REALbasic (was Re: Pocket PC)

[Lorin Rivers]

At 10:09 PM -0500 2/7/02, use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:
>Message: 9
>Date: Thu, 07 Feb 2002 23:57:54 +0000
>Subject: Re: REALbasic (was Re: Pocket PC)
>From: Ben Rubinstein <benr_mc at cogapp.com>
>To: <use-revolution at lists.runrev.com>
>Reply-To: use-revolution at lists.runrev.com
>
>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?

Anything is possible, but reviewing sales figures leads me to believe 
that if people had given up, we'd see a huge decline in Pro upgrades 
which is far from true.

>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).

It pains me to hear you had so much difficulty. I believe that these 
sorts of problems have been addressed (problems with sockets and 
threads essentially). Every release of REALbasic is greatly improved 
over the previous one. 3.1 was released about a year ago (and was 
followed almost immediately by 3.2), and is two major revisions 
out-of-date. You should try the latest release and see if it's any 
better. If not, drop me an email offline and I'll try and help you 
figure out what the trouble is.

>   As
>a side effect, when the demo expired it wiped my license for 2.1.2, so that
>was then running in demo mode.

That's curious. No reason why that should happen.

>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.

You can also order license-only upgrades -- the docs are also 
supplied as PDFs so you need not burden your shelf needlessly.

>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.

If your current methods work well for you, by all means, continue. 
That said, I'm fairly sure you'll be pleased with the Windows 
compiling in the latest releases.

>
>   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


-- 
Lorin Rivers                      512.263.1233 x712 v
Vice President of Marketing       512.263.1441 f
REAL Software                     mailto:lrivers at realsoftware.com
PMB 220                           http://www.realsoftware.com
3300 Bee Cave Road, Suite 650
Austin, Texas 78746
REALbasic: the powerful, easy-to-use tool for creating your own
software for Macintosh, Mac OS X, and Windows.