Feature from 3.3 (January/February 2005)

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Feature

Postmortem: HelpLogic

Developing an IDE Application with the REALbasic IDE

Issue: 3.3 (January/February 2005)
Author: Dave Wooldridge
Author Bio: Dave Wooldridge is the founder of Electric Butterfly, Inc. (http://www.ebutterfly.com), the web design and software company responsible for UniHelp, WSL-Amazon, MaxiToolbar Pro, and the popular developer site, RBGarage.com.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 20,751
Starting Page Number: 13
RBD Number: 3309
Resource File(s): None
Related Web Link(s):

http://www.ebutterfly.com
http://www.ebutterfly.com/helplogic/

Known Limitations: None

Excerpt of article text...

HelpLogic is a cross-platform help authoring solution, available for both Mac OS X and Windows XP. It is a feature-rich development environment that allows users to easily create help systems for software applications and web sites from a single source of project files. With built-in features like the Visual TOC Builder, Project Workshop, HTML Code Editor, Link Manager, and Page Templates, HelpLogic was designed to be a time-saving authoring tool for programmers, documentation writers, web site designers, and e-book publishers.
HelpLogic started out as a very simple idea, but soon evolved into a very complex project. Consuming a year and a half of research, product design, and development, HelpLogic is by far the most sophisticated application I have ever worked on in REALbasic. For those of you out there who are afraid that REALbasic is not powerful enough to successfully tackle a large-scale commercial application, let me put any doubts to rest right now. HelpLogic contains thousands of lines of code, and yet it compiles into a relatively small executable and runs amazingly fast. Version control is a snap since I can compile both the Mac OS X edition and the Windows XP edition from a single REALbasic project file. Writing an integrated development environment like HelpLogic in any other programming language would have taken twice the amount of time (not to mention the headaches of maintaining a separate set of source code for each platform).

...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.