Ongoing report on Appmethod

I am continuing to use Appmethod, see my earlier posts:
http://bkhome.org/news/201509/more-thoughts-on-appmethod.html

I have more comments to make, as I get close to the end of the 30-day evaluation period.

Instability
There were some stability issues when I first started to use Appmethod, but it is getting worse. Perhaps this is due to the app I am creating getting bigger?
These are the issues:

"stopped working"
"access protected memory"
"access violation"
dead keyboard
often busy

The little whirling gizmo beside the mouse pointer keeps coming up, so frequently it is annoying. If I type anything when it is "busy", the text is lost.

Then increasingly often, it stays busy, and Windows reports that Appmethod has stopped working.

I turned off code-completion, but it has not reduced the frequency and duration of the busy intervals.

The dead keyboard issue is weird, Appmethod just stops receiving keyboard input. Still working otherwise.

And then there are seemingly random errors when opening my app or compiling.
Like today, I opened my project, and got this:

"error reading TActiveStyleTextObject.ActiveTrigger"

So I quit and restarted Appmethod, this time my project opened without error.

It reminds me of the old days in the 80s and early 90s, when I was using a Windows 95 word processor that crashed every 15 minutes. I just saved my work frequently -- as I am now doing with Appmethod.

Android x86
I have got to throw in this criticism, as it is very poor that a commercial product such as Appmethod does not support Android on the Intel x86 CPU.

I understand that there are difficulties, as Appmethod compiles down to machine code. There may also be licensing and extra costs involved.

Probably a separate app would have to be created just for x86, to deploy to online stores, which is another complication.

One can only hope that if popularity of x86 Android gets any stronger on phones and tablets, that Embarcadero will embrace it.

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Comments

Curious, a few days ago, Appmethod was crashing frequently, as reported above.

But, last night I used it for hours, not one of those issues. Well, apart from being frequently busy.

I notice that 1.17 is almost to be released, amongst many new features, it has auto-recover in case of crashes!

Meaning, if you haven't saved, you can still recover the files.

http://bkhome.org/news/201509/appmethod-saga-coming-to-end.html

Tags: general