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Issue 4.1

REVIEW

REALbasic 2005

Issue: 4.1 (September/October 2005)
Author: Toby Rush
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 4,182
Starting Page Number: 10
Article Number: 4106
Related Web Link(s):

http://www.realsoftware.com/

Full text of article...

With REALbasic 2005, REAL Software's flagship product receives it's most fundamental and far-reaching overhaul since our favorite program began its life as Cross Basic in the late 1990s. The latest version sports an almost completely redesigned interface, provides some very nice new additions to the language, includes some new IDE capabilities and introduces a new payment and version scheme.

The interface changes are obvious at first sight; rather than having separate windows for code editors, window designers, and so on, REALbasic 2005 organizes the entire project into a single window. REAL Software has managed to keep things simple by using a web browser philosophy, incorporating a location field, back and forward buttons, tabs, and even a Spotlight-like search capability which displays multiple results in a single, hotlinked and highlighted list.

Windows are now designed within this large window as well, in a design environment which allows you to scroll to view large windows and even place controls "off the edge" of a window (something you could do in previous versions using the "top" and "left" properties, but which made selecting and editing difficult).

The project window makes use of three different toolbars. These toolbars are all customizable, using a slightly different method than standard Apple toolbars: choosing the "Customize..." menu item brings up a separate dialog box where you move items from one listbox to another (rather than dragging items directly to and from the toolbar from a sheet, as with the OS X Finder). Bookmarks can be dragged to the bookmark bar, but not away from it (removing a bookmark is done in the "Customize..." dialog box).

The menu editor, appearing in a tab along side other editors, still doesn't quite feel like real menus: a quirk that has been present in all versions of REALbasic, but seems increasingly out-of-place in an otherwise polished interface.

As one of the few items in REALbasic that doesn't pertain to a specific project, the Language Reference remains in a separate window but is now much cleaner and better organized and easier to read. The capability to drag code snippets into a code editor is gone, but all text can be selected and copied from the Reference, which is just as intuitive.

Of course, the changes in REALbasic 2005 are much more than skin deep; the new version adds the long-desired capability to open multiple projects at once, a new HTML Viewer control, the capability to roll multiple controls into a single, reusable control class and several other improvements. Perhaps one of the most interesting changes, though, is completely under the hood: REALbasic 2005 is created entirely with REALbasic, something REAL Software has been working toward for more than five years.

REALbasic is also adopting a new purchasing model, offering the program on a subscription basis and providing updates every 90 days. And since the folks at REAL Software are now finally using a Rapid Application Development environment to create their software, we can probably expect those updates to be pretty darn good.

End of article.