REALbasic News by Seth Willits

January 24, 2006

REAL Software News

One Month Until REAL World 2006
REAL World 2006, the third annual 3-day REALbasic User Conference, only a month away, will begin on February 27, 2006 at the Omni Austin Hotel Downtown in Austin, Texas. Why should you attend?

• Over 40 sessions hand picked by REALbasic Developers like you.
• Top Notch Speakers chosen from only the best REALbasic gurus.
• Actual REALbasic Engineers at your fingertips.
• Priceless time with other REALbasic Developers.
• Convenient Location In the heart of downtown Austin at the Omni Hotel.
• Commercial Free Experience.

Don't miss out! Hotel reservations must be made before February 5th to get our special conference rates for the beautiful Omni Hotel. Find out all the great info about REAL World at the REAL Software website, including quotes from real attendees.

REALbasic Websites

RBLibrary.com, REALbasic Learning at the Speed of Now
Are you tired of fruitless searches on out-of-date websites? Come to RBLibrary.com to find current, accurate articles, packed with the information that you need to make your programming project a quick and easy success. Exclusive content, only found at RBlibrary.com includes articles written by REALbasic experts such as Mark Nutter, Will Leshner and Aaron Ballman. You will find articles for all skill levels covering a wide range of topics. Also, in association with RBDeveloper Magazine, we present a selection of the best and most useful past articles so you can pick and choose what you like. Check back often as new articles are added daily.

REALbasic Development

PDF Classes v2.2
The PDF Classes from Fireye Software are a set of classes for generating PDFs from your REALbasic application. These classes are written entirely in REALbasic, and make it easy to create PDFs on any platform. With very little code, you can make a PDF with text, straight lines, bezier curves, rectangles, circles, and images. Version 2.2 optimizes PDF output, resulting in faster printing and file sizes up to 25% smaller than previous versions. Version 2.2 also fixes a bug with the PDFMemoryblockImage class which caused images to not be visible. Above the freeware version of the classes, the pro version ($100) has font embedding, images in console apps, and a PDF table of contents.

SQLite3ProfessionalPlugin v1.0b1
SQLite3ProfessionalPlugin is a plugin that gives you full low level access to sqlite 3 databases. It is very different from the built-in REALbasic 2005/2006 engine, because it doesn't have concepts like Database subclass or RecordSet classes built-in (even if it's easy to create a wrapper for these classes in RB). It is a near 1 to 1 map to the sqlite3 C api, so you can have access to every sqlite3 callback routine, like the progress handler routine or the sqlite3 virtual machine and so on. For more information see the SQLabs website.

RadRSS v3.0
Radical Breeze has updated RadRSS, their news feed reading socket for REALbasic, to version 3.0. RadRSS is an RSS and ATOM specific socket which does all the heavy lifting of dealing with an RSS/ATOM news feed for you. Simply supply a URL to a known RSS/ATOM feed and RadRSS will supply you with easy to manage information on the feed and all available RSS/ATOM Entries. New features in RadRSS 3.0 include the ability to read the full xml feed from the last feed received and parsing an RSS/ATOM feed from a local xml string. RadRSS requires REALbasic 2005 R3 and is part of the $30/year subscription to the Radical Breeze Developer Pack.

RadThumbnailView 2.0.1
RadThumbnailView is a picture thumbnail viewing control. RadThumbnailView 2.0.1 contains bug fixes, including a bug which caused the double click event to not fire in some cases. RadThumbnailView is, as all developer components from Radical Breeze are, written in 100% REALbasic code, requiring no plugins and are fully cross platform. Radical Breeze developer components require REALbasic 2005 R3 and are part of the $30/year subscription to the Radical Breeze Developer Pack.

Advanced Undo and Serialization Frameworks
Preparatory to release of its forthcoming (02/06) eBook, "Object Oriented Programming with REALbasic", Relevant Logic announces the free release of two significant frameworks for REALbasic: a Serialization Framework, and an Undo framework. These are the most advanced Undo frameworks available today for REALbasic, and the most advanced (possibly only) serialization/flattening/marshalling framework for REALbasic.

ReflectionCanvas and LibraryListbox
ReflectionCanvas displays a picture and mirrors it horizontally, achieving the effect that we can see in applications like iTunes in the video library.
LibraryListbox is a ContainerControl subclass implementing a ListBox control that looks and behaves like the "Source" list inside iTunes.

