I'm happy to announce that we released REALbasic 2008r4 today! This release has some really awesome additions, as well as a ton of stability fixes. As usual, I intend to list all of my favorites. ;-)
I think my number one, most favorite thing of all time (for this release, anyways) has to be the ability to use constants as part of other declarations. This is one of those things that is actually a pretty major feature, but most people probably see it as a minor bug fix. It means that you can finally use constants as part of method optional parameters, and property initializers. Previous versions of REALbasic would either 1) Silently ignore the constant value and put in 0, or 2) Work. It all depended on the order the compiler happened to compile things in. Now it will just work. But it's more than just that -- you can also define enumerations in terms of constants. For instance:
Const kFoo = 12
Enumeration Fruit
Apple = kFoo
Pear
End Enumeration
That is now legal code, and will provide expected results (Apple is 12, and Pear is 13). You can probably expect to see some more posts about this particular change in the near future, so I'll just move on.
Another really nice feature is actually a continuation of the Analyze Project system. Now you will get results for things like implicit numeric conversions, floating point comparisons, and you can even make your own custom warnings via #pragma Warning( "This is an awesome warning, eh?" )
But it's not all just new features and ponies! There are some great bug fixes that came with this release as well. For instance, the ability to use the codesign utility to digitally sign your Mac applications. (For something so simple to explain, it sure was a royal pain to make that work. Mach-O is a terrible link format, let me just whine!) Also, we brought back the ability to view picture masks in the debugger but in a significantly safer manner.
I'm really digging the latest release -- it's very solid and has a great mixture of new functionality. What's everyone else's take on it?
I like the steady improvements that go in each release.
IMHO, the RB language has improved quite a lot since the advent of the "new" IDE in 2005: New data types, Enumerations, Structs, Attributes, Namespaces, Introspection...
Too bad, I don't have a major project in RB at the moment, so I don't get to play with all those goodies on a regular basis.
Keep up the good work!
Ponies ?
Hmmm .... seems we need a bug fix as I added Unicorns not Ponies :P
Codesigning is a big deal for me.
All of the new compiler warnings (about types, etc..) are changing the way I program for the better.
I believe that the warnings enabled me to find a couple of long-standing bugs which were only showing up randomly.
You guys are doing awesome work...I couldn't be happier with REALBasic.
My favorite feature (long awaited) is control locking! :D I'm sure I'll end up needing codesigning, but at the moment, I'm not bothered by it.