Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

MacosNerd · Jan 7, 2008, 09:17 AM

Not really a development question as much as a usage question (so the lounge over the dev forum).

As the title states, does anyone use it If so why and for what

I stumbled upon their website a little while ago and realized they're still around. I'm not looking to develop anything but I am curious to see what advantages this has over xcode.

I vaguely recall that earlier versions of realbasic were not cocoa, I wonder if that changed at all.

The Godfather · Jan 7, 2008, 01:44 PM

I use it sporadically, and I'll continue using it because it is so damn easy (for a former Visual Basic yellow belt), compiles your apps for Mac, Windows and Linux, and has the easiest 3D animation environment all around for programming languages.

I don't know if it is Cocoa, but you can try the 30 day demo.

I used in late 2007 to make a GUI-based network protocol analyzer. I couldn't believe that it took me only 1 hour to make my app functional, then 7 hours to go back and fix my bugs.

LogicalVue · Jan 7, 2008, 01:54 PM

Sure, lots of people use it. It's benefit over XCode is that it is cross-platform. And also quite a bit easier to use. I'd say it's primarily used for lots of in-house development. The REALbasic IDE is written in REALbasic.

REALbasic still creates Carbon apps, although they are Universal Binaries. They do plan to add Cocoa capabilities to REALbasic, but there is no date for when that will happen.

If you're looking for more info, you might want to check out the REAL Software forums:
REAL Software Forums :: Index

MacosNerd · Jan 7, 2008, 02:17 PM

I haven't done any software development now for a couple of years, since I made the jump from developer to sysadmin a couple of years ago. I am tempted from time to time to develop just because I loved programming.

goMac · Jan 7, 2008, 02:19 PM

One of the big reasons I stopped using RB is because it isn't free like Cocoa is.

MacosNerd · Jan 7, 2008, 02:46 PM

Originally Posted by goMac

One of the big reasons I stopped using RB is because it isn't free like Cocoa is.

That's the rub.

If I'm going to make the effort to develop some stuff I may want to go that route. I'm not talking shareware or anything. I've had some ideas to develop a couple of utilities for myself. Do I take the time and effort to learn xcode/obj c or pony up some $$ and bang something out much quicker.

lpkmckenna · Jan 7, 2008, 02:46 PM

REALbasic is probably great for local RAD, but not making software for sale. RB apps tend to be huge, while Cocoa apps are nice and small.

Leopard now includes the Cocoa bridges for Ruby, Python, and Perl, so you can code in far better languages than BASIC.

lpkmckenna · Jan 7, 2008, 02:48 PM

More: Theocacao: The Sleeper Hit Feature in Leopard
More: Cocoa: Ruby Cocoa

The Godfather · Jan 7, 2008, 04:25 PM

Originally Posted by goMac

One of the big reasons I stopped using RB is because it isn't free like Cocoa is.

Get a Linux box (or VM) and use the free Realbasic IDE for Linux.

Chuckit · Jan 7, 2008, 04:32 PM

Honestly, I just really don't like REALbasic that much. I doubt anybody who's used Cocoa or Ruby is going to use REALbasic and go, "Wow, so this is what I've been missing!" Like lpkmckenna said, it's a good RAD tool, and it's probably the easiest way to do cross-platform GUI apps, but honestly, think about it: Are there any good Mac apps made with REALbasic? I can't think of one.

If cross-platform is your priority, maybe REALbasic is a good choice. If you'd like to make Mac apps, Cocoa is not that hard to learn. (Although to be clear, I don't think it matters much whether the apps REALbasic generates are Carbon or Cocoa-based, since you're not interacting with the framework directly.)

The Godfather · Jan 7, 2008, 05:52 PM

^ A sampler for the un-believer above
Monkeybread Software - Freeware - Combine PDFs 3.0

iMOTOR · Jan 7, 2008, 05:53 PM

Seems like Python would be the easiest way to cross-platform. No?