C.A.B. - Custom Application Button v1.0
C.A.B (direct download) is a customizable button class for REALbasic. It contains buttons for use in your Rb apps. You can choose from round, miniarrows (my version of littlearrows) or some object buttons. You can change the color of the round, miniarrows buttons and there symbols on the fly. Also with the round buttons you change the symbol on the fly. C.A.B. is free to use but requires credit in the about box or splash window.

January 11, 2006

REAL Software News

REAL Software Ships REALbasic 2006
REALbasic 2006 release 1 is packed with language enhancements, runtime features, and development environment support including:

• Localization. New Lingua (TM) utility enables developers to provide translations for their REALbasic application in multiple languages without recompiling.
• IDE Scripting. REALbasic developers can automate repetitive tasks within REALbasic. This is especially useful for automating the build process. This capability also enables developers to compile REALbasic applications via the command line interface.
• Drag Events. REALbasic applications now expose more events while the mouse is being dragged. This enables developers to create more interactive user interfaces.
• Additional Datatypes. Nine new datatypes, including signed and unsigned integers up to 64 bits, provides greater compatibility with Visual Basic. This also allows integers greater than 2 billion to be stored.
• Enumerations. Enumerations offer developers an easy way to work with sets of related constants, including the ability to name a set of constants. Enumerations reduce developer errors and make code easier to read and maintain. Enumerations also make REALbasic more compatible with Visual Basic.
• Structures. REALbasic developers can now use structures to create user-defined types (also known as UDTs). These structures are useful for API calls or for working with third-party file formats and networking protocols. Structures also improve compatibility with Visual Basic.

Any REALbasic 2005 user with a current update plan can download REALbasic 2006 Release 1 now and begin using it at no additional cost. REALbasic 2006 Standard Edition starts at $99.95 while REALbasic 2006 Professional Edition is offered at a special introductory price of $399.95 for a limited time; list price is $499.95.

REALbasic to Support Cocoa and Universal Binaries
REAL Software announced a forward-looking strategy to expand their support of Mac OS X technolgies by building a new REALbasic platform layer based on Apple's Cocoa framework. Major 3rd party REALbasic plug-in developers plan to support the new REALbasic Cocoa framework as well. Concurrent with Cocoa support, REAL Software will also deliver support for Universal Binaries, Apple's technology that enables a single application to run natively on both Intel and PowerPC architectures. Support for Cocoa and Universal Binaries will ship later this year and will be delivered via the REALbasic Rapid Release model. Any customer with a current update plan at the time of release will have access to these new features at no additional cost.

REALbasic Development

FTPKit v1.2
FTPKit from Bains Software is a set of REALbasic classes that implement the FTP protocol. FTPKit adds a full-featured FTP socket class to REALbasic which automatically parses FTP listings, allows for directory downloads and uploads, changing file permissions, custom commands, and features a powerful queue system. Version 1.2 includes several bug fixes and enhancements. A hobbyist/shareware license can be purchased for $30, and a professional license is available for $75.

SearchFieldToolbarItem
SearchFieldToolbarItem provides an HISearchField for your Mac OS X toolbars. That's right -- an actual OS control, not some hacky counterfeit control. SearchFieldToolbarItem requires Mac OS X 10.3 (that's when HISearchField was added) and REALbasic 2006r1 because it makes good use of the new shared methods added in that release.

StackCleaner
A new feature in REALbasic 2006 is the RuntimeException.Stack() property. However it outputs function names as the compiler sees them, not as they're presented to the developer in the IDE. StackCleaner aims to remedy this by translating the compiler names back into their familiar forms - simply call RuntimeException.CleanStack() and you'll be presented with the same data in a more friendly format.

Made With REALbasic

Formation v2.0
Formation is a unified idea and personal information organizer. Keep a journal, jot down ideas, make a grocery list, track your DVD collection, manage passwords, or design entire creative projects! Formation harmoniously combines lists, notes, contacts, calendar, media browser, scrapbook, smart-links, and more. New features in version 2.0 include: advanced searching, multiple importing and exporting options (including XML and RSS), enhanced calendaring functionality and more. Version 2.0 will be a free upgrade for all Formation users, and is scheduled to be released in the first half of February for both Mac OS X and Windows XP. A new user license for Formation is available for $29.95. Formation can also be purchased as part of the "10 Pack plus Formation" for $69.95 All registered Formation users will receive a free upgrade to 2.0.

