NS-Basic, the Palm OS-sourced BASIC language toolkit which has recently been ported to work under StyleTap on S60 and UIQ, has been significantly reduced in price, apparently to attract hobbyist developers rather than just corporates. The new entry price is $99 (about £50) and the 'Pro' version (which includes things like proper application signing) is down from $700 to $300 (£150). Still quite a lot of money, but hopefully now practical for a lot more people. For examples of what a StyleTap-hosted NS Basic application looks like, see RMR Software's S60 catalog.
Read on in the full article.
And what advantages does this have over the Open Source and free Python?
If you're have used Visual Basic, you'll find NS Basic easy to pick up and use: the IDE and the programming language will be familiar.
If you used NS Basic/Palm, it's even easier - your programs will run with little or no change.
Basic has always been an easy language to get started in.
Makes kind of ugly apps though, doesn't it 😮
The only price which will involve hobby programmers is �free.
Steve
Your exchange rates are a bit out of date - 99USD = �57, 300USD = �173 - and those are at money market rates which most people can't get
The description of "apparently to attract hobbyist developers" is misleading. While there will undoubtably be a few cases of this, we are more interested in the much bigger market of independent developers and small IT departments in bigger companies.
Close to 20,000 developers use our tools to develop apps on Palm, Windows Mobile and the desktop. The pricing of our new Symbian product is now in line with the other platforms.
Most of our business has come from independent contract developers and from small IT shops. Enterprise, government, education and yes, hobbyists are also users.
We think there's a real place in the Symbian world for a commercially supported, easy to use VB like dev tool.