10-18-01

REALbasic Buzzword Machine by Erick Tejkowski

Ever feel like your bosses are making things up as they go along? Well, they probably are! Today's project is a simple one, but it evens the score. Now you can produce all sorts of buzzword-filled phrases and impress that boss with your knowledge. Only you will know that its complete nonsense!

Build the Interface

Launch REALbasic and open Window1. Add a PushButton and a Listbox to the interface, making certain to give the Listbox 3 columns. You can arrange the interface however you wish, but it might look something like this:

There, that was easy, wasn't it?

Add the Code

Double click Window1 and place the following code in the window's Open event.

This code opens a text file named resexbuzzwords and reads in all of its data. The data is a list of jargon arranged in groups of three words. Each word is separated by a comma. As the data is read from the file it is placed within a particular column in the Listbox.

Next, navigate to the Action event of PushButton1 and enter this code:

This code creates a random three digit number between 000 and 999. Each digit represents a row from the Listbox. Using these random row numbers, we pull out the data from the Listbox to finally form the random buzzword phrase.

Conclusion

If you'd like to download this week's example instead of typing it in, you can get it here. See you next week!

10-16-01

REALbasic News by Erick Tejkowski

REALbasic 3.5.2b2

Since Apple has released OS 10.1 some users have reported significant crashing when using the Carbon version of the 3.5.1 IDE. REALbasic 3.5.2b1 includes a fix for this. REALbasic 3.5.2b1 also fixes the failure to load resources in the IDE when choosing 'Run' from the menu (as opposed to cmd-R which does work); this behavior was introduced in 3.5.1. There are no other changes between 3.5.1 and 3.5.2b1. This release will likely become the official 3.5.2, but please contact us if you find any new issues between 3.5.1 and 3.5.2b1.

MovieStuffExtensions MovieStuffExtensions extend the movie class and moviePlayer control. One of the initial reasons to implement these extensions is the fact that the Movie.Handle provides a handle that does not work with Toolbox calls in Windows. In the plugin another Handle is provided that in MacOS is identical to the movie.handle and different from it in the windows environment.

Additional methods have been provided too, that extend the functionality of the Movie Class and the MoviePlayer Control. You can hide parts of the controller, draw the controller on top of the movie box, ...

New URL Button The URLButton class from Thomas Reed has been updated to version 1.1.4.

TBFinder Update. Will Cosgrove has posted an update to TBFinder. It has a ton of new features and fixes, so don't miss it.

SoundShip plugin Theo Smith has created an audio plugin that lets you synthesize audio on the fly. Cool stuff, indeed! You can download it here.

'plst' Editor Need to edit the 'plst' resources of your REALbasic applications? Try the REALbasic Application Plst Editor from Mr. Willits.

iScreenSaver iScreensaver Designer is the world's first and only cross-platform screensaver editor. iScreensaver Designer for Windows and Macintosh version 2.0beta10 is available.

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