BKeeney Briefs

You can file this one in the “Bob was bored and had a wild/random thought” category.  :)

The Real Studio download package comes with several hundred example projects.  These examples range from very useful to downright useless (in my opinion) but they’re there for people to explore and use.  So in other words, the example may or may not be all that helpful depending upon your skill level.

So my question of the day is why are these part of the download package/installer and not available in a special section of the Real Software website?  It would save on download sizes and it would become a centralized location for Real Studio examples.  Ideally, anyone could contribute to this list.

When we started ARBP and added the Source Code Repository, this was the intention.  I wanted it to be the Planet Source Code of Real Studio projects.  The ARBP source code repository has over a hundred projects and gets a fair amount of traffic and downloads.  The drawback is that few people contributed to it and the older projects are really showing their age.  The other drawback is that it’s NOT Real Software and despite only needing an account to use it a lot of people shy away.

The leading argument against such a page on Real Software’s website are the Real Studio users themselves.  There is a tendency for Real Studio users to complain (loudly) when the examples don’t work.  They are justified, in my opinion, since examples in the download package should work with the version of Real Studio in the download package.  To me, if it’s in the download package it implies that it works implicitly with that version of Real Studio.  Unfortunately, that’s not how it works and sometimes leaves new users with a bad taste in their mouths.

A projects repository web page doesn’t have this problem as the person uploading the project sets the version of Real Studio it was created with and perhaps what operating system and adds some tags to it or something like that.  How cool would it be to upload the project file(s), have an RS web app scan it, pull out the keywords and make it part of a searchable system?  Of course it would allow other users to vote and leave comments.

I post a fair bit in the Real Software forums.  Often times I point to the relevant information the poster needs in the Real Software wiki or to various 3rd party developer websites.  I could see a projects page doing something similar and allow me to link to the project that would help the poster out.

Another thought would be to make this a Web Edition application since essentially we’re talking about a web app that’s a front end to a database.  Perfect place for a WE we app in my opinion.

Could ARBP do this?  Of course they could and it was discussed, in-depth, at the Atlanta conference in March.  They could do it – I have no doubt since they have some pretty smart people in ARBP – I just don’t think ARBP should be the one doing it.  I’m arguing that Real Software is a better and more logical entity to host this thing.

The Real Studio community isn’t as large as Visual Basic – that’s just simple math.  You could argue that a mere percentage or two of users would ever contribute to the projects page and that probably true.  However, assuming that Real Software sticks around for a few more decades, I would argue that one contribution a month is more than what we have now and more examples are better.

What say you?

If you use Real Studio and are a blogger, the fine folks over at Figa Labs have (re?) released a plugin for WordPress that formats your REALbasic code properly in WordPress.  This is a very nice plugin and is apparently based the PHP code of an old Real Studio employee.  So now your code snippets go from this:

Function Ask(instructions as string, byref initialtext as String, bPassword as boolean = false, w as Window) As Boolean

stInstructions.text = instructions

efText.Password = bPassword

efText.text = initialtext

efText.SelectAll

if w = nil then

self.ShowModal

else

self.ShowModalWithin w

end

if bSave then initialtext = efText.text

return bSave

End Function

 

To this:

The only tricky part it remembering the shortcodes, which isn’t really all that hard.  ”["rbcode"]” starts the formatting and “["/rbcode"]” ends it (remove the quotes to actually get it to work).  Ideally I’d love to have a button that lets me do format the code without having to remember the shortcodes but hey, life isn’t perfect.

Happy coding, and blogging!

This seems like a no brainer, but we’ve been bitten by it and we’ve picked up the pieces of multiple projects from others who haven’t lived by this rule:  If you’re creating a cross platform application, test early and test often on the platform you’re NOT developing on.

Real Studio is a cross-platform development tool.  It runs on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.  In the Professional/Enterprise versions you can build for other platforms and debug on the other platforms as well while staying your native environment (using remote debugging).  It’s really an awesome experience running Real Studio on the Mac and running the executable via VMare (or even on another machine in the office) running Linux or Windows.

