I discovered this week that you can’t subclass a REALbasic toolbar. Well, you can try and the compiler won’t complain but it just won’t do anything. That’s a bad thing but it could have been worse. Thankfully I wasn’t trying to do anything hard and all I had to do was extend it and make a call in the open event.

But that brings up the point that the toolbar in REALbasic isn’t very powerful. It doesn’t offer any customization routines that we’ve come to expect in modern applications. Heck, you can’t even do what Real Software is doing with their toolbars in the REALbasic IDE using the native toolbar. From this alone it’s fairly obvious that RB isn’t using the same toolbar control that they’ve given us to play with.

Given the plethora of replacement toolbars out there I’m not sure there’s any huge incentive for RS to replace theirs. Sure, all of the third party toolbars work but none of them are NATIVE to the REALbasic IDE and that’s what stinks. In none of them can you see what the toolbar is going to look like before runtime.

Does it worry you that RB uses something that we don’t have access to?

What do you use for a toolbar or are you happy enough with the built-in toolbar?