BKeeney Briefs

A friend sent this one to me today. http://www.xkcd.com/528/

Comments like the ones in the link are useful and necessary.  Sometimes it’s for the stress relief of the developer and sometimes it’s just a way to document the strange oddities that come out of some developers.

I’ve been known to put comments in code (generally in OPC projects and unfortunately one or two of my own projects) to the effect of, “I have no friggin’ clue why this was done this way.  If you change this value really, really bad things happen when trying to do ‘x’.”  For one client I had dozens of comments that said, “Because AM told me to do it this way, “ and it would be preceded by commented out code where they had me do the exact opposite thing.  Such is the life of a developer.

Now, on to the comments about why the PSD format is horrible and how it ever got that bad.  I suspect that in the beginning it wasn’t so bad.  It was probably written by one or two developers working very closely together.  Then another developer was hired to do a new feature who was either incompetent or too lazy to figure out the way it was done before.  Then another developer was hired to either fix bugs or add yet another new feature and was either lazy, incompetent, or under the gun to get it out and re-used code from the earlier implementations that was one of the three ways of doing it.  And then another and another did the same thing.

Finally you get a big, ugly, incomprehensible, complex thing that no one can figure out unless you life with the code day in and day out.  I have no doubt that the Photoshop developers can look back and be embarrassed about such complexity.  But I understand how it goes.  You start with something fairly simple and you keep bolting pieces on to it and you try to keep it as simple but it just keep growing.  It’s like a virus that goes unchecked.

The worst thing though, is that eventually, its complexity gives  the parent company a barrier of entry from copycats.  In this case, anyone wanting to work with PhotoShop documents has to figure it out.  Likewise I suspect that MS Office suffers from some of the same issues.

One could argue that these companies want the complexity so they can keep stranglehold on their market.  That might be the reason why these things are never cleaned up.  Engineers and developers cringe when they hear this but sometimes it’s true.  From a business standpoint it works, so why fix it?

Anyway, I spent way more time talking about code comments than I expected.  Thoughts?

My employee has a decade of experience using Visual Basic 6.  The first thing he’s doing is figuring out how the REALbasic IDE works.  For his first project he’s running the IDE and setting breakpoints to see how things are called.

When he asked me how to get to the call stack I was somewhat taken aback.  It’s that little popup menu at the top of the window, it’s obvious, right?  Well, obviously not to a new RB user coming from VB 6.

After I showed him what it was and how to use it his words were, “Well, that’s not very intuitive!” and I’d have to agree.  What is the function of a popup menu?  Well, it allows the user to make a selection from a list of choices.

In the RB IDE the call stack popup menu has no label to indicate what it is nor what its function is.  It’s only when you click on it do you find the really valuable information – the call stack.  And then the popup menu makes sense because you use it to traverse the call stack.

While the popup is a good control to make a choice it’s not an optimal control to display varying information.  You have to click on it to get the information.  That’s not efficient in my opinion, but I’m not sure there’s a good alternative either.

Ideally, you’d like that information in a listbox so you can see it all times because that’s what a listbox is good for.  But clicking a listbox to traverse the call stack isn’t exactly intuitive.  Do you put the listbox on the right side of the window?  Above or below the variables section?  Perhaps it should be at the top where the popup menu is now but bigger so it takes up more room?  Is it redundant to have both the popup menu and the listbox and making a selection in either does the same thing?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions.  However, I like listening to REALbasic newbies because if a little tweak here or there can help change their experience it’s worth exploring.

There are number of things users would like to see improved in the debugger.  Let’s focus on this one little thing.

What are your thoughts?

I’m a part of the beta program so I get to work with these releases early.  I rarely move production projects over to a REALbasic beta because, well, it’s a beta and all bets are off.  I broke that rule for ’09 R2 because it was so solid for me in my early testing.

R1 and R2 are very solid releases for me and I have no qualms recommending that you upgrade.  I have to give the RS developers some kudos for doing a good job.

<applause>
Excellent work folks.
</applause>

Now that R2 is out, we also have a new ‘version’ of RB called REAL Studio.  It’s essentially the old Pro version with a license key that works on all three platforms (yay!) and updates for 12 months instead of 6.  You also get REAL Server out of the deal as well as priority support.  It’s quite a bit pricier at $1495 and hopefully it gets some new features quickly to make it a better deal.

The drawback is that the Pro edition loses profiling and IDE scripting.  But it is cheaper now as well at $299.

I personally think that removing IDE scripting is a bad thing.  But, on the other hand, I doubt most users will miss it.  Let’s hope that RS has something up their sleeve for us mere mortals in the future.  By the way, there is an article on the ARBP website that shows you how to use postbuild scripts to create a DMG and copy files into your bundle and resources folders (sorry, it’s only available to paying ARBP members)

I won’t dwell on the details of this release because I wrote up a little review of R2 on the ARBP Blogs and Opinions page (free registration required).

What are your thoughts on R2?

I’ve written about Battlestar Galactica and how it was gritty and showed all of the human flaws and that there were many gray areas to debate.  I think the reason why I like the new Bond is the same thing.  He’s not a pretty boy who’s suave and confident and has an air of aristocracy that gives him a commanding presence.  He takes his shirt off and you see scars and bruises and you see a brutal and savage history that the old Bonds never had (in the movies at least).