We see it time and time again (and we’ve been guilty of it ourselves a time or two) where someone does all their development on Mac OS X and tests on Mac OS X but their app looks awful once they get it into Windows.  Text backgrounds looks like crap and the flickering is atrocious whenever they resize the window or move controls around at runtime.

The reason?  Mac OS X and Linux have double buffered windows while Microsoft Windows does not.  Mac OS X and Linux always draw to a buffer first and then draw to the screen.  Windows does not which is the cause of much flickering.  Real Studio has some easy workarounds for a bulk of the flickering and some simple rules of thumb to reduce, if not eliminate, Windows flickering issues.  Among them:

• Canvas objects should have Double Buffering turned on
• Do not erase the background of Canvas and Container Controls
• Be wary of using Refresh – perhaps Invalidate is a better choice
• Layering of controls will almost always get you into trouble.  Putting anything over a Canvas control (that draws anything) is almost a sure way of getting into trouble

So the lesson is that you really should be testing your app in all of the environments you plan on supporting early in your development process.  If you wait until you’re about ready to ship it’s too late.  You might have some fundamental assumptions in the project that’s hard to fix now that you’re almost done.

Cross platform development is easy using Real Studio, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t differences.  You need to test for those differences early and on a regular basis.

Since I spend most of my time on the Mac side I’m assuming Windows and Linux RB developers have the same issues going to the other platforms.  What are some of the issues you see?  Did I miss any reasons for Windows flickering?

As many of you know, I switched from a shared host that was I very happy with (BlueHost.com if you care) to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) so that I could run Web Edition apps (without fear of getting booted off for an app that took down an entire server) and get more speed from my website.  After 3 or 4 people were streaming videos the whole site become practically unusable and that’s the big drawback of using a shared web host – your server might have a thousand websites all clamoring for server processor attention at any given time.  So I switched.

I did my research and looked around and got recommendations.  I was settled on one and called and they called back a day later.  That was no good.  I called choice #2 and after a single, disastrous phone call with their tech support I decided to go to choice #3 which was MyHosting.com for their VPS package.  I went with them because I called tech support and got a real human being who was very helpful (and answered the question correctly).  So I went with them.

Unfortunately, since then I’ve had horrible tech support.  It took two weeks of tech support to resolve an issue with ordering (yes, just ordering) an SSL certificate.  It’s taken three weeks of going back and forth for them to acknowledge that the mail server wasn’t working right (this is after a very long-time client had emails bounce).  The latest round has taken over week of getting Spam Assassin installed on the server (again some ordering/billing issue) and the damn thing doesn’t even work.  I had one issue early on where the technician actually gave me the wrong instructions and caused my entire domain to be unavailable over a weekend.  So collectively I’ve had a very bad experience.

I should have learned my lesson years ago.  I used MyHosting at one point for my shared hosting.  Again, friendly, very polite people, but their tech support just wasn’t very good and I was spending too much time worrying and fretting over my website.

So I’m on the hunt again for a good, friendly, and useful VPS.  I don’t have the time to muck around with my web server for days on end as I have with MyHosting – I have a business to attend to.  At this point, I’d ideally love for someone to just switch all three of my domains over to their system and just “get ‘er done” if you’ll pardon the colloquialism.

So I’m looking for recommendations.  Don’t recommend one unless you have are absolutely thrilled with them.  Price is always an issue but frankly I just want the damn thing to work and if I do have a problem I want to call and be able to talk to a human being that knows the subject material rather than reading from a script.  The reason I mentioned BlueHost above is that I loved their shared hosting AND their tech support was always helpful – always.  And I used them for five separate websites (and still use them).  Too bad they don’t do VPS.  :(

 

BKeeney Software Announces Over Six Hours of Web Edition Training Videos

BKeeney Software has announced the addition of over six hours of video training material devoted to the Web Edition of Real Studio.  The new training videos pushes the total number of hours of high quality web streaming video and project files to over 30 hours.

