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Review
OS Settings 1.0
Issue: 1.2 (October/November 2002)
Author: Mark Davis
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 3,463
Starting Page Number: 10
RBD Number: 1106
Resource File(s): None
Related Link(s): None
Known Limitations: None
Full text of article...
The beauty of REALBasic is that it can do so many complicated things in a very simple line of code. Plugins and classes have helped almost all of us in making our programs because they can fix or do things that the developers at REAL Software haven't gotten to fixing or doing yet.
Imagine making a simple timer or calendar program in which you need to find out the current date or time. Without knowing the time layout or format, you could be stuck writing many lines of code just to get a small task done. Nobody wants to do that, especially when you really just want to work on other more important features of your program. That is why OS Settings is so useful:
it helps you examine many aspects of the operating system settings, such as finding out the numbers separators for decimals and thousands (great if you are going to compile your program for languages that use different number systems). Have you ever gone to a website that has in the news column (04/05/02) and you wondered if it was posted April 5th or May 4th? Well, you don't need to be stuck with the same date problems when you are coding in REALBasic. OS Settings can tell you the month, day, and year positions in the date, so now you will know what that number 4 stands for next time. OS Settings also lets you find out things like if the date or time has leading zeroes (ex. 04/02/99) and if the user is using a 12-hour clock or a 24-hour clock.
Sure, all of these things can be done with a good amount of code but what about when you are compiling for Windows? With OS Settings you won't need to worry about it; you can sit back and relax knowing that OS Settings will run in Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, and Windows operating systems.
Well, nothing is perfect, and there are some negative things to be said about OS Settings. One thing that disappointed me was the deceptive name. If someone is going to call their class OS Settings, maybe it shouldn't concentrate so much on date and time related settings, but also on more technical system features. Also, it would be nice if OS Settings included a feature to tell the user what day of the week it is.
Overall, the $25 price seems quite fair for its many features and its cross-platform compatibility. After using OS Settings quite a bit, I highly recommend REALBasic developers buy this class if they know their program would benefit from its many features.
In Brief Product OS Settings 1.0 Manufacturer Redcort Software Price Shareware Use: $10
Commercial Use: $25
System Requirements REALBasic 3.x; 68k, PPC, OS X, or Win32 Contact Info info-at-redcort.com
www.redcort.com/rb
Pros Cross Compatibility; fair price; very easy to use Cons Deceptive name; Could have more features Rating (1.0-5.0): 3.0
End of article.
Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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