Eh, I had a whole big, long rant typed up which I was going to mark as private (due to strong language and stronger opinions). But after blowing off all my steam, I think a summary will suffice. I am the UI evangelist at REAL Software for all platforms, not just Windows. While my personal preference is to avoid the Mac, I'm still a professional programmer. My goal is for the user experience to match the user's expectations on whatever platform they are running on. That means meeting the UI guidelines for that platform. It's a monumental task since the
April 2006 Archives
I can't give any specifics away... but boy am I looking forward to the first alpha of r3. I've been working a lot on polishing up various things, and I'm excited to see it in a release. Mind you, I'm not done polishing up everything I want to see polished. But the things which I have put some shine on are really great. Hopefully other people are as excited by it as I am. :-) I've spent most of my day marvelling at how quickly I can get work done on a new dev box. My compile times are a
I got my new dev box last night, just around quitting time. So I've spent the better part of today getting it up and running just the way I like it. So here's a litany of information you probably could care less about. The first thing I did was do a full backup on my old dev box. I've got an external 240 GB firewire drive that I put my backups on, so I dumped everything onto that. The whole backup process takes a while because I do the full ones by hand. And let me tell you, transferring a
So here are my personal thoughts on bug reporting, in general. I normally wouldn't say much, but it's a good blogging topic for me today. Please, if you're going to take the time to file a bug report, at least attempt to make good use of that time. If the report is really vague or otherwise unhelpful, it will probably just be closed due to not being "reproducible." Then you've wasted your own time in submitting the report, and the time of the person who has to review the report. What I mean by "unhelpful" or "vague" would be a
I've seen a handful of people confused by this, so I think it should be explicitly stated. All three concepts are the same in REALbasic. When you set the control order of a control on a window, you are telling REALbasic what order to create the controls in. So if you have a PushButton (control order of 0) and an EditField (control order of 1), then the PushButton is made first, and the EditField is made second. Z-ordering is the 3D ordering of controls -- it determines what's in front of another control or what's behind it. So in our
Tonight's my last night here in TX with Lis -- I head home tomorrow. We had a nice picinic dinner/party thing with one of her professors from school and a few other students. They had this research project they all did together, and were celebrating its (almost) completion. It was quite fun. Now we're going to head out to a pool hall with some other friends and going to play some pool. I doubt we're going to stay out that late tonight though considering the fact that a huge storm last night kept us awake for a long time. Seriously,
So I've always wondered why some radio stations start with K and others start with W. At first, I thought it had something to do with AM vs FM stations, or something else. But radio.about.com set me straight! In 1912, every country was allotted one (or more) call letters to designate their radio stations. The US was given K and W (Canada got C and Mexico got X, btw). Stations all over the country nabbed whatever call letters they wanted, but in 1923, the FCC said that everyone east of the Mississippi had to start with W, and west of
I started working for REAL Software over four years ago (wow, long while ago now!). Back then, I used to get asked questions about how to accomplish things in Windows all the time. At least once a week I'd get questions like "how do I make it so that only one instance of my app runs?" and "How do I get the amount of free disk space?", all on Windows. There was a Carbon Declare Library (still is one, in fact) that helped the Mac users out. But there was nothing on Windows -- you were at the mercy of
:: coughs :: is this thing even on? So much silence...
