of devices that CASL is known to work on?! Of course I could kick it off with the 'legacy' ones I know of but that's not the intention. I don't think simple addition such as "anything running OS abc.123" is sufficient. It's much easier in my view to scan a simple alphabetical list of known recent devices! It would not take a lot if you are on here to add a line or two to the list and I'm sure it would help others out like myself. It could include the manufacturer or known issues of course.

Your plight is one that all of us have taken in the past several months. Except when someone asks for a WinMobile specific application, I have all but stopped using CASL. It truly broke my heart to do so because it is my favorite language outside of VB and VB.Net.

That being said, I looked into a common platform that would work with almost any new phone that has a web browser. I say almost because I am now doing web based .mobi apps and because I am using Visual Studio to create the ASP.Net app and it requires javascript. The problem is that not all mobile browsers support javascript. While I am still working on a fix or workaround for that, I am at least trapping the fact that a mobile browser does not support javascript and notifying the user.

It is unfortunate, but it seems that this is the way things are headed and we all need to jump on the bandwagon or find something else to do. My applications for the Palm, WinMobile, WinMobile Phone and Smartphone have not sold a copy in at least six months. On the other hand, the .mobi sites (user's pay for a subscription) are doing very well.

Indeed, I love Casl and come here daily to check in. That said, everything I'm writing now is iPhone. I'd rather write for Android on philosophical grounds, but I've been getting enough iPhone business that I haven't had time to look at switching.