Wow, what a whirlwind of wackiness. Sorry, alliteration just isn't working for me today. ;-) What I really meant to say is that I've been super busy as of late, and so things like blog postings tend to be few and far between.
In no particular order:
I've been working several long days (including the entire weekend) on some really awesome new compiler features for the next beta. I'd tell you what they are, but then I'd have to kill you. But those of you who are in the betas program will probably know what I'm talking about when the next release comes out. But after doing 12-16 hour work days for the last four days, I can honestly say that my brain is full.
In addition to the compiler work for REAL Software, I've been working with Lis on getting our wedding preparations taken care of. We're going to be down in Austin in just a few weeks, and we need to meet with all of our vendors to take care of things. We also have to decide on some vendors (like florists, cake and photographers)! All I know is that I'm very happy now that we have the officiant lined up. The last one backed out on us, so we had to scramble to find a new one!
Speaking of Lis, it's getting to be finals time pretty soon, so she's been doing tons of studying while trying to finish up her lab work. So I've been in to her lab a fair amount recently, keeping her company while she does her thing. Wish her luck!
Since this is usually a technical blog, let me leave you with one interesting piece of REALbasic knowledge you may not have known about. When you're writing plugins, you have to be very, very careful about type safety, because it is your responsibility to deal with it. It's trivially easy to write a plugin method that accepts a String from REALbasic, while declaring the parameter type as REALobject, for instance. That would be bad enough, except for arrays which have an even more special, gotcha to watch out for. When you create an object array from a plugin, the array doesn't know what type of object you are planning to put in there. It truly is an *object* array -- you can stuff anything you want in there. Dates and Windows and Kittens and Dictionaries, etc. So you have to be certain that all of the objects you place into the object array are of the same type, otherwise you will have some very bad problems on your hands. It may seem like common sense, but it's still something that you have to be aware of. REALbasic does a ton of type-checking for you to keep you safe, and the plugin SDK does almost no type-checking for you.
So there's your tidbits for the day!
Dude! This blog shows up fourth in a google search for "rambling."
That's kinda cool.
Now, back to my important work. Hope all's well in the R.S.
Alliteration was going well till you chose "wackiness".
Good luck to Lis, she's going to need it. On the other hand, I'm sure the finals will be a breeze!
As for arrays in objects, think yourself lucky you don't need to deal with arrays in variants like some languages do :)
@Elizabeth -- it was actually first in google's search rankings about two months back, but I suspect the top ones did a bit of google bombing to get there since they are brand-spanking new sites. :-/
@Steve -- oh man, you don't know the half of it. Just wait till the beta comes out. ;-)
I was always confused when translating between RB classes in C and the C data types. It wasn't intuitive. Of course, I haven't checked lately, though.
@jdiwnab - the new SDK documentation has a very good table for converting C types to RB types (and back).
Awesome! Thanks, Aaron!
Does sound like you've been busy busy busy
Looking forward to the next release
Don't know the half of it? I've never got a headache from a set of release notes before!