REALbasic News by Seth Willits December 7, 2005

REALbasic Development

PDF Classes v2.0
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 2.0 of the classes now have: All types of filled and stroked shapes, Automatically wrapped styled text (can be loaded from a StyledText obect), Fonts can be embedded in the PDF, increasing portability and improving Unicode support!, Images can now be drawn from a console app!, PDF table of contents (PDF bookmarks) - that little list of links (in the drawer in Preview) - can now be generated!, Table cells now clip to their bounds. Above the freeware version of the classes, the pro version ($100) has font embedding, images in console apps, and a PDF table of contents.

FTP Suite v4.2
FTP Suite is professional software library that allows REALbasic applications to implement the FTP protocol. First released in November 2002, FTP Suite is the only full-featured and professionally supported FTP Solution available to REALbasic developers. FTP Suite 4.2 adds two new "smart" commands, DirectCommand (useful for executing FTP server-specific commands), and SITECommand (which sends a command to an FTP server using the standard FTP SITE command). FTP Suite FTP Suite ranges from $34.99 for hobbyists to $79.99 for professionals.

RadThumbnailView 3.0
Radical Breeze released another REALbasic developer component, RadThumbnailView, a picture thumbnail viewing control. 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.

RbApp v1.0.3
RbApp provides a collection of reusable REALbasic classes that can speed the development of almost any desktop application. RbApp is easily added to any Macintosh or Windows program using RB 5.5 or 2005. It includes sample applications, a printed and PDF developer’s guide and royalty-free distribution of classes compiled into the application. RbApp includes: RbEdit (text editor view), RbView (page layout), RbCommand (undo/redo), RbPalette (toolbars and palettes), RbStringList, RbXML, RbHelp, and RbLibrary (text editing). RbApp is priced at $195 for a Single User License. Contact Excel Software for site license pricing or to download a free trial edition.

ElfData Plugin v4.7
The ElfData plugin is a string processing library, which can make many string processing operations both simpler and faster, and even make things possible that before, weren't possible! The ElfData plugin is built for Unicode from the start, offering almost all of it's functionality for Unicode as well as bytes. There are many things you can't do in REALbasic that you can with ElfData, like verify that some text is valid UTF8, or check for BOMs automatically and more. Version 4.7 brings full Windows, Linux, and Mac compatibility, general speed and RAM efficiency improvements, a new RingTree class, and some other minor enhancements.

Component X Graphics 2005r2
Component X has released Component X Graphics for REALbasic 2005. Component X Graphics is a library of fast, cross-platform consistent graphic routines for stretch, flip, rotate, shear, and trim pictures, routines to adjust contrast, gamma, HSV, and RGB of pictures, routines for compositing, threshold, transitions, and pixelating images, and even a routine to blit high quality crawling ants on images. 2005r2 adds preliminary support for Linux and a new TextArc sample. Although Component X Graphics is no longer an open source project, it is now free to use in any application provided that you note its use in your documentation or the application itself.

REALbasic PDF v1.0
Toby Rush released "REALbasic PDF," a set of reusable classes that allow programmers to easily add PDF creation capabilities to their REALbasic projects. REALbasic PDF is designed to have the same programming interface as the REALbasic graphics object, meaning programmers do not need to know about the inner workings of PDF. REALbasic PDF is open-source, and developers are welcome to use it in freeware, shareware and commercial products if they include a credit to Toby Rush in their about box and/or documentation.

CSDictionary v1.0
From Bucktail Software, CSDictionary is a case-sensitive dictionary class for REALbasic 5.5 and later. CSDictionary works as a drop-in replacement for REALbasic's built-in Dictionary class. Simply import this class into your project and replace "Dictionary" with "CSDictionary" in your code. After that, any String-type keys you use will be searched case-sensitively.

MBS Plugin v5.4
Monkeybread Software released version 5.4, yet another release of the instanely large and all-encompassing MBS plug-in for REALbasic which has over 500 classes, 4 controls, and over 11,000 documented functions. It's HUGE and amazingly is backwards compatible to REALbasic 3.5. Also required is 75 MB hard disk space and around 16 MB of RAM in addition to the requirements of REALbasic and the operation system itself. Licenses are on per/year subscription model similar to REALbasic, and go for €40 and €80 for private and commercial uses respectively.