Just a quick update this week. We’ve been busy and it’ll only get busier! Read More...

In my continuing series talking about what the pain points are in REALbasic, this week we’ll look at version control format and the IDE. Read More...

In my continuing series talking about what the pain points are in REALbasic, this week we’ll look at the toolbar. Read More...

If you are not an American football fan you can disregard this entire post.

While being Bob’s Taxi Service yesterday I heard through one of our local all-sports-all-the-time talk radio stations that the NFL is thinking about hosting a SuperBowl overseas. Man, where do you start on how bad of an idea this is? Read More...

The May/June 2009 REALbasic Developer magazine was sent out today. My BKeeney Briefs column topic was naming conventions and how they affect my decisions on OPC projects. Read More...

Most Macintosh applications can be scripted using AppleScript. You can debate all day long on whether or not AppleScript is a good language or not, but the fact is that most Mac OS X users expect their applications to be scriptable. ARBP has a new article on it. Read More...

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

I ran across a source code listing today about Xee. Xee is an open source image viewer for Mac OS X. The original post (via Daring Fireball) commented on the hoops Adobe wanted the coder to go through to get the PSD spec. I found it hilarious because of the initial comments about the spec in general. Read More...

I have a new employee starting to use REALbasic. We’ve decided to keep a running dialog of things that a new RB user might find difficult to understand and possibly offer some suggestions on how to improve their experience. This will be an ongoing occasional series.

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Real Software released REALbasic 2009 Release 2 yesterday. I think it’s a very solid release. I’d also like to thank RS for a good release. Read More...

I watched the movie, Quantum of Solace this weekend. I find the new Bond movies to be stark contrast to the old Bond and frankly I like it a lot better. Perhaps it’s because I grew up on television in the 80’s where everything was black and white simple. I don’t miss those shows. Read More...

In my continuing series talking about what the pain points are in REALbasic, this week we’ll look at the HTMLviewer control. Read More...

One of REALbasic’s strengths is that it’s fast and easy to make decent applications. In many respects I find it much easier to use than Visual Basic 6. However, it’s lacking options in one, very big area: Reporting tools. Read More...

We’ll depart from our normal programming to digress into a very important topic - science fiction. This post has absolutely no programming or business information in it. I will also violate my blogging rule by talking a bit about religion, politics, and sex all in one post! If you are not a Battlestar Galactica fan, you can skip this one. Read More...

There are times when you do a project (in any development language) and then determine very late in the development cycle that you really should have done something differently. In my case, I forgot about localizing my application for anything other than English. Now that it’s almost too late in the cycle to easily change, I’d love to have some IDE hooks that allow me to iterate through the project and change some things programatically. Read More...

Since RS has announced their new Studio, the NUG mailing list has been asking the question about what new features should make it into the Studio version. Lest I be considered too anti-RB, here’s a pain point and a solution: How about Windows installers? Read More...

REAL Software announced today that starting with REALbasic 2009 Release 2 there will be three versions of REALbasic. Here’s my take on the new REAL Studio: There’s some good, bad, and ugly news. Read More...

When I redid my website using a popular open-source Content Management System I needed to integrate the site registration with the purchasing system software. So I put up a bid on Guru.com and ended up hiring a firm from India to do the work. Here is my story.... Read More...

In a previous lifetime I was an electrical engineer and did a lot of startups in hot, dirty steel mill-like environments. It was there that I learned a very valuable lesson and saying from a plant manager. Read More...

Emotion is a very primal instinct. We have very long memories of those who we feel have wronged us (whether true or not). How many people have sworn off a company because of one bad experience? I know a lot of people hate dealing with tech support, cell phone companies, and auto companies. So why anger your customers if you don’t have to? Read More...

I keep an eye out for alternatives to REALbasic. I do this for a variety of reasons. One, I like to do the research and two, if the time ever comes to move on, I need to know the alternatives. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t plan on abandoning RB anytime soon, but there are some gaps in RB that are frustrating to deal with and if I find a tool that might be better, I’ll take a look at it. This is one of them.... Read More...

I’ve been remiss in adding posts about the RB Developer column articles. The March/April edition is out.
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REALbasic 2009 R1 was released today. The usual press releases went out about new features, bug fixes, yada, yada, yada. But I’m very happy that Real Software is now using their new blog to tell us what’s new and changed. Read More...

In a post last week I talked about the window of opportunity of converting Visual Basic apps to REALbasic. I’ve lost at least two projects because of one simple, glaring omission in REALbasic. Lack of full COM support. Read More...

This weekend my lovely wife and I escaped to Sanoma Valley in California. We wanted to do some wine tasting and discovered why hiring a Subject Matter Expert (SME) is a good idea. Read More...

I’ve written more than a few times that REALbasic is an excellent choice for those who need to convert from Visual Basic 6 to something newer. Is that window of opportunity closing or closed? Read More...

South By Southwest is an interesting conference. This blog post http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/03/sxsw_interactiv.html asks the relevant question of why anyone would want to go to a conference that’s blogged, tweeted, and videotaped as much as it is. I don’t think the conclusion is surprising but it is a ‘duh, that makes sense’ moment. It brings it all into focus of why I like Real World so much. Read More...

On a followup thought on my “What Does RB Have 3 File Formats” post. The XML format is currently the only prescribed way to look through a REALbasic project file and that’s a pain and it’s slow. I think my real wish is to have hooks into the IDE itself. Read More...

This Google blog post http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating-with-code.html sums up nicely a project we did last summer using REALbasic as a Rapid Prototyping Tool.
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The RB forum has been pretty active with a Show Us What You Made In REALbasic thread. ARBP now has a section of the website dedicated to it! Read More...

Aaron’s blog post from a few weeks ago regarding the three types of REALbasic users got me thinking. That’s always a bad sign. Read More...

This SuperBowl should go down as one of the best ever. Not so much for the commercials. Read More...

The question of the day is when is it time to add staff? Read More...

iLife ’09 arrived in the mail yesterday. The face recognition is awesome. It’s fun besides. Read More...

Since Aaron is no longer at Real Software I find myself missing his blog more and more. Well, the blog is still there but since he’s with a new company it isn’t all about REALbasic any more. It wasn’t an official blog from RS by any stretch of the imagination, but it gave us some great insight into a sometimes very opaque company. Read More...

I finished reading “Yes Man” by Danny Wallace last night. If you want a good laugh and think about your life a little bit, I definitely recommend this book. Read More...

The default file format for REALbasic is a proprietary binary format (RBP). They also have an XML format and a newer version control format (VCP). So my question is why does RB support 3 formats? And does it hurt them by having to support and update all three formats? Read More...

I think my favorite feature in REALbasic is Container Controls. What’s yours? Read More...

Parts 1 and 2 of the ARBP December 2008 RB Enhancements Survey analysis is now available for review. It may be accessed via the Blogs and Opinions section of the ARBP members only site at www.arbpmembers.org. Read More...

It costs $100 to purchase REALbasic Personal edition while it costs $500 for the Professional edition. As someone who uses REALbasic in everyday business I have to put myself in RS’ shoes every now and then and wonder the following: Does it make sense for RS to support people like me? Read More...

All I have to say is wow. How little did I realize that my first post of the year would cause so much controversy. Well...that’s not entirely true. I enjoy stirring the pot a little to start a discussion and it’s been quite the discussion. Read More...

I have a lot of conversations with developers. Most of them use REALbasic and are pretty loyal to the product. But I’m seeing rumblings that not all is well. So I ask the question, is REALbasic relevant? Read More...