BKeeney Briefs

It’s amazing what a couple of days away from the office will do to the backlog of work.

REALbasic 2009 R4 was released last week.  The two new features, build steps and reporting, have some serious bugs which makes it pretty much worthless to me.  It’s a shame, really, because I could use both of those features RIGHT NOW!  Definitely not one of RS’ finer releases in my opinion.

I suspect that there will NOT be a 4.1 release and instead there will be an R5 release before the end of the year.  I think this only fuels the fire that  RB’s rapid release model isn’t good for us.  A 4.1 release makes them look better in my opinion (even if it’s not easier for them).

My biggest issue with R4 is that the PostBuild scripts that we’ve been using for several releases do not work at all in R4.  Since the build steps don’t work I’m forced to use R3.

Honestly, I expected REAL Reports to be buggy.  It’s not a feature (reporting) you can slap together quickly.  There are a ton of permutations when dealing with pagination and other standard reporting features so it doesn’t surprise me it has bugs.  A couple of no-brainer bugs got through though which, to me, speaks volumes for:  a)  the lack of testers; and b)  the beta process is broken because a new major feature was allowed to get into final candidate status with known, show-stopper bugs.

I wrote up an R4 release review in the Blogs section of the ARBP webite.  The review was written before some of the big bugs were discovered and also most of it was written while I was out of town where I couldn’t do extensive testing.  But then again, if you don’t need reports or build steps then it’s probably a decent release.

Some of the Einhugur plugins had to be updated for the R4 release.  The new FontUnits class caused some issues if you were creating Windows and Linux apps that weren’t using the default size of zero.

Snow Leopard finally caused me to swear at Apple the other day.  One of the things that’s broken in Snow Leopard is the Apple Indexer app no longer takes some of the parameters it was using before.  It appears that the replacement is hdutil(1) but I’ve not followed up on it.  This breaks all of our PostBuild scripts as well as Mac Help Writer from Artistic Techworks.  So now I’ve got a regular Leopard machine to do builds on until we figure out the workaround.

The REALbasic Colorado Summit was a decent success.  A basic review is in the ARBP Blogs section.  A good turnout considering the compressed time frame we had (under two months).  I’m hoping that if we do one next year we have at least 4 months notice so we can line up better speakers and get better attendance.

The one day REAL Software regional events in Atlanta and Chicago are coming up the first week of November.  I’m speaking at the Chicago event on November 5th and I’m talking about the REALbasic Community.  It’s a big topic so I’m not entirely sure what I’ll talk about.  ARBP for sure.  Probably where to find help learning RB and how to find professionals to help you out.  If I have time I might talk about some of the plugins available, alternative controls, etc.

Thoughts?