BKeeney Briefs

I answer a lot of questions from REALbasic folks.  I don’t mind.  I enjoy the varied and interesting questions that come up.  Sure, some questions seem simple but when you don’t know even the right question to ask using a tool, even as easy as REAL Studio is, is frustrating.

Heck, I’ve been there – I started out knowing nothing 10 years ago.  It’s part of the reason why I troll the REAL Software forums and answer questions.  It’s part of the reason why I’ve done the video training series (a couple of hours of Web Edition is coming up!) because I’ve found that I enjoy the challenge of getting to know a piece of RB as well as I can.  If I can do one thing to help someone else it makes my day.

I helped found the Association of REALbasic Professionals because I (and many others) felt that we needed an association devoted entirely to REALbasic.  In a year and half I think we’ve gotten off the ground and doing a decent, (if barely) adequate job.  Don’t get me wrong, we have a dedicated presence in the community and the website gets a lot of visits per month.  We have some content that you can’t get anywhere else and we have the largest repository of REALbasic projects outside of REAL Software itself (that I’m aware of at least).

We’ve picked up RBGarage which used to be the ONLY way to find RB classes, plugins, modules, and examples.  It’s in need of some serious updating and if I had all the time in the world I’d rewrite it using Web Edition.  Trust me, it’s on my list of things to do.  We also picked up the Windows Functionality Suite.  It’s recently been updated to work with REAL Studio 2010 R4 and above, but it’s also in some serious need of attention.   It needs better examples and documentation.  Again, it’s on my list.

We’ve organized two conferences, the first in Boulder, Colorado in 2009, and now the Atlanta REAL Studio Summit set for March 19th and 20th.  Putting together a conference is time consuming and rounding up speakers and getting the details right isn’t as easy as one would think.  But again, I’m very excited to be part of it because I know that if I get some things out of it hopefully someone else will to.

But then at time I sit back and wonder why it seems like I’m the only one who cares?  ARBP has become a part-time job – that I don’t get paid for.  We are in serious need of volunteers and replacements for officers for this all-volunteer organization.  I’m an engineer and programmer.  I’m not much of a leader – I recognize this and am ready to fade into the background for ARBP.  ARBP is in need of the next generation of leadership – people who can lead it into the future and do things better than what we’ve done.

If you think you have the ideas, vision and willpower to drive ARBP forward, I invite you to contact me.  If you can make it to the conference in Atlanta on March 19th and 20th I think that would be awesome.  Even if you don’t attend the sessions, it will be a good time to meet and greet many people that are heavily invested in REALbasic.

So maybe next time your in the forums you’ll answer a newbie’s question?  Maybe you can look at WFS documentation?  Maybe you can even help with ARBP?  Someone could use the help and maybe you’ll enjoy helping others.

I said back in December that I’d write a review of REAL Studio 2010 Release 5 when 5.1 was released.  Well, that didn’t quite happen as I expected.  For one thing, the 5.1 release didn’t happen until January and now we’ve discovered more information about the main component of R5 – Web Edition and its deployment problems..

2010 Release 5 and the subsequent 5.1 release (released in 2011 – how does that work?) were mainly about Web Edition.  I did a significant portion of a big web app project using Web Edition and to put it bluntly, there are many bugs, holes and significant issues with all aspects of Web Edition and I can’t really recommend it for production apps right now.  There are still significant issues with browser compatibility that need to be ironed out as well.

Deployment of standalone web apps seems to be okay, but installation of FastCGI applications was hit and miss (mostly miss) on commercial web hosts.  Since it was pretty much a black box installation it either worked or it didn’t and neither RS nor the web hosts were able to help much in diagnosing the problem.  And now we’ve been told that FastCGI isn’t all that RS hoped it would be and a new middleware application needs to be on the server so it can run as a CGI application.  This is disheartening to everyone that put in significant time trying to figure out deployment issues (including me).

Obviously, despite all of the problems in the first release of Web Edition, my client does have a working web app on his website (sorry, can’t share the URL).  To me this truly does indicate how powerful the RS web framework is and with a little more thorough testing and polish it should be a nice addition to my toolset.  I see much promise in Web Edition.  It makes the creation of web applications very easy.