CharlesS · Jan 7, 2008, 05:54 PM

Originally Posted by Chuckit

Honestly, I just really don't like REALbasic that much. I doubt anybody who's used Cocoa or Ruby is going to use REALbasic and go, "Wow, so this is what I've been missing!"

Most people who have used Cocoa or Ruby are going to advise you to stay away from RealBasic. I'm not going to buck that trend. Go with Cocoa, especially now that you can use a variety of languages with it. It's not hard to learn, and it's very powerful. What's not to like?

MacosNerd · Jan 7, 2008, 08:10 PM

MacTracker is probably the most well known application that I'm aware of that seems to use realbasic.

Chuckit · Jan 7, 2008, 08:23 PM

Originally Posted by MacosNerd

MacTracker is probably the most well known application that I'm aware of that seems to use realbasic.

Ah, right you are. That is a good example of a good (albeit dead simple, to the degree that it would take like three lines of code in Cocoa) RB app.

MacosNerd · Jan 7, 2008, 08:45 PM

Your right, its not a complex program, but the author has done a great job at making the application a very polished product.

goMac · Jan 7, 2008, 09:01 PM

Originally Posted by MacosNerd

Your right, its not a complex program, but the author has done a great job at making the application a very polished product.

Back when I did RealBasic it was a PITA to get RealBasic apps to behave like real OS X apps. There was no support for basic stuff like alert sheets, and no support for even stuff like transparent tiffs.

LogicalVue · Jan 7, 2008, 09:24 PM

This is probably the best example of a slick-looking Mac OS X application built with REALbasic:

LightSpeed: Point of Sale (POS) for Mac OS X

ibookuser2 · Jan 8, 2008, 01:17 AM

REALbasic was the language in which I first learned to program full applications with GUIs. It's nice and fairly straightforward for that. It gets frustrating if you try and do anything with too much complexity and start having bugs. Some stuff is simple enough that it throws exceptions and you can use the built-in debugger, but when you have programs that just flat-out crash, it gets hard to tell whether you've done something bad or when there's a bug in the REALbasic interpreter/compiler, and if you know how to use a real debugger to figure out what's going on, REALbasic probably isn't the right environment for you anyway.

Eventually I got frustrated by this, along with the fact that it's not free and not only do you have to pay to upgrade and get the new features, they stop releasing updates for older versions and there are a lot of bugs that go unfixed. You also have to keep paying to keep your applications compatible with newer systems. I have some apps compiled with version 3 or somewhere around there that broke horribly when 10.2 came out. Recompiling with version 5 fixed it with no code changes, but it was a pricey upgrade.

Also, I don't know how much they've optimized things since version 5, but my recollection was that while the built-in functions were implemented efficiently, but if you wanted to do something like draw a bitmap image into a canvas, writing a for loop to copy a pixel at a time was orders of magnitude slower than calling the built in drawImage (or whatever) method, even though the underlying implementation uses a loop to copy pixels. In this example, there's no reason to do it a pixel at a time rather than just calling drawImage, but what it means is that if there's something performance-intensive that's not provided by the library functions, you either have to write a plugin in C++ to do it efficiently and fast, or you deal with the performance hit for doing it in REALbasic code.

So, if you can afford the upgrade costs/subscriptions, your apps are fairly simple, and your needs are covered by the libraries, it's great. The cross-platform compatibility speeds up development (though again, if your apps get too complex, you have to carefully test on both platforms and handle the quirky differences.)

- - e r i k - - · Jan 8, 2008, 11:51 PM

Originally Posted by LogicalVue

This is probably the best example of a slick-looking Mac OS X application built with REALbasic:

LightSpeed: Point of Sale (POS) for Mac OS X

Wow. That actually does look quite impressive.

NeXTLoop · Jan 9, 2008, 01:22 PM

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - -

Wow. That actually does look quite impressive.