IntelliScanner Home Inventory
IntelliScanner Home Inventory bundle for Mac OS X and Windows is a complete solution for keeping track of assets and belongings in any home. The complete kit includes an award-winning IntelliScanner personal barcode reader, asset and media tracking software, along with 250 pre-printed barcode tags to place on any object. Home Inventory bundle is now available at introductory pricing of $179.00 for the corded USB model, and $279.00 for the Portable model (featuring Bluetooth wireless technology or PC serial). Prices will increase to $199/$299, respectively, after Friday, January 13th.

IntelliScanner Kitchen Companion 100
IntelliScanner is now shipping Kitchen Companion 100, the Company's new handheld barcode scanner and software bundle for smart grocery shopping and nutrition/recipe management. Kitchen Companion is powered by an Internet-enabled database of over 300,000 grocery items. Simply scan the barcode on anything as it's thrown away, then download the information like a digital camera for complete details including the name, brand, category, shopping section, and size. Users can print out a categorized shopping list, or send the list to an iPod, Palm, or cell phone.

TaskTime4 v4.0
TaskTime4 provides a straightforward method of tracking time spent on jobs you do for your clients. It can generate personalized invoices which can be emailed, printed, and saved to disk. Other important features include: project status tracking, Address Book integration for adding clients, linking of related resources to projects for easy reference, project expenses tracking, ability to bill for flat rate items, scheduled and manual data backup, minimizing of project windows to small floating time controllers, and much more. Version 4.0 includes a huge number of improvements, so check it out. TaskTime4 is Shareware. The registration fee is $20 ($5 to upgrade for registered users of versions prior to 4.0).

January 4, 2006

REALbasic Development

Obfuscate v1.1
Obfuscate is a program to render obscure a string of text within REALbasic compiled code. Anyone scanning your code with a hex editor will not be able to pick out what you are trying to hide in the code without a lot of work. Use Obfuscate for serial numbers and other key information. Version 1.1 added quotes around the input string in the generated code to show leading or trailing spaces, an option for adding line continuation characters in the return line of the generated code to help make it more readable, and the ability to launch the "read me" file from the program. Obfuscate is free.

ArrayUtils Module First Release
ArrayUtils is a module with a collection of methods to add on more array functionality to REALbasic. Currently the module has functions for Average, Clone, Max, Min, RemoveSlice, Slice, and Total, and also some works-in-progress: AppendArray, Concat, and Splice. This is just an initial release to get the module out in the open, so hold on to those feature requests for the time being. There's plenty more in store just around the corner.

Mac ODBC for Access beta testers needed
Actual Technologies is looking for a small group of beta testers to provide feedback on our ODBC driver for Microsoft Access databases. The driver will allow you to perform multi-table queries against an Access database using OS X. No Windows machines are required. For the initial release, the driver is read-only - SELECT statements are supported, INSERTS and UPDATES are not. We are specifically looking for testers to validate functionality with the RB ODBC plugin. The ideal situation would be a medium to large database (more than 1000 rows, more than 5 tables) and an existing application already working under Windows using the Microsoft driver. If you are interested in participating, send an email to Jonathan Monroe.

Made With REALbasic

DOT-Tunes iTunes Webserver v2.0.2
DOT-TUNES is a dedicated iTunes web server which allows users to publish selected Artists, Albums or Playlists over the internet. This enables people to download or listen to your published tracks via a web browser, any internet enabled device or the free client software. DOT-TUNES allows you to control iTunes from a remote computer or any internet enabled device like a Sony PSP, Palm, Pocket PC or a web enabled mobile phone. DOT-TUNES is available on Mac OS X and Windows.

My Money Minder v1.7.3
My Money Minder is the easiest way to manage your personal finances. It is a Made with REALbasic application that allows you to keep track of all your expenses, income and bank account balances. These can be organised into an unlimited number of user defined Categories and Groups. My Money Minder requires a Mac running Mac OS X v10.1 or greater or Mac OS 8.5/9 with the Carbon Library v1.1 or higher installed. My Money Minder is available as a fully functional 30 day time limited demo and can be purchased for $US 12.50.