Most of the skills you’ve spent years developing for desktop applications can be transferred to Web Edition with very little learning curve.  It’s those little things you’ve come to expect in desktop edition that will make you feel exasperated.  WebPage constructors don’t work as you would expect and sometimes subclassing WebDialogs will cause them to just not work and the Application.UnhandledException doesn’t catch exceptions and doesn’t let you keep your web app running.  All of these, by the way, have been marked as fixed in 2011 R1 already so RS is being very responsive to the major issues.

The other significant part of Release 5 was Cocoa.  Many things were fixed and much of it is now working.  Of course the first project I tried in Cocoa failed miserably due to a graphics issue but that appears to already be fixed (after I submitted a feedback report with a reproducible example project).  So despite all the fixes it’s still a work in progress.

RS really needs as many people using Cocoa as possible to find those hidden or quirky problems.  Always remember that RS doesn’t always use their own product like we do:  so creating feedback reports with example projects is the best way to help them.

A very promising note, though, is that the Feedback application that is available to beta testers is now Cocoa.  In my usage it’s pretty solid – but not quite perfect.  But it is built using an alpha build of Studio 2011 R1.  So it’s close.

So if you missed out on R5/5.1 you probably didn’t miss out on much unless you were specifically looking for Web Edition and Cocoa.  The march to Cocoa continues and it’s getting better (really!).  Web Edition shows a lot of promise and WILL get better (it has to) and hopefully the deployment issues go away in 2011 R1 which will hopefully go into beta testing soon.

If you had one thing to change about REAL Studio, what would it be?  I’ve been giving this some thought recently and I think the number one thing that I wish was better is the training material.  To me, training material includes tutorials and example projects.

Yes, there are examples, but I find them to be so simple they don’t scale very well into my own applications.  Often, when I’m learning something new in REAL Studio I find the examples to almost hinder me because they demonstrate the most basic way to use <insert control/class/technique here> and not how you’d use it in a real application.  Don’t get me wrong, I understand that you need those types of examples but I want/need something just a little more in-depth.  I could just as easily argue that a more complete project that demonstrates several things at once is better than the simple ones but, as they say, to each their own.

Along with examples, I find the lack of REALbasic training materials on the RS website to be…interesting.  If you look at their training webpage at http://www.realsoftware.com/support/training.php they are pointing to three 3rd party websites (one of which is mine, by the way).  I find it odd that a development tool that is meant for hobbyist developers doesn’t really have a nice and big tutorials and training section.  I’m not complaining (because it’s part of my income) – just pointing it out.

Don’t get me going on the lack of Web Edition apps on their website…

Friday afternoon grousing material for you.  What would you change?

The January/February 2011 edition of REAL Studio Developer magazine is out.  My regular column talks about the value of ‘face time’ and how, despite all of the electronic means available to us, of communicating with one another, sitting across the table with another person is a very powerful thing.

Sadly, we (BKS) meet very few of our clients face-to-face.  Those that we do have become more than just clients – they’re colleagues, partners, and sometimes even friends.

Personally, I think this is why I’m so excited about the REAL Studio conference coming up in March in Atlanta.  It’s a lot of work to put on a conference and do a presentation.  But past conferences have shown that I always come home very happy and jazzed about the things that I’ve learned and people I’ve met.  Exhausted?  Definitely!  But well worth it.
What about you?

If you are a REAL Studio developer, you might want to check this out.  The Omega Bundle for REAL Studio developers is now available and is a very attractively priced bundle of 10 REAL Studio development tools for only $399 which is 80% off their regular price.

The bundle includes:

• Formatted Text Control
• Elastic Window
• Mask-R-Aid
• RB Code Reports
• REAL Studio Developer Magazine
• Aspen Icon Set
• Valentina Office Server Unlimited
• Franklin 3D Game Engine
• The complete Monkeybread Software plugin set
• Valentina ADK

I can tell you that there are more than a few items on this list that I already own and use on a regular basis.  I can’t tell you how happy this makes me to see this sort of bundle available to RB developers.
More information can be found at http://www.omegabundle.com

Welcome to 2011.  I hope that you, and your family, have a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year!

