Lis and I are sad happy to announce that we're having a going away party on Saturday, May 26. We realize this is Memorial Day weekend, and apologize for it, but it's the only weekend we're going to be available from between now and the move. The plan is to start the festivities in the afternoon and carry on till people feel like leaving. It's going to be a fairly low-key affair. If you need directions on how to get out here, just send me an email and let me know where you're coming from. If you need a place
April 2007 Archives
When structures were first introduced, the conversion between a structure string and a normal string was very naive -- the entire structure string was stuffed into the regular string. That included nulls, and whatever else was in there. However, we found out that this was really not a good idea because it caused all sorts of weird problems for users. People were using a string in a structure as an honest-to-god string (go figure) and not as a bucket of bytes. But the conversion was treating it more like a bucket of bytes than as a string. So around 2006r4
Due to a horrendous amount of trackback spam over the last two days (about 300 trackbacks), I've turned trackbacks off entirely. I've not seen any good use of them in the years I've been blogging (I'm the only one who ever trackbacks my own postings anyhow), so I think this will be a permanent change. If anyone has any opinions on this though (which I doubt), feel free to voice them. I just wanted to give a heads up in case someone had their heart set on being able to trackback one of my posts. :-P
Life is so much fun, right? So I bet you're wondering what I've been up to. No good, that's what! After 2007r2 was released, I dove right in to r3 for my day job. That's been keeping me pretty busy for most of my days. And when I'm not working on that, I've been preparing my REAL World 2007 presentations (which are due Friday of next week, in case any presenters are reading). In my oh-so-ample free time, I've been working on a project that I've wanted to work on for ages, but never found the time to. My accessibility
I see this come up time and again on the forums and in personal emails (and I don't mean to pick on anyone in particular). It is unacceptable to change the user's system settings unless it's directly in response to the user asking for them to be changed. Period. You do not change their volume for them. They have it set to whatever they want it set to. When you change it, you're barging in on their preferences and saying "I know better than you do that you want to hear my song at full volume -- it's just that
So there's been a snafu recently with the way REALbasic handles file associations on Windows (in 2007r2). Yes, I realize it sucks, and I'm sorry for that. It's also been fixed. But someone asked a few interesting questions like "why the change" and "how did this get missed" which deserve some interesting answers. So it's time for a history lesson. When I was first hired on at REAL Software, my job was to help port the IDE from the Mac to Windows. I came on board just after 4.0 was released, and while we were working on 4.5. So this
I thought I'd share this neat little bug with everyone here. When r2 was released, I started seeing reports about people's images on Windows starting to have blue in them instead of the transparency. What was even more odd was that I couldn't reproduce the issue on Vista, but others could. I could reproduce on XP (but some others couldn't). What the heck, right? The problem was specific to pictures which had alpha channels in them and were dragged into the project. Well, you see... the problem was that when you drag a picture with an alpha channel into the
Wow! So I tried remote debugging today with Visual Studio 2005, and let me say, I sure do appreciate REALbasic's remote debugger more. Don't get me wrong, I like our remote debugger (especially since I wrote it!). But after trying out the VS one, holy crap... First off, there's like 10 pages of firewall exceptions you have to put into both the source and target machines. Fine, ok, whatever. I ended up just disabling the firewalls because it was easier that way. But then... I realized that I had no stub on the target machine. After 15 minutes of googling,
So we finally got 2007r2 out the door this morning! Yay for shipping! This was a long and arduous release with some really awesome things in it which I am gleeful about. 1) Incremental compilation 2) Tons of new debugging features The reason why I'm so excited about these new features is because I'll be using them every day. We had a dirty little secret which we didn't let out until today: we've been using 2007r1 to develop 2007r2. And we'll be using 2007r2 to work on 2007r3, etc. So this means I no longer have to wait for long