Except this time, it's useful for people of all ages! VB has an API called "Command", which gets you the command line arguments for your application. It gets them without the application name though -- just the stuff after the app name. REALbasic has something similar with the System.CommandLine API, except that gives you the entire command line, including the app name. I can see uses for each way of doing things, but I can also see how people may find it hard to go from the RB way to the VB way. So as a part of my VB
Unfortunately, I get asked rather frequently how to port an application which uses SendKeys. This horrible little hack is used to emulate keyboard input in an application (I've usually seen it used to do horrible things like dismiss dialogs automatically). Well, RB doesn't have the API. However, there is still hope. I think this function should behave the same as the VB SendKeys function. You see, I've started a new section to the Windows Functionality Suite -- VB compatibility functions. I'm sure they'll be rolled into the VB Project Converter some day, but I figured this would be a fun
I am alive, and updating again. Lis' internet connection is flaky (at best), but I am back here in Austin and prepared to give a recap of the last few days for those who are interested. I got into Austin late on Wed night, and we drove straight from the airport down to Houston. We got to Lis' parent's house around 1am, and hung out until about 3am. Then off to bed for us! We woke up on Thur "morning" and got a start to our trip. We went to the grocery store and picked up supplies for our camping
So I figured it might be fun to share some war stories with y'all (see, I can be a Texan when I want to be Lis!). I figured I'd give a shot at telling you some insider information (shhh, don't tell on me!) on how this last cycle went for me, personally. These are just little stories about what sort of things I enjoyed, what was hard for me, etc. What bug I enjoyed fixing the most: This is a tough one because I worked on a ton of bugs for this last release. I almost consider bringing back 5.5
In keeping with my last few posts, I want to highlight some of the other goodies from r2 (can you tell that Oblivion is really sucking a lot of time away from other things, like blog postings?). The project item editor now has some new contextual menu items: Make External, which makes an internal item into an external one. Make Internal, which internalizes an external item. And New Implementor, which is used on a class interface and gives you a new class which implements that interface. If you're like me, and you make a lot of serial subclasses, you'll love
So here's another thing that I truly love about r2 -- better accessibility! In previous versions of REALbasic, we ignored things like the user's settings for window and pasteboard colors, text color, etc (which are settable on Windows). But in this version, we now honor that. What's more, we allow you to set these colors if you'd like. And here's why: Code editor background color: Studies have shown that contrast is the most important factor in readability. That's why you typically see white backgrounds with black text. However, some studies have also shown that a dark background with light text
Sorta. :-P I spent a blissful weekend doing (almost) nothing aside from playing Oblivion. :-) I haven't geeked out like that in a while, so it was really a blast and I'm glad I did it. Needless to say, it threw my sleep schedule off to stay up until 4am playing a video game (and waking up the next day at 1pm). But worth it. So guess what? We shipped r2 today. Surprise! My favorite "feature" of r2 is the improved stability. Cut, copy and paste work now (thank god!). The properties editor no longer munges property definitions with spaces
So I stayed up and played Oblivion until 2am last night (had to go to bed early since I had a dentist appt this morning). Yeah, I like this game. Plenty. Right now, I'm playing as a knight (hey, I like to hack and slash, what can I say) and I've mostly just been puttering around doing quests. Tons of fun. :-) Now I have to ask -- for those of you who've played this game, do you have some tips for a n00b? Anything and everything is welcome. :-) Why doesn't the 360 come with a wireless card? I
Heh, bet that scared more than a few of you. ;-) I went out and bought an XBox 360 today, along with Oblivion. I haven't unpacked it yet (since I still have to work for at least another 1.5 hrs), but believe me, I am itching to! So if you don't hear from me for a while, you can be sure of what I'm doing. :-D Just to let everyone know -- I made it back from Austin just fine. I had a seven hour layover in O'Hare. Let me tell you, that airport sucks more every time I fly
Have you ever written your own edit field-like control? I have (called the code editor in REALbasic)! I learned something new today with regards to this feature, and so... time to blab! When the System font was switched to Tahoma, I started to notice an odd behavior in the code editor. The caret (the blinky line thinger that shows the current position) would cover up part of certain letters due to placement. This annoyed me because it was harder to read some code when the cursor was on part of the text since the cursor would obscure the glyph. So
I thought this topic would be a no-brainer, but I see that a lot of people are still confused about it. So let me try to put things into perspective. But first, some background. Rewind 20 years to when Windows first came out -- the proper way to store your configuration data was in a format called an "ini file" (short for initialization file). These files would allow you to use key/value pairs to set configuration data for your application. You could have sections within the file to specify logical groupings of data, and you could also add comments to
It's been one of the more busy weeks I've had in a while. Tons of meetings at work that were all over the place (but had a happy ending regardless), a lot of emotions, etc. I'm glad last week is over -- now I can get back to happily coding away. Meetings are an ok break from work, but I don't like them when they're all lumped together into a week. Then I just feel lazy. :-P You may be wondering why I haven't been posting any RB tidbits lately. That's mostly due to lack of time. I have been
