 Hey everybody, this is Brian and welcome back. It's been seven months since I've done a video? Wow, has it been seven months? No, it's been longer than that. Wow, seven months. It's been a while. It's been a busy seven months. I get a lot of email and I do still try to read and reply to all my email but sometimes it's just impossible. So for those of you that have been wondering why I haven't published in seven months, Void Realms has not changed one bit because I've been busy. Anyways, I really need to redo this website. I didn't lose any code. It's been on the same host for years now. It's still 100% funded by your donations and it is still non-profit. I'm very happy about that. See, went through a nasty breakup, moved not once but twice, changed jobs not once but twice, bought a house, actually just bought a house. I'm still in the process of unpacking. Met someone very special to me and that's about all of my personal life. I'm going to share with you animals but you guys have been asking. So in short, life's been just crazy. Things are calming down now. Plug in botnet. You've heard me kind of talk about this and I've released some code and stuff. I'm actually going to stop developing this altogether. The project has not retained my interest at all and I did a similar program called laptoplocator.nut years ago which would track laptops and the problem it had is the software had to be installed before someone lost or got their laptop stolen or whatever. The problem is everybody who contacted me was like, hey dude, I lost my laptop six years ago in a foreign country. I'll give you a dollar if you can track it down and it just was not worth my time. I could see how for big businesses this would be worth it. It's just you got to be interested in what you're working on so I'm just not interested in it anymore. I may delete the source code or I may just give it away. I'm not sure but plug in botnet is going to sit there until its subscription runs out and then the hosting plan is just going to kill it. So what have I been working on? I'm glad you asked. SocietyQuestClub.com, side project me and a buddy of mine have been working on. As you can see, three people like this. So it's really gotten popular. It's not gained a whole lot of popularity at all. We've decided to completely redo it from the ground up. It's no longer going to be a web portal and admittedly the web portal wasn't that great. It's going to be a mobile app. The problem with developing a mobile app is well compounded by the fact that A, I've never really built a mobile app before. Shocker, I know, 2017 and I've never built a mobile app. So I had to learn mobile development. So that's really what I've been doing for the last seven months. The problem with mobile development is once you release for one platform, the other platform wants it. So my buddy is a sales guy. I'm a programmer. I use Android. He uses Apple. That's not true. I actually have both devices but don't ask me why I have two cell phones. I actually have four cell phones. Let me count them. Five cell phones. Don't ask why. Point being, let's say you make this a really awesome program and you release it for Android. Well, then sales guy comes in and goes, what about iOS? So now you got to start all over again. You make it for iOS. You want it for Android. Now you're juggling multiple code bases. So if you find a bug in Apple, you don't have that in Android because they are not compatible. They use two different frameworks. For example, this uses Android Studio. This uses either Objective-C or Swift. Not compatible in the least at all. So I started looking at cross-platform frameworks, if you will. I looked at a lot of them. I actually looked at all of them that were out there and cute being near and dear to my heart. At the time, I didn't think QML. Whoa, I almost switched that to that little icon there. That would have been bad. Anyways, point being QML at the time, I didn't think was really mature enough to do what I wanted it to do. I mean, just simple things like switching from one page to another. If you read the forums, they said, well, it's not really designed to do that. Really? Come on, guys. That functionality may have existed at that time. I just was not easily finding it and having a job and kid and family and all that and friends. It's just, I don't have the time to sit there in Google all night. So I looked at Zimera and I looked at a bunch of others. I got really hooked into React Native. React Native, really, I got to admit, just hooked me for about four months straight. I made a couple of personal programs with this. In theory, I loved React Native. I absolutely loved it. What I hated about it was that it's JavaScript. I cannot stand JavaScript. Do not ask me why. Maybe it's years and years of C-Sharp and C++, but JavaScript is this abomination that needs to die. And I'm sorry, anybody who likes fat arrow needs to get a fat lip because I hate fat arrow. Don't play around with scope is all I'm saying. Anyways, point being, I left React Native not due to JavaScript. JavaScript gives me a migraine. But React Native is a Facebook framework. See how it's Facebook? And I went to integrate. I started doing serious development here for Society Quest Club said, all right, let's do this. I went to integrate just a simple Facebook login with the Facebook React Native and it would not work. You would think that a framework coming from Facebook would have Facebook baked right into it, but no. So I spent literally two weeks of my life scouring through forums, user groups, asking questions, stack overflow, you name it. No one could figure out my exact error message. And no, I'm not going to exhaustively post it again because at this point, I just do not care. Point being, the error messages it kicked out made no sense. And then people said, oh, well, don't use, you know, don't use this, use that, try this, try it. Everything I tried, nothing worked. Somebody even suggested wiping the whole thing and starting from scratch. And I'm like, starting from scratch. This is from scratch. I literally made the program, tried doing the Facebook SDK and then poof, didn't work. Then one shining ray of hope I got it to work. I actually brought up the app. I saw the Facebook login button. I clicked it. Everything worked. It made no sense why it didn't work. So I saved all my work, table check, triple checked everything. I was all excited, went and had a beer and the next day came back, woke my computer up from sleep. And it still didn't work. It was kicking out just a different error message. I said, you know, I'm done. I'm so completely done with this. I shouldn't have to spend two weeks just trying to get a Facebook login on a Facebook platform. Anyways, rant over. Point being, I went and I tried a lot of these different frameworks. The only one that I really haven't tried is