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...

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...

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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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...

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

Santa delivered a Wii Fit to our household for the kids. Surprisingly, the adults in the family like it....a lot. Read More...

Late last year, I created My Wish List for REALbasic in 2008. Let’s see if I was a prognosticator or just a wishful thinker. Read More...

Real Software released REALbasic 2008 R5 this week. Are we already back to mediocre releases? Read More...

It was announced today that Real World 2009 is cancelled and will be replaced with as yet To-Be-Determined regional events. Does this bode well for Real Software or simply an indicator of tough economic times? Read More...

A lot of people are clamoring for copy/paste functionality in the iPhone. It seems simple, but I think the implications are more wide ranging than just a simple copy/paste. I don’t think it’ll happen for a while and here’s why. Read More...

I’ve been relearning xCode and Cocoa and learning how to make an iPhone application. Too bad you couldn’t make an iPhone application with REALbasic. Read More...

By now you’ve heard about REAL Software laying people off. Here is my totally unsolicited, unwanted, and quite possibly wrong analysis of another area where REAL Software could have cut some costs. Read More...

Significant changes have occurred at REAL Software. See the Press Release.
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It’s been six months or so since RS moved from their old bug reporting system to FogBugz. Here are my stats and I’m wondering what yours are. Read More...

I have been a fan of SQLiteManager from SQLabs for quite a while. Unfortunately, it has been giving me various error messages for the last year or so. These errors occur on old and new database alike. So it was time for a change so I did a little research and find a replacement. Read More...

With a US presidential election coming in a matter of weeks it’s not surprising that political comments are making their way into sports articles and blog comments. I think it’s a stupid idea regardless of your political leanings. Read More...

I followed a link that Dana from Real Software put in a forum post today about a contest at All Basic. What I found there was interesting to say the least. Read More...

I received an email yesterday from Real Software introducing new priority support plans. The support plans don't interest me too much other than that I can get them. But the one thing that struck me in this email was the revised pricing and plan for the developer Referral program. I think they’re doing themselves wrong. Read More...

We’re continuing our analysis of the ARBP survey and this time we look at database applications. More air time from me until the ARBP forums are up.
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We’ve started analyzing some of the results of the first ARBP survey. Since the ARBP forums are not up and working yet I figured I’d give ARBP some air time. Read More...

REAL Software released a ‘dot’ update to REALbasci 2008 Release 3 now making it REALbasic 2008 Release 3.1. That’s awesome news! Read More...

Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software fame recommend that you shouldn’t hide or disable menu items. Read the piece here. I saw hogwash.
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REALbasic 2008 Release 3 was released yesterday. It’s a mix of new features and bug fixes. Read More...

I was happy with my Sony e-Reader, that I purchased used from my cousin, until I had to deal with tech support. Afterwards I have to recommend that you should not buy the Sony because they are misrepresenting their product. Here’s why: Read More...

I’ve been critical of web apps recently. I ran across 280Slides today. It looks slick and appears to do a lot of things. But is it a replacement for KeyNote or PowerPoint? Read More...

It was noted recently that Apple has made huge improvements with Javascript with webkit. See this article that talks about the authors opinion that Apple should extend OSA (Open Scripting Architecture) to not just AppleScript but to include Javascript. I’d take that one step further and say that RBScript should be added as well. Read More...

I listen to music all day long while I'm working. It's a habit (good or bad) that I developed in college while studying for hours on end and have kept up since. Heck, I became a DJ at the college radio station (WOUI - pumping out an amazing 10,000 milliWatts!) to listen to a lot of different music and did a study marathon one finals week because it was the 'quietest' place on campus. I love music and it's one of the reasons why I have such a large music collection and why I fell in love with iTunes and my first iPod.
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I've been tell you about my agile project over the past couple of months. This sprint was about laying the foundations for future additions to our prototype. It was also the sprint where we documented as much as we could. In addition to that we tried out a couple of bug tracking systems.

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Real Software engineer, Nathan, posted an item on the NUG list today that I find most interesting and heartening. They asked people who use RBScript to take a survey. That's pretty interesting.
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This is an oldie but a goodie. This one is sure to get me all riled up because, to me anyway, it strikes at the heart of stupidity and why people hate Microsoft so much: Windows activation. Read More...

I've had the 'pleasure' of working with some web applications recently and I can't say I'm overly impressed. I've been a desktop application user since 1986 and it seems that web apps are lacking standard features that desktop users have had for years. Read More...

Real Software scares me sometimes. This week they told us they were switching to FogBugz as their new bug tracking system. I think that's awesome! But then they said that the old feedback system was being shutdown and no longer available and oh, by the way, the new system isn't searchable. Talk about a sh**storm. I have to file this one under the "What the Hell Were They Thinking!?" category.

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In the grand scheme of things, a name doesn't mean much but as we've seen with Apple and Microsoft operating systems, a name gives 'meaning' to a product. There are a lot of people that, when hearing the word 'basic' in reference to programming, think of the bad old days where you numbered each line of code and it was interpreted (i.e. slow). They think of QBasic or GW-basic! Didn't they die with DOS?
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Mars, THE compiler guy is leaving Real Software. The official announcement is here. Read More...

I've been pondering why the 3rd party plugin and controls market isn't bigger for REALbasic. Certainly part of the barrier to entry is the size of the market. Part of it is RS' reluctance to actively promote the 3rd party solutions. Another barrier to entry is that the existing plugins are so inexpensive that it's tough for a new competitor to enter the space dominated by MonkeyBread and Einhugur (both of which we own and use and highly recommend). Read More...

Let's play CEO for a minute and pretend that we're Steve Jobs who takes (and probably deserves) the credit for a successful Apple turnaround. In a minute we'll also pretend that we're Steve Ballmer who is at the helm of the most dominate software company in the history of computing. Do you really think either one of them cares about REALbasic and REAL Software? Read More...

It seems that the idea of having a professional association for REALbasic has some legs. Many people have left messages and contacted me privately offering their support and giving us some ideas...

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For the past couple of weeks I've been talking about things I'd like to see in REALbasic and what, I think we, as users, can do for REALbasic. The comments have been great - I appreciate all the time and effort all of you have put into them. I think I've settled upon one thing that I'd like to see changed in REALbasic.

The Language Reference in RB is, depending upon who you ask, is either barely adequate or downright horrible. I tend to leans towards the former because I think it's lacking depth to be very useful. For every object, property, method and event there's information needed but not in the LR. Sometimes this includes bugs but more often than not, just clarification on what's changed.
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I have my wish list for what RB can do for us. Now, to be campy, what can we do to help REALbasic? Read More...

There's been an interesting discussion going on over at Norman Palardy's blog. It started innocently enough by Norman complaining that he's been getting support and change requests for some of his free and unsupported code that he has on his site. The discussion has morphed into a life of its own so I figured I'd start the "My Wish List For REALbasic in 2008" thread and get some additional feedback.
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