The Web Edition videos discuss how each web control works, including the events that you’re most concerned with, and demonstrates the use of it.  Most videos come with a project file and most come with an example web app running on the BKeeney Software website.

Parts of the Web Edition are free to access by simply signing up for the free Guest Pass at http://www.bkeeney.com/create-account.  The Guest Pass gives you access to over nearly forty five minutes of Web Edition specific material and two and half hours of total Real Studio material.

Several Guest Pass Videos for Web Edition:

Getting Started with Web Edition:

http://www.bkeeney.com/realbasic-training-section/free-content/article/2-Free%20Content/332-web-editiongetting-started

Style Editor Walkthrough:

http://www.bkeeney.com/realbasic-training-section/free-content/article/2-Free%20Content/334-web-editionstyle-editor

Installing your Web App:

http://www.bkeeney.com/realbasic-training-section/free-content/article/2-Free%20Content/371-web-editioninstalling-your-web-apps

Users may purchase one of a variety of memberships including several three month membership types and a yearly membership.  Memberships start at just $55 and give you access to over thirty hours of training video.

With over one hundred videos to watch there is an incredible amount of material available to novices and experienced developers alike.  To get a complete feel for all of the material covered in the videos, please visit the tag cloud at http://www.bkeeney.com/realbasic-training-section/cloud-tag.

Students and educators should contact BKeeney Software to see if they’re eligible for a 40% discount.  ARBP paid members should check their discounts page on the ARBP website to find their 20% discount coupon code.

The host of your videos is Bob Keeney.  Bob is the owner of BKeeney Software, a software consulting firm specializing in Real Studio application development for over ten years.  For more information on their services and products, please visit http://www.bkeeney.com.

 

[Edit]:  We are currently working on resolving our SSL problem.

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Hi folks.  You’ve persevered through the web server change and hopefully you’ve noticed the refresh.  Just a few of the changes to come!

Moving web servers isn’t very fun but hopefully the responsiveness will be much better for the REAL Studio Video training users.  We had quite a few comments that the site was very slow which makes sense since it was on a shared server with probably several thousand other websites all demanding resources at the same time.

The Serial communications saga continues…. Never say die when it comes to serial communications because, like so many things in programming, there are multiple areas where the problem might lie.

Here are the facts as I knew them this morning.  Given a hardware configuration (serial port to fiber optic converter to fiber optic converter to Serial to USB converter), I could reliably talk to my device in Mac OS X and Windows XP.  In Vista and Windows 7 it failed.  The serial port monitor software that I running in Windows was able to see the messages with 100% accuracy while the RB serial control was not.

Sounds like an RB bug, right?  I submitted it, with video proof, and had a reasonably happy weekend.  The client was not happy, understandably, and after consulting with REAL Software (who, by the way, responded to my email promptly this morning) agreed that it might be a bug and they would be happy to try to reproduce (and ultimately fix it) if we sent them the hardware and a sample program and some money to do it for the R4 release.  R4 will come out sometime this fall, by the way.

The client was not happy about the additional cost and the time delay as you can understandably imagine.  So I said I’d do some research and figure out if other people are having serial issues too before issuing a recommendation to send all the materials to RS.  I’m sure some of you are guessing where this is going.

It just so happens that the specific manufacturer of the Serial to USB Converter (Prolific) has some serious issues with their Windows 7 (and Vista) drivers.  After a few more specific web searches I found an alternative (perhaps older) driver that works fine if you do the following in Windows 7:  Right click on the properties of the installer, select Run as Administrator and select Vista SP2 under the compatibility popup.

Run the installer, restart Windows 7 and Voila!  We now have a fully functioning driver – that works – in Windows 7.

Hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20 and I *should* have thought about this last week.  I had “something in the middle” that I assumed worked.  I had evidence that it did work (the serial port monitor) but my assumption was false (obviously).

