Suggestion Box
Believe it or not, sometimes I have a difficult time finding topics to blog about. In those cases, I look to the suggestion box to give me inspiration. If you have a question or idea that you think would made a good blog topic, please post it here. Periodically, I will go through the comments left here to pick blog topics. As I do so, I'll remove any comments describing blog postings I've already posted (or am about to post). This should keep the comments section to a reasonable size and make it easier for you to see what others would like to read about.
Thanks!
How the team uses RB itself to work on the IDE/parts of the framework. As a language matures it is always interesting to see and hear how it becomes used to create more and more parts of itself.
Writing a plugin - getting started.
A modern introduction/overview for those Windows/Linux programmers who don't know anything about CodeWarrior nor MPW (and don't want to) and therefore get tired/stuck when starting the way Plug-In SDK recommends.
More examples and explanations on customizing controls would be nice...especially examples using Container Controls. Thanks.
Writing efficient REALbasic code, especially loops, db operations, etc.
Two things off the top of my head:
1) How to best Version Control you code. I have always been using SVN (even in the bad-old-days when the files were just binary BLOB:s) and it has saved my bacon on several occations. Reminding people about the rbvcp-format would be great (as I always forget it and ending up being to covard to turn a rbp into a rbvcp project)
2) Organization of a large projects in the IDE. My biggi-project contains about 40 modules and I have a hell-of-a-time exporting, making them external and sharing them between my other projects. From the forums I understand that 40 modules are not that big of a project, but anyway....
Ways to protect your RB based controls, libraries and modules from unauthorized use. MBS and many authors use a run time registration code (which can easily be copied) from machine to machine. How would you recommend dealing with us protecting our hard work?
How might one use Delegates and Introspection to implement REALbasic-compiled plugins and libraries?
Under what circumstances is it safe for C/C++ libraries and plugins to call back into the REALbasic runtime?
For instance, the Portaudio library may invoke callback functions at interrupt time. Can a REALbasic program that implements the Portaudio library via declares safely handle these callbacks?
What are the pitfalls and benefits of adding the equivalent of C++ templates or Java generics to REALbasic? How difficult would it be to add such a feature to REALbasic? What might the syntax look like?
What would it take to enhance REALbasic to fully utilize multicore processors? Is there any way that REALbasic could provide an additional thread data type where each thread of said new datatype could run on a separate core?
What would be good candidates for new compiler optimizations and why? For instance, I would like to see inline functions and improved function call performance for non-inlined functions. What would it take to implement these compiler optimizations and any others that might be deemed useful?
Since I am also interested in processes and organization I do also have a non-technical question, related to work organization, processes and so on:
As far as I can tell from your blog postings, you seem to telecommute. I suppose this brings up some interesting issues related to work / work processes: e.g. discipline/motivation, communication and coordination issues... What challenges do arise to you and REAL Software, how do you tackle those, what are your primary communication tools and their advantages/disadvantages...?