REALbasic News by Seth Willits March 22, 2006

I Have Returned!
You know how things go... they get a little crazy every once in a while. I'm back after not updating for a month, hopefully to be quite regular again. I apologize in advance for some of the news items being kind of stale, but these are the more interesting ones I have. (Sorry, I'm not going to post all the news from the last month! :)

REAL Software News

Celebrating Over 100,000 Users
REAL Software announced REAL World that REALbasic is celebrating the major milestone achievement of 100,000 users. Ken Houghes, a developer with Vesta Technology, is being honored as REALbasic’s 100,000th user. Mr. Perlman contacted Mr. Houghes to break the news and tell him the company would be offering him REALbasic Professional Edition licenses for each of the three platforms REALbasic supports, Windows, Macintosh and Linux. When asked how he felt about being singled out for the honor, Mr. Houghes exclaimed, "It was really great, getting the REALbasic Pro keys, and to hear from Geoff Perlman. I’m really looking forward to working with REALbasic."

REALbasic Taking Poland By Storm!
The Poland Ministry of Education and Science has purchased 3,500 REALbasic software licenses to teach programming in schools across Poland. “The Ministry of Education and Science has been looking for a programming environment to replace Visual Basic to teach programming on the Macintosh,” said Malgorzata Charezinska, vice president of key accounts and education for Apple Poland. REALbasic has been installed in over 300 lyceums (secondary schools for students aged 16-19) across Poland. REALbasic is taught in the informatics program which covers both systems management and computer programming. Congrats to them, and congrats to REAL Software!

REALbasic Development

Windows Functionality Suite v2.3
The Windows Functionality Suite is a set of REALbasic classes and modules that provide convenient access to things that are not included in the framework already. It is an on-going open source project that includes many different pieces of Windows-specific functionality for your application. It is provided free of charge and includes a rich feature set including:
- FTP Support
- Console support for GUI applications
- OS Version Information
- System Colors
- Registry Helpers
- Locale Information
- Cryptography
- Plug and Play Notifications
- StatusBar Control
- TreeView Control
- Date/Time and Calendar Controls
- Extended ToolTip Support
- Window and FolderItem Extensions
- And Much More!

PDF Classes v2.4.1 - Generate PDFs in REALbasic
Fireye Software's PDF Classes are a shareware class library which allows you to create PDF documents from your applications. The PDF Classes have been updated to version 2.4.1. New in versions 2.4.0 and 2.4.1:
- Fixed encoding bugs! High-ASCII text displays correctly, even when not embedding fonts.
- Fixed font name corruption on Windows.
- Added the capability to check whether a given font is available for the PDF Classes to use.
- Greatly expanded and improved examples.

While most features of the PDF classes are available in the freeware version, some features such as font embedding and table of contents generation are for licensed users only.

StringUtils Module v1.4 - The String Functions REALbasic Should Have
The StringUtils module is a public-domain module of string functions. Methods to reverse a string, remove certain characters, convert a string to hex, handle fields containing quotes, measure the similarity of two strings, SoundEx, EditDistance, and Double Metaphone algorithms. Version 1.4 improves the speed of HexB slightly, added MatchCase function (makes the case style of one string match that of an example string), fixed a bug in NthFieldQuoted which would cause it to fail when, the separator occurred as the first character of the string, added Random function (generates a random string of a given length and character set, and made all functions available to console apps except Sprintf.

GraphPro v3.1 - Graphing Classes for REALbasic
GraphPro is a set of flicker-free graphing classes for REALbasic with a very large feature set. It is cross-platform, working on Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, Windows, and recently Linux. GraphPro costs $75 (which includes the source code). For a detailed list of features (far too many to list here) see the GraphPro website.

OxMath Classes Release 1
The OxMath Classes are standalone 3D math classes (vector, quaternion, etc.) plus "function" classes useful for procedural animation. These are the promised math classes ripped from Frank Condello's game engine. The function classes are responsible for all the funky shader animations in that demo, but are useful for all sorts of other things as well. The rest of the classes are nothing special but may contain some useful bits.