If you’ve not heard about it already, THE REAL Studio event of the year is happening on March 19th and 20th in Atlanta, Georgia.  The Association of REALbasic Professionals (ARBP) and REAL Software are hosting the REAL Studio Summit 2011.

That’s just 10 weeks away!  There is still time to sign up and save some cash.  Until the end of January the cost is only $350 but after that it’s $450.

Nowhere else will you get as high a density of REALbasic developers in one location.  Currently there are REALbasic developers coming from across the United States, Europe and possibly Australia to come together to talk about our favorite development tool – REAL Studio!

This conference is shaping up nicely because there are topics that should interest many people.  If you want to learn more about the new Web Edition there’s a session on that.  Learn how to get your apps ready for the Mac App Store.  Learn about Cocoa and what’s going to be forthcoming in REAL Studio.  Learn how to manipulate PDF’s in your RB applications.  That’s just a few of the highlights.  See the complete session and speaker list at http://arbpmembers.org/real-studio-summit-2011/sessionspeaker-listing.

Some argue that conferences are a waste of time and resources and that you can do the same thing electronically.  I disagree, for many reasons.  There is something special about people coming together to discuss any particular topic.  Being able to sit across the table and look someone in the eye is an important quality that we overlook a lot of times.  I know I trust people more when I’ve met them in person than I do when I haven’t.

In years past (at REAL World events and the Colorado Summit ’09) I’ve found that the time in-between sessions is, in many ways, more valuable than the sessions themselves.  Developers that are business competitors discuss what they do to find clients.  They discuss the realities of being a business owner.  They discuss things face-to-face that they’d never do electronically.  Of course everyone gets something different out of conferences but I’ve found them invaluable as a RB consultant.

It’s also a place where work can be found.  I’ve not been to a conference where there wasn’t someone looking for a REALbasic developer.  Since there is no higher concentration of RB developers than at these conferences it’s an excellent way to find developers and find work.  Plus, you never know when another developer might have a lead and they’re too busy to work on so networking with other developers is always a good idea.

REAL Studio is made in REALbasic and it’s awesome that RS ‘eats its own dog food’ but we, as users, don’t necessarily have the same needs.  Many of todays biggest features have been discussed (ad nauseum it seems) at past conferences before they were implemented so don’t underestimate the power of cornering discussing things with an RS engineer.

I’m excited about this conference and I can’t wait to see you there.  See you in Atlanta in March!

A couple people have asked me already asking if I will be doing a review of REAL Studio 2010 Release 5 (which was released this week).  The answer is, yes, of course.  However, I will be waiting until R5.1 for the full review since RS has already stated it is coming.

I’ll share some initial thoughts on R5:

• Web Edition is interesting but it is only a 1.0 product.  There are more than a few quircks yet to be worked out from top to bottom and thus I can’t really recommend it for clients – yet.
• I’m working on a major project using Web Edition.  For the most part it’s just like making desktop apps except the controls and events are slightly (if not irritatingly) different.
• Unlearning 10 years of REALbasic habits is going to take a while since some things just aren’t possible right now (e.g. web page constructors don’t work quite the same way as they do in desktop apps).
• I’m disappointed that RS does not have some good web app examples running on their website (or any website) by now.  This is the message it sends to potential users:  ”Hey, look at this nifty new development tool for web apps.  It works even though we’re not showing anything on our website!  Trust us!  Really!  You’re going to love it!”
• If you’re looking for something new or impressive for either desktop apps or more news on Cocoa then I’d say talk to me in 2011.

Anyway, more in-depth review and news when R5.1 comes out.

It’s Thanksgiving week in the United States and it’s traditionally a time where we give thanks for another good year.  This year I’d like to give a big shout-out to REAL Software for REAL Studio.  Thanks, REAL Software!

I’ve been pretty hard on REAL Software the past three or four months.  I’ve been bitten hard by several bugs and I’ve been pretty vocal about it.  As one of the regular commenters noted to a disgruntled user:

As much as we whine and complain, we all have a love/hate relationship with REAL Studio. We love it for its easy-to-use IDE, it’s readable but powerful language, its ability to compile cross-platform apps, etc.