Flutter, simply because I'm sorry, Google, I didn't want to learn yet another programming language because it uses Dart. I may do that in the future, but right now I'm really trying to just get things done. So I want to use things that are familiar to me. So going back to what I've been doing is I've really been growing the Voidrums Facebook group. And as you can see, we have, holy crap, we have 1,706 members in there. It just seems to be growing every day and it's growing way, way, way out of what I can control. We have several admins. I want to give a big shout out to everybody in there who's been very helpful and listened to me rant and rave about React data with JavaScript and Xamarin and all these other things. See like here that have you tried Flutter. You know, we just toss out ideas and it's not just me and one of the people. I mean, there's thousands of people in here that are talking about things and getting feedback. So I've really been trying to grow the community and just give back. And on this, there was a discussion that happened and I'm sorry, on the spot I was going to actually say your name, but I forget the gentleman's name who said, hey, have you tried vplay, which leads me to what I've been doing now. Been looking at vplay.net. And vplay, I gotta admit, I wasn't really liking the idea of something you have to pay for until I really looked at it. Now, don't hit the stop button. You don't actually have to pay for it. Let me explain a little bit. You need to choose games or apps. What vplay is doing is acts as a layer on top of Qt and QML. So all of the fun powerful features you have in Qt and QML, you have in vplay. And the beauty of it is you don't have to be an expert in JavaScript. You don't have to know, oh my gosh, all the garbage that I learned with React Native. Of course, now that I'm on the spot, I can't think of like Redux and MobX and all the state management nonsense that just drove me crazy. You don't have to learn any of that nonsense. You just have to learn QML, which is, I want to say, a spin off of Java. You can actually use JavaScript in QML. And you have the full power of the Q framework. Now, apps and games. So I'm just going to pick one. I'll just pick apps. And it's got some really cool stuff to it. You can, it's got a lot of coding in it. And it's got really, let me close this just so I can show you why I'm interested in this. If you look at vplay, what is it? Let me take a minute. My internet's been kind of crazy here. You can use the best of Qt. And I know this is going to sound like a sales pitch. And it goes even further. It's got so much features in it. The code wants to play anywhere, native performance, component base. It's got the best parts of all of the other things that I have been trying. And it runs on the platform that I love. Cute. So why not? This is the only thing I didn't really care for was pricing. You see, personal's free. So you're like, what is wrong with this? Why are you not liking free? Well, my project, this society quest club, is going to be Facebook based, meaning you have a Facebook login. And I want to use something called Google Firebase as a backend, which is a real time database, very powerful database. The problem is, if you scroll down Google Firebase, not in the free version. Of course, now that I'm on the spot here, there it is, social network like Facebook, not in the free version. So you got to pay for that, which makes sense. Now they have a 30% off sale. It's 49 bucks a month. That's about $600, which, you know, that's really not bad if you think about it, because I remember plucking down $400 for Delphi 4 way back in 2000. So yeah, that's really not bad. And considering if you have, you make a game that takes off and you make a dollar or something per user and you get 100 users, it's already paid for itself. And you don't have to write any of this code. So then I started thinking, okay, great. They probably handicap it. They have indie versus enterprise. Well, actually, if you scroll down, they have the same thing except for a customer success manager and turnover and support hours. So from a technical standpoint, they have the exact same things, price difference being level of support you get. Okay, that makes sense. So anyways, long story short, I downloaded the plan. I just started playing around with it. And I actually, you know what? I got optimistic again. I started liking it. I tried playing with some of the features and it wasn't quite clicking. So I had to read some of the documentation. And then I actually talked with the CEO and co-founder Chris and said, Hey, do you mind if I just check this out and make some tutorials on it? Actually, to be honest, he emailed me because when you download it, blah, blah, blah, you enter your email address. Really great guy. And I'm not going to say it because I don't know if I'm allowed to, but they have got some features coming that are just going to blow the pants off of everything else out there. So I think what I'm going to start doing is I'm going to really learn vplay, not just from the app side, but from the game side to because vplay is really designed to be a game engine. It's just I was blown away when I looked at the stuff and some of the sample games, some of the sample games in this thing that are free and come with source code are better than the actual games out in, you know, Google Player or the iStore. I was kind of surprised. And when you look at them, they make sense. The way QML and vplay come together, I know this sounds like a sales pitch and I swear I am not getting paid by these guys at all. I'm actually thinking about giving them money to buy this thing. But the way it comes together, it's just very fluid and it's kind of in the spirit of Qt. And that's what I'm looking for here. I haven't really played with Qt a whole lot because I've been messing around with other frameworks. So I'm hoping that my beloved Qt will forgive me and be nice to me and that I won't lose all the knowledge that I gained throughout the years. So that is a lot of talking. But in short, I'm going to continue working on the mobile version of Society Quest Club. And at the same time, I'm going to start making tutorials on how vplay here. And we'll see what happens. Well, that's it. Give me feedback. I'm really interested to know what you guys think about vplay and what successes and what stories you have with it. I want to say I know I sound negative, like I'm bashing other frameworks like React Native. I'm sure they're great frameworks. I'm just saying I did not have great experiences with them. No, I have not tried every single framework out there and I do not intend to. I just don't have that kind of time. Every framework is different. Use the right tool for the job and I'm kind of leaning towards QML, Qt, and vplay. So yeah, just drop a comment and let me know what you think.