BKeeney Briefs

It seems appropriate during this week of Thanksgiving to give a big thank you to all the readers.  So a big, hearty, “Thank You!” for asking questions and providing some interesting feedback.

Whenever I start talking to REALbasic developers, I get asked, a lot, about finding REALbasic consulting work.  It’s not hard finding work, but it is not always easy finding good projects.

The difference?  One issue that comes up is that because it’s real and it’s basic means REALbasic it must be easy-to-use (read that as cheap), right?  Wrong!  Making a good quality REALbasic application requires some perseverance and some experience.  I can guarantee that the RB apps I make these days are way better than my early RB apps.  Experience counts in software development just like in any other profession.

Good projects aren’t always available.  Maybe you have to do an ugly project for next to nothing to hold you over until a bigger, better project comes along.  With consulting it really is a ‘what is the next project?’ world.

So where do you find work?  The first thing you have to do is set up shop.  Does your website say anything about REALbasic consulting and/or development?  It should because that’s the first way people are going to find you.  You should also have a previous projects page that talks about the work you’ve done.  Sometimes you can’t talk about a project in a lot of detail due to non-disclosure agreements, but you can talk generically about the type of work you’ve done.

In a recent ARBP survey word of mouth and their website were the two highest percentages, by far, of any of the topics.

Do you self promote yourself in the RB Forums and the NUG list?  If not, you might be missing out on some work.  By answering some questions on the forums and NUG (for free) you can get some free exposure and people get to know your name.  Do you think it’s a coincidence that regular columnists/writers for RB Developer magazine are mostly consultants?

Are you listed in the ARBP consultants list?  You should be.  It costs nothing other than signing up for their limited membership (i.e. free).

Finally, the REAL Software Consulting Referrals Program is a great way of getting leads.  People who think they want a REALbasic developer to contact them fill out a web form and you get an email.  It’s then up to you follow up on the lead.  It is somewhat pricey at $1000/year but one good project and will pay for itself.

In fact, I would call the program a bargain.  In 2008 REAL Software changed the program and nearly doubled the price to be part of the program.  I criticized them at the time and still think it was a bit heavy-handed but the quality of the leads has gone up and so has the frequency of leads.  I contact most of the leads twice.  First when I first get the lead and in a couple of weeks afterward.  Most of the time they tell me they only have one or two replies to their original post so this says to me that there are not a whole lot of people in the program.

Look folks, if they’re filling out a form asking for REALbasic work they’ve already sold themselves on using REALbasic.  You don’t have to sell the merits of RB – they’ve self-selected themselves!  It’s like shooting fish in a barrel from a sales perspective.

Do you talk about what you do?  You should because you never know who you’re talking to.  I went to an NFL training camp this summer and while having a drink at a bar where the players sometimes hang out I had a great conversation with someone that happened to work in software industry.  While it hasn’t resulted in any work – yet – it might in the future and isn’t that what marketing is all about?

So that’s it.  There’s no secret to finding REALbasic work.  Have a great Thanksgiving and happy coding!

A majority of us use the web to do research – it’s faster, easier and the information is fresh.  For years I was a frequent visitor to Ramblings, a website/blog run by Aaron Ballman.  In my opinion, it was THE definitive source for many things in REALbasic.

For those of you that are new to REALbasic, Aaron was one of the REAL Software developers that worked on REALbasic.  We was with the company for seven years which is a long time in the software industry and in many respects REALbasic bears his signature.

In his new book, Ramblings on REALbasic, Aaron took many of his old blog posts, cleaned them up with new information, rearranged the order and put them in book form.  The book is divided up into Knowledge Base, REALbasic Language, User Experience, Windows, Design Patterns, Plugins, Other Languages and Just for Fun.

The Knowledge Base is a rather large collection of changes, gotchya’s, and miscellaneous information dumps about REALbasic that Aaron wrote about for years.  REALbasic is ever evolving and Aaron wrote about the bugs or misunderstandings to give us (the REALbasic developer) a little insight into what or why it happened or how we are misusing it (which happened more often than we’d like to admit).

The REALbasic Language section goes into specific REALbasic features.  I guarantee that you’ll learn something about REALbasic in this section.  Aaron writes it not as an end-user but as someone who is writing the compiler and having to support people like you and me on a regular basis.

A good portion of REALbasic developers use RB on Mac OS X and we sometimes take a Mac-centric viewpoint of developing software for Windows.  In the User Experience and Windows sections, Aaron goes into detail on some of the finer points of the Windows experience.  If you’re not a Windows expert (and even if you thought you were), these are must read sections.

The Plugins section is an alternative to REAL Softwares woefully incomplete documentation.  Aaron does a nice job of explaining how plugins work with the IDE and then goes into details that most of us will never use (unless you want to make a plugin that is).