In the old Bond movies the bad guys were bad and the good guys good and never the two shall meet.  This is not so in the new Bond.  In Quantum of Solace I don’t think there is a single truly bad or good guy, including Bond himself.  Remember how the bad guy would also tell Bond his plan to control the world (remember that in The Incredibles they called it ‘monologuing’) while they were going about the business of killing him.  How stupid was that?  In the real world they don’t tell you why – they just put a bullet in your head.

No more cute little gadgets from Q that would save his life.  Now the technology isn’t as in your face and out of this world.  The movies we saw in the 60’s to recently are so dated now they’re almost unwatchable from a technology perspective.  The new series doesn’t make it a big deal of it though they certainly use it in a reasonable manner.  I think this means that these Bond fills will still be watchable in 10 years and not feel so outdated.

So being heavily influenced by TV shows from the 80’s, how would they be done nowadays?  A number of TV shows had easy to identify the good and bad guys.  Those shows would tank today.  But here are a few suggestions if anyone from Hollywood is thinking about reviving them.

Bo and Luke Duke would probably be robbing banks to keep Daisy from working the strip club (because she’s got to feed her cute kid and her sometimes drug habit).   Boss Hogg skims money from public works projects and funnels money to the orphanage he grew up in (and a little to his boy toy who’s threatening to expose him to his minister and his wife – in that order).

ChiP’s would have Jon leading an ‘alternative lifestyle’ which is threatening his job due to his excessive partying and drug/alcohol use.  Meanwhile, Ponch would be “looking the other way” when the local gang causes trouble because his little sister is in love and has the child of the gang leader (with another one on the way from a rival gang leader).  Their boss, meanwhile would be a recovering alcoholic that’s on the outs with her husband, her police chief ex-lover and is fending off the advances of Ponch’s sisters boyfriend (the gang leader).

The A-Team?  Please.  Remember how nobody died even with a ton of lead flying around?  I don’t think so.  Their leader, Hannibal Smith would actually be a war criminal with the Hague after him for following orders in Iraq.  He would make no apologies for it and because he felt he was screwed by his government he’d be uncovering atrocities (both his country and allies) at an alarming rate.  Lt. Peck would appear to be a suave playboy millionaire but is really from a poor community in the sticks of West Virginia and joined the military to get an education and away from his dysfunctional family.  Murdock wouldn’t just be acting crazy, he would have severe mental illness using a never ending sequence of drugs that don’t fully help him.  Murdock is always just a bit away from either going berserk or committing suicide.  BA Baracus would be a buff, but sensitive man who struggles with his sexual identity.  He purposely mutilates himself because he’s trying to push everyone away but still wants people to notice him.  They’d steal, they lie and in general would do the bidding of the highest bidder.

Those 80’s shows were awful in their own right because they were too black and white – but it was what we wanted at the time.  In those days the US was the good guy and the Soviets were the bad guys.  Simple as that.  We didn’t want to explore anything else.  They didn’t spend a whole lot of time exploring the human condition.  They failed to show us the weaknesses that people have and their lives were too simple and too easy.

Bond, Battlestar Galactica, The Watchmen, FireFly, and even House all give a mirror into our own psyche and push our buttons because of their moral ambiguity.  The good guys aren’t always good and the bad guys aren’t always bad.  Is Hollywood a reflection of what we think of the world around us or will Hollywood change our view and attitude of the world?  I don’t know about you, but I like seeing a movie/show that is a little less certain of what black and white is.  It certainly makes for better entertainment.  What about you?

First, let’s point out that RS never said that the HTMLviewer control was meant to be a web browser control.  It is, however, what a lot of us want to use it as.

On Windows, the HTMLview uses Internet Explorer, on the Mac it uses webkit and on Linux it uses LibGTKHTML.  While this makes a certain amount of sense for their respective platforms it doesn’t for cross-platform use because the differences are exasperating and difficult (if not impossible) to work around.  What works great on Mac OS X causes OLE exceptions on Windows.  What draws properly on Windows does not on the Mac and there seems to be some serious issues on Linux with handling modern HTML properly.  I had to rewrite an application in Visual Basic 6 last fall because of constant crashes in the htmlviewer.

So is there a solution?  Obviously RS has heard the complaints.  Stability has improved but the cross-platform oddities continue.  Perhaps the best way to solve the cross-platform problem is to use a cross-platform solution.  Webkit (Safari and iTunes) and Gecko (Firefox) are both cross-platform and is being used by many developers.

It is my opinion that a true web browser control is a necessary (perhaps even critical) component in todays web-enabled world.  The current htmlviewer isn’t good enough for most users and thus is an impediment rather than an asset to REALbasic.

How easy is this to add into REALbasic?  I have no idea, but when I queried a few people that would know the answer they said it was possible to do so.  It would, however, potentially add an additional 14 to 20 megabytes to a built application.  That seems like a lot but for some developers having a stable web browser would be worth the additional size.  For some it would not and I don’t know what to do to help those developers.

In June of 2008 I asked this same question in a post and even posed the possibility of helping fund the development of a true web browser plugin.  No one took me up on it then.

If RS cannot do it, then perhaps it’s time for a 3rd party to do it.  If you feel that this is an important addition to REALbasic what would you be willing to pay for a true stable, cross-platform web browser?  Thoughts?