"The best publicity is a great demo." - just made that up, but it sounds true
I would like to suggest as a general goal the development of a small number of great apps that showcase FPC and/or Lazarus.
These would be new apps, modern apps, polished and good-looking, which would appeal to general users and developers alike, with 21st century features that users now expect such as animation, maps, geolocation, Web services, rich text, etc.
Ideally they would be available via app stores - this would be a big drawing card for the tools that were used to develop them. At a minimum, the apps would be available as codesigned installers that can be downloaded by clicking on a single link.
They could be paid apps - also a great attraction.
An app wouldn't necessarily need to be developed with Lazarus and/or LCL either. For example, it could be a Web app, as long as both the client and server parts were written in Pascal. (Web apps would need to be deployed to an actual server, not just as source code or screenshots.) Or it could be a Mac or iOS app developed with Xcode and FPC's Objective Pascal dialect. Or an Android app developed with Eclipse and FPC's JVM compiler. Whatever mix of tools produces the best results.
Ideally these new apps would not be
just desktop apps, but would include something else - a mobile companion app, server side stuff, etc. For an example, see something like this case study,
http://www.elementscompiler.com/elements/casestudies/curacaoweather.aspx?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=case-study-weather, which describes two mobile client apps, server side software, and a desktop reporting app for backend analysts, all written in the same language and sharing some source code between the apps.
"I wanna write Windows software like my Dad did in the 90s." - said no young programmer ever
So what types of apps would probably
not be suitable to showcase?
- Apps that look and feel like 90s Windows desktop software.
- Me-too apps.
- Trivial apps.
- Apps that are overly complicated to use.
- Apps that use a non-standard look, feel or practice for a target platform.
- Retreads; recycled apps; tired apps.
- Programmer utilities.
Are there examples of the kind of showcase apps I'm thinking of? Well, I took a spin down the list in
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Projects_using_Lazarus. Once I'd eliminated all the broken links and abandonware, only a couple apps caught my eye in the context of what's described above:
Alas, both of these apps are probably far too specialized to interest more than a handful of users, and they're desktop only, but they're bright and colorful (and cross-platform), and I could imagine them making the transition to an app store.
So who's in?
Gentlemen, start your engines.
Comments welcome.