Debugging serial communications (and network communications for that matter) is a royal pain in the behind.  When something isn’t working, work the problem backwards.  When there’s hardware involved, verify that the hardware works or try to eliminate the hardware.  In my case, my Windows 7 doesn’t have a true serial port (it’s running on my Mac in VMWare).

So maybe you’ll learn something from my experience and pain.  Maybe you’ll keep yourself from having a bruised forehead (from banging your head up against a brick wall).

Happy coding!

I discovered, today, that automated backups are only good if the backup actually takes place.  A directory on the BKeeney website got corrupted and unusable today (don’t ask since that’s a really good question) wiping out the key to, well, everything.  After scrambling to figure it out I called the ISP to see if they could help (like maybe from their backup).

They gladly said that, of course, they could help.  They usually have 2 backups that they can restore from.  The tech looked up the info and then sheepishly said, “Until it gets too big”.  Which of course, with 20 hours of video (in both H.264 and Flash formats), easily exceeds their limit.

So, for now, the bkeeney site is down until I can get things reinstalled.  Oh, and just to make matters worse, the website of the software author we use is also currently down (related?  possibly but I doubt it) so if it takes a full install to recover I’ll have to wait until they come back up to download the install packages.

Did I mention that I’ve been incredibly busy with consulting work?  I don’t have time for this crap.

This will probably be the last post of the year so I can spend some quality time with my family.  Have a very happy holiday season.  For those celebrating Christmas, have a very Merry Christmas.  Have a joyous and safe New Years as well.

One thing that’s come up recently (and more than once actually) is the need for training materials for REALbasic.  I’ve seriously been thinking about doing video training sessions and offering them through the BKeeney.com website as a subscription service and streaming video (physical DVD’s are a possibility but increases the initial startup expense and I want to avoid physical inventory that’s dated).

Any sort of video training will take a fair amount of time to complete.  Just covering the basics of REALbasic will take months to get something out the door.  Add in the Rapid Release Model and I will always be aiming at a moving target.  How many hours of video is needed to put the shingle out?  What’s a good price (keeping in mind that while doing the videos I’m not doing as much consulting work)?

My guess is that most RB developers reading my blog have been using RB for a while but I’d like to get your opinions on this as well:  How much of a beginner level versus intermediate and advanced material?  And even for beginner material do I even need to go so far as to explain what variables are?  In other words do I assume the student knows absolutely nothing about software development or has at least a little knowledge of some other language?

In that same light, would problem solving videos be better than a more traditional approach?  For example, I could do a video training on “How to Open files of a particular type” versus exploring the various things in the FolderItem.  Each approach has its merits and drawbacks.  What do you think?  I could argue both ways.

Regardless, the one thing I think that will happen is every video will be tagged with the RB objects used and perhaps even the object methods used.  So doing a search on FolderItem would result in a bunch of videos that use the folderitem.  If you did FolderItem.Item you’d might find videos that iterate through the items in a directory and so on.  The drawback to the tags is that any complete application examples will use a lot of different RB objects which then might make the tags worthless because a search will hit every video.

For what it’s worth, there is some existing REALbasic training.  They have 7 hours of RB training and a subscription gives you access to a LOT of other applications (which I could never offer).  I’ve watched all the free training and it seems to do an adequate job but it hasn’t been updated since 2007.  I plan on updating more often than every two years – especially if I can pay my bills from it!

I’ve also done a minor example application and recorded it.  With a little editing and speed up of typing sequences it’s at two and half hours and I don’t consider it done yet!  Add in an IDE walk-through, some Remote Debugging, and miscellaneous topics and I probably have 4 to 5 hours of relatively decent video footage.  I think I can do it, I just need some positive encouragement or negative feedback before I commit myself.

At this point, dear readers, I’d like your thoughts.  Good or bad idea?  What are the pitfalls that I haven’t thought of yet?  Will people actually pay for an on-going video series on REALbasic?  Should the emphasis be on beginner, intermediate, or advanced material?  Should I let the members determine the production order via an online poll?