The Design Patterns section is particularly interesting because he creates the design patterns using REALbasic.  Design patterns are coding patterns that, if you’ve been doing software long enough, you start to see over and over again.  Bigger, more complex applications probably have some of these coding patterns in them already (even if you didn’t know it) but it’s nice to get the theory and uses of them in REALbasic, up front.

Aaron does a good job of pointing out bugs and flaws in REALbasic and which versions they occurred in.  Some of those flaws are fixed in later versions of REALbasic, and he doesn’t always note if they’ve been fixed or not.  I can understand the complexity of finding out when bugs were fixed but it makes the text incomplete in my opinion.

Another missing feature, especially for the design patterns section, is downloadable project files.  It’s one thing to list the source code and explain it, but it’s entirely different to have a working example that you can step through.

While it’s sometimes nice to have a paper book to thumb through it’s getting harder and hard to justify the cost of a book that will lose its relevance in a short period of time.  This is not new to Ramblings or any book on technology but the REAL Software Rapid Release Model guarantees that any paper book will quickly become, if not obsolete, dated quickly.

All-in-all, I think this is a great book to keep on hand because it contains information not found anywhere else.  The RB language reference and user manuals give you minimal information and often leaves you guessing.  Ramblings fills in some of those missing blanks.

Ramblings on REALbasic is available for $59.00 through Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Ramblings-REALbasic-Aaron-Ballman/dp/0615316034 or $50 through Aaron’s website at http://ramblings.aaronballman.com/book/.

I’m not entirely sure what Apple changed in Snow Leopard but  we quickly discovered that disk images created in Snow Leopard don’t work the same in Leopard and earlier systems.  When we create our disk images we have something that looks like this:

Looks fine in Snow Leopard.  Acts fine in Snow Leopard.  But when you take it into Leopard you get a disk image that looks something like this (no background image):

Long time Mac users understand what to do but new Mac users were a little mystified at what to do.  Unfortunately we didn’t find this out until after a couple of releases, but we did find a solution.

We use a postbuild script to automatically create our disk image.  The bit of code is:

hdiutil convert -quiet  -format UDBZ -o “${IMAGE_NAME}.dmg” -imagekey zlib-level=9 “./${IMAGE_NAME}.sparseimage” \
|| error_exit “$LINENO: Could not compress the DMG”

This leaves a sparseimage file laying around and normally we get rid of it.  While running this in Leopard we didn’t and copied it.  This sparseimage has the proper graphics and works in Snow Leopard so we now use it as our template when doing builds in Snow Leopard.

We changed the script to delete the OLD file on the sparseimage using:

rm -rf “/Volumes/${MOUNTED_DISK_NAME}/Task Timer 4.app/Contents” \
|| error_exit “$LINENO: Could not delete old build”

Then we copy our newly created RB app into the sparse image.

rsync -a “${MAC_OUTPUT}/Task Timer 4.app/” “/Volumes/${MOUNTED_DISK_NAME}/Task Timer 4.app/” \
|| error_exit “$LINENO: Could not copy into volume”

So, it’s kind of pain to do, and it’s not very efficient but it works.  We are still using RB 2009 R3 because build automation that was released in R4 doesn’t work for us.

Update:  If you want to see the entire script, there is an article in the Articles section on the ARBP members only site, which is available to any paid membership.

Paul Lefebvre over at RBDevZone is doing a podcast about REALbasic.  Podcast #2 is out today and more information can be found at http://www.rbdevzone.com/2009/11/rbdevzone-podcast-2/

Good job, Paul!

ARBP has a new survey out today about the RB Beta Program.  The short survey asks you about your experience with the beta program and your thoughts on ways to improve it.

ARBP members should log in to the members site and choose the survey under the REALbasic menu.

Non-ARBP members can use this link.

ARBP  released the results of their 2nd annual REALbasic Consultants Survey.  The results probably won’t surprise many of you, but I think surveys like this are interesting.  If nothing else you can compare your rates with other consultants.

One of the more interesting questions, I think, is the “what are the biggest challenges in being a REALbasic consultant?”  Not surprisingly, Finding Work is a high issue and mirrors the 2008 survey results (which we did not publish in its entirety).   Bugs and Perceptions about REALbasic were also not significantly unchanged from the 2008 survey either which is somewhat of a concern.

For me, I was happy with the quality of REALbasic 2009 series until Release 4.  For many of our projects, though, we’re still using Release 3 simply because the new Reporting tool has too many bugs and the Build Automation was essentially useless for us.  Are you using R4 for production releases?

My question to you, dear readers, is if you feel that RB’s quality is better, worse, or the same this year than last?  Do you feel that the ratio of bug fixes to new features is right or should new features have a higher or lower ratio to bug fixes?  As an established user of REALbasic, do you feel that you are a valued more or less than a new users?

Finally, do you think the new Feedback application is going to help us shape RS’ priorities for 2010?