REALbasic (was Re: Pocket PC)

[Ben Rubinstein]

on 4/2/02 9:13 PM, Lorin Rivers at lrivers at realsoftware.com wrote:

> REALbasic's Windows support improves with every release. We rarely
> get complaints about it any more.

Lorin,

I don't want to start a flame war either, but is it possible that this is
because people have given up on it - either switched to another system
altogether, or using RB for Mac development only?

I was very keen on RB when it first came out; and proudly demoed to
colleagues some simple apps which were cross-platform.   When I first tried
to use it seriously to create some simple utilities that had to run on
Windows support I had horrible problems; I got involved with Revolution when
I needed to develop a more serious app on which Windows support was
critical.

The last thing I did with RB, about seven months ago, was a tool that needed
to extract some data via HTTP, format and print it various ways.  Having
just started with Rev, I was undecided what to use; Rev had built-in support
for HTTP, but the printing model on RB is superior to that in Rev - also I
had more experience with RB.  I quickly found an HTTP module I could use,
and built the app in RB; on the Mac it did (and does) an excellent job.
When I tried to move it to Windows I had no luck.  Going through that
painful debugging process of making changes on a Mac, recompiling for
Windows, moving over to Windows and testing, revealed that there were at
least three separate problems - the HTTP code was getting unexpected
results, the command to raise a print dialog simply did nothing, and the
printing had another problem (my memory grows dim as to the exact details).
This was using version 2.1.2 - at that point 3.1 had just been released.  So
I downloaded the demo of that, and found that the situation on Windows was
even worse (again, apologies, I don't have the exact details to hand - I
think I posted them to newsgroup at the time, but didn't get any help).  As
a side effect, when the demo expired it wiped my license for 2.1.2, so that
was then running in demo mode.

I resolved to upgrade RB anyway (company money, not personal) just so that
I'd have it on the shelf; but then 3.5 was in testing, so I thought I might
as well wait for that and not have to get another set of printed manuals.
I've simply not got round to it, because I've been doing everything in
Revolution.

RealBasic is an excellent product; there are some aspects of it which I
prefer to Revolution.  But at this point I wouldn't bother opening it for
anything that I wasn't convinced would be Mac-only.  I'm not posting
complaints about RB's Windows support - but that just means that I'm not
even making the effort any more.
 
  Ben Rubinstein               |  Email: benr_mc at cogapp.com
  Cognitive Applications Ltd   |  Phone: +44 (0)1273-821600
  http://www.cogapp.com        |  Fax  : +44 (0)1273-728866