My sentiments exactly!  REAL Studio is incredibly easy to use.  REALbasic, the language, is pretty well thought out.  It gets better with every release which happens every 90 days (sometimes less).

REAL Studio, when you get down to it, doesn’t let you make too many mistakes.  It does everything it can to prevent you from doing something stupid.  It’s a development tool and that’s about as complex a piece of software as you’re going to get and it does it on three platforms (four if you count Cocoa as another platform and five if you count the new Web Edition).  Auto-complete isn’t perfect, but it’s useful in learning the language.  Sure, I wish it had some more powerful features/tools built in to it, but for the most part it’s easy-to-use.

I’ve spent some time in xCode recently and it’s not the same.  It has a tremendous learning curve.  There are settings all over the place and I’m actually quite amazed that Apple, being the user interface experts, have such a crappy IDE.  Auto-complete?  Please.  It’s barely usable unless you know exactly what you want before you start typing.  Granted, I’ve not spent 1,000 hours in xCode but I think it’s safe to say that REAL Studio has a MUCH shorter learning curve.

The REALbasic framework also seems to make much more sense than quite a bit of the Cocoa frameworks.  The RB frameworks are fairly logical and encapsulated rather nicely (there are notable exceptions) but it seems (to a newbie at least) that the Cocoa frameworks are all over the place in terms of logical encapsulation and usability.  I’ve heard enough complaints from .NET developers to wonder if many of the same issues don’t exist there as well.

Could it be that a smaller development group actually makes framework development easier, or at least more coherent?  Very few people (in relative terms) have touched the RB framework over the years than either Cocoa or .NET.  I think this is a good thing because the RB framework is remarkably consistent.

Whether you like the 90 day release cycle or not, it makes REAL Studio predictable.  You know, to within a couple of weeks, when the next version will be out.  This is nice to know.  It’s also nice that RS has release several point releases when the large bugs have been found and reported.

Sure, it drives me nuts that old bugs sometimes reoccur and new bugs were introduced in recent releases.  Sure, I find it hard to believe that new features haven’t been thoroughly documented and vetted before release.  But at the same time I feel that my public bitching and whining (and that’s what it really was) may have gotten the point across that it’s unacceptable for my business.

In the long run, I’m thankful for REAL Studio.  It pays the bills for my family and my employees.  From a consulting standpoint I can create really rich and complex applications for Mac, Windows and Linux with minimal platform specific code.  Is it perfect?  Of course not, but I’ve not found a better environment for me and my clients.

REAL Studio is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool.  It takes me days to create a rich application that takes weeks to do in other tools.  Many features are remarkably full-featured and have stood the test of time since they haven’t changed much in the nine years I’ve been using REAL Studio.  The fact that they’ve added some pretty powerful language features, that maybe 10% of the user base will ever use, speaks for how powerful and expandable the language and platform really is.

It’s easy to focus on the negatives, but this week I’m going out of my way to say thanks.  I’m thankful for (in no particular order) awesome clients, a successful business, good health, good friends, an awesome employee, my super wonderful family, and yes, even REAL Software.

I’m thankful for all the hard work that REAL Software has put into REAL Studio.  So thank you to all the men and women of REAL Software.  I wish you much success, happiness and prosperity in the future!

I have a hard time falling asleep.  Always have and probably always will.  So I lay awake thinking about ‘stuff’.  Last night I started to think about the REAL Software Feedback system.  I have no particular beef with it – it’s just it doesn’t help me very much in certain areas.

I’ve used a lot of different bug reporting systems over the years.  Some are awful and some are really good depending upon the project.  Feedback is somewhere in the middle and I think a few changes would make it an outstanding system for REAL Software and for us users – particularly those that participate in the beta program.

First, add a category to the feedback report.  Just off the top of my head, I think these categories would be helpful:  Feature Request, Crash, Failed Assertion, Incorrect Functionality, and Incorrect Documentation.  This would be helpful for RS engineers in working on the really important types first (i.e. crash and failed assertions) and the rest later.

