We (BKeeney Software) updated our REALbasic Training Videos today with H.264 video as the default rather than Flash. This allows access for iPad and iPhone users.
We have over a hundred videos and around 20 hours of training videos. Our Journal Entry project, a simply diary application, goes through the process of creating a REALbasic database application from start to finish. While we do all of the development on Mac OS X, we regularly go into Windows and Linux and explore the differences between controls and how to workaround those differences.
If you’ve ever wanted to see how other people use REALbasic, this is an excellent opportunity. We have around two hours of free video (with registration). Subscriptions are available and if you’re a student or educator, contact us to get up to 40% off full price. ARBP paid members can get a 20% discount.
So far we’ve been getting excellent reviews!
[Updated] Part of my motivation to moving to H.264 was to view the videos on my iPad. The iPad is a really good medium for video training because it can run beside the desktop/laptop computer and you can do the same things in REALbasic while I’m showing it to you in the video. Video on the iPad is gorgeous!
I don’t venture into Windows-land very often but I ran across a couple of articles today that gave me cause for concern.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/jul09/07-24statement.mspx is talking about how European users might get to choose which browser is used by their machine.
The second is http://www.aeroxp.org/2009/03/ie8-functionally-removable/ is about how Internet Explorer is functionally removable from Windows 7. The article states that the procedure only removes the Internet Explorer executable and not all of the supporting libraries so it shouldn’t be much of a concern to RB developers. Or is it?
During the ARBP chat last week, REAL Software president and CEO, Geoff Perlman stated that he was unaware of any Windows 7 incompatibilities. No one asked specifically about what happens if the user uninstalls Internet Explorer in Windows 7 or a European users chooses FireFox, Safari, Chrome or Opera as their web browser rather than Internet Explorer.
Will the HTMLviewer still work? I think it will because it’s dependent upon the supporting libraries but it’s a question that I’d like reassurance on from RS. But perhaps the real question is whether the HTMLviewer.IsAvailable is an adequate check and it jumps into the libraries or if it’s simply a check on what version of Windows you’re running? After all, if you’re using Windows XP or Vista you HAVE TO HAVE Internet Explorer. But it seems like Windows 7 might be changing that rule.
I’ve been particular critical of the HTMLviewer control over the past several years. Yes, RS has worked some of the bugs out but it’s still not as stable as I’d like to see it. My biggest beef is that it’s not using the same supporting libraries on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. On Mac OS X it uses WebKit. On Windows it uses Internet Explorer and on Linux it uses GTK. This leads to platform incompatibilities, instabilities and downright bugs between the platforms.
If you didn’t read the release notes for RB 2009 R3 you’ll find that RS isn’t shipping REALbasic with the Language Reference for Linux because HTMLviewer has too many issues so Linux users have to rely upon a PDF version. Ouch.
REALbasic’s strength is cross-platform so why not use a cross-platform web browser as the basis for HTMLviewer? Use Gecko (Firefox) or Webkit (Safari and Google’s Chrome)! We might need it for Windows 7 which is being released in October?
Thoughts?
More info on Cocotron can be found at http://www.cocotron.org/. Their stated goal is:
The purpose of the project is to provide an easy to use cross-platform solution for Objective-C development.
There’s a blog post at Mac Daddy World at http://macdaddyworld.com/2008/10/27/adventures-in-cocotron/
Now I can say with some certainty that xCode and Objective C isn’t as easy to learn and use as REALbasic but a programming language is a programming language and we can all learn “one more” language and IDE. Certainly one of the truths about REALbasic is that all of it’s controls are a compromise and not as feature rich as their .NET and Cocoa brethren. Cocoatron has the potential of changing some minds of people who might be looking at REALbasic and go with Cocoa if controls on both platforms are nearly identical.
It seems that Cocotron isn’t an officially supported Apple product but that might not matter in the long run if enough developers start using it. Stranger things have happened in other platforms where something becomes a de-facto standard. It wouldn’t surprise me either that Apple has a skunkworks project that does this as well so it’s possible that at any point Apple could go, “Because of demand, here’s the official Cocoa for Windows frameworks.”
One major issue I see with Cocotron is that you can only do code development on the Mac. That is certainly one of RB’s strengths where you can run on Windows, Linux or Macintosh OS X and compile and debug for the other platforms (Pro editions only).
One thing that is similar to RB is that it looks like you can debug your Windows app while running in the xCode IDE. I wonder how fast or slow that is? I might just fire up xCode this weekend.
Your thoughts?