Second, I need to be able to say what version of REAL Studio I’m reporting against.  I often get a message from an RS developer asking what version of Studio I saw this in because they don’t see in the version they’re working on.  I’ve resorted to putting the version in the comments which seems kind of silly.  Feedback, as I understand it, is using inter-app communications to get the version of Studio.  As long as it’s running.  If it’s not running it uses (assumes?) the latest version.  Which might be incorrect.

I often report things when Studio ISN’T running (I just go up to the Finder search and type Feedback to open it quickly).  So I’m either reporting no version or against a possible wrong version.  It would be nice if Feedback recognized this and let me select from a possible list of versions.

I understand that RS will test it against whatever their most current version is, but to be more efficient I would think knowing what the exact version the bug is reported against would be more helpful than showing the latest version.

We now have incremental release notes.  Yay!  Maybe the Release version information should be in Feedback too.  Ideally, I’d love to get an email from the Feedback system whenever the version it was fixed in was released.

For example, I noticed in the latest release notes for R5 alpha 2 that a bug I submitted is supposedly fixed.  As the submitter I would like an email telling me that R5 alpha 2 has a fix for that bug/feature request and kindly asks me to verify that the it is fixed or not.  As the submitter, I should be able to Verify or Reject the fix.

Not being able to vote down a feature request is a long standing beef of mine, but I’ll not beat that dead horse today.  Perhaps the voting should be broken out into two categories:  Feature Requests and Bug Fixes and presented as such?

Well, that’s it for today.  Maybe tonight I’ll go to sleep quickly.  What do you think would be more helpful in Feedback?

I feel like I’m repeating myself.  Yet another Saturday wasted where I started getting into the details on a new REAL Studio training video only to get stymied by a bug.  This bug is related to FileType UTI’s and has been reported, and verified and has been around since 2010 R2.

Unless you’re using REAL Studio creating document-type applications and forcing yourself to use UTI’s you’ll never get bitten by it.  This bug isn’t a particularly bad bug as far as bugs go but it does involve project file DATA LOSS which is one of the worst types of bugs in my opinion.

It furthers my belief that REAL Software doesn’t create enough new projects using REAL Studio that are full, complete, going to be used by end user type projects.  I’m not talking about examples because they’re generally too simple and only demonstrate how to use one thing.  What I’m talking about is making a complete project that does something real and useful in a way that exercises major portions of the REALbasic framework, coordinated such that it could be considered commercial quality (even if it does nothing real).

In my case, I had a need on several projects recently to use Virtual Volumes.  I searched for a utility and the one that’s been around for years was no longer available.  I ended up making a quick and dirty utility to make them which wasn’t all that hard.

After weeks of adding new functionality to it and getting it into good working condition I decided that it would make a good training video to show new developers how to use REAL Studio.  Of course, that’s where the real work began since I now had to look at every aspect in Mac OS X (drag and drop) and in Windows (non-MDI windows) and make some changes.  I also incorporated feedback from clients that were using the utility as well.

REAL Studio and REALbasic are huge – I don’t think I appreciated that until I started doing the training videos and started listing everything I need to discuss.  Even on the things that I’ve already done (that’s over 100 videos and close to 25 hours of training!) I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface and my list keeps getting bigger and bigger.  So I understand that bugs happens and the Law of Unintended Consequences can hit for seemingly innocuous changes.

I talked about example projects earlier.  There is one example in the REAL Studio Examples folder that is a great example of what I wished RS would do more of:  The Database Example.  It is a more or less complete example of a database application that does reports.  It is pretty much how I go about my projects and it has copious comments.  It combines multiple techniques, classes, and controls together that is how real world users would do it. I wish there were more examples like it.

It’s a prime candidate to get updated with the new Segment control.  The new Prepared databased statements would be another fine thing to add to it.  It’s a good example project that should get updated with newest stuff.  It would also force the developer to use it in a real world situation and would probably expose some of the weaknesses we find in new stuff.

In general, I’m surprised that they don’t do more tutorial and sample projects showing how to do things in REAL Studio.  But then if they did that I’d have to find other things to complain about on Saturdays.  ;)