REALbasic can be used to create very professional applications. The problem is that RB has such a low point of entry that it allows virtually anyone to pick up a copy and start programming. You then end up with a bunch of programs that, while decent from a personal hobby perspective, are crap when compared against professional software.

For an individual, or a company, who really knows what they're doing, RB is as capable as any languge... and more so than some...

Angus_D · Jan 13, 2008, 09:01 AM

Originally Posted by iMOTOR

Seems like Python would be the easiest way to cross-platform. No?

RB is not just a language but also a complete framework. Your same GUI code will pretty much work out of the box on all the platforms.

The Godfather · Jan 13, 2008, 11:31 AM

Originally Posted by goMac

One of the big reasons I stopped using RB is because it isn't free like Cocoa is.

One of the big reasons I stopped subscribing to cable/satellite is because it isn't free like over-the-air is.

MacosNerd · Jan 13, 2008, 11:39 AM

Some things are worthwhile to purchase, like cable. Based on what folks have posted here, I'd say the free tools that apple provides is superior and more flexible to what RealBasic can offer. The downside of xcode/objective C is probably the learning curve if you have little to no experience with C/C++

I am getting the itch to start developing again. I've been out of programming in my job, and I miss the fun and enjoyment of programming so I'm going to poke around and some in OSX.

The Godfather · Jan 13, 2008, 12:05 PM

The difference is that I care about cross platform programming, and you don't.

MacosNerd · Jan 13, 2008, 12:16 PM

You are correct

Eug · Jan 13, 2008, 12:51 PM

I keep hearing statements to the effect that anyone could pick this up and start programming. Just how easy is it?

I'm not a completely stupid guy, but I'm not a programmer and when I've looked at the screengrabs and examples, all I see is "Wow, that's pretty complicated for a n00b". It certainly looks way harder than learning to make a useful HTML page for example. And that's coming from somebody who's actually taken a few programming classes in university, albeit a long time ago. And with HTML, you could use Dreamweaver or whatever too.

Personally I think that a non-programmer using REALbasic would generally come up with absolute crap.

The Godfather · Jan 13, 2008, 01:03 PM

Not just anyone. Anyone with a minimal experience in programming, be it Basic or C (and not being married to the C language). The Quickstart PDF makes it as easy as it gets.

I don't know if HTML experience would count toward your learning curve with RB, but you'd be worse off with any other programming language/environment.

Chuckit · Jan 13, 2008, 02:59 PM

I don't think REALbasic is particularly easier than Ruby.

The Godfather · Jan 13, 2008, 03:49 PM

I haven't programmed Ruby or seen any application made with it, but a quick search on newbie tutorials makes me think that it isn't easy to make a GUI with Ruby.

Plus Ruby is interpreted, while RealBasic is compiled.

The language itself looks as easy as RB.

CharlesS · Jan 13, 2008, 04:31 PM

I haven't used Ruby either, but being a modern programming language, I can't imagine that it wouldn't be a far better designed language than BASIC.

subego · Jan 13, 2008, 05:11 PM

So, how bad is Java?

I was looking to that to solve my cross-platform issues, and I'm wondering if the reason no one has mentioned it is that there is something ya'll know that I don't.

The Godfather · Jan 13, 2008, 05:34 PM

Originally Posted by CharlesS

I haven't used Ruby either, but being a modern programming language, I can't imagine that it wouldn't be a far better designed language than BASIC.

Equating an old language with a bad language is a logical fallacy.

Basic was, in its time, a limited and comparatively slow language, but it was popular due to its ease of use and debugging. Those bad features are not inherently linked to the language, and they were removed by RB engineers back in the 90's. Real Basic supports object oriented programming (classes, instantiation, etc), databases, graphics, etc since a long time ago.

Is it worth its price? You won't know it until you try it.

The Godfather · Jan 13, 2008, 05:41 PM

Originally Posted by subego

So, how bad is Java?

I was looking to that to solve my cross-platform issues, and I'm wondering if the reason no one has mentioned it is that there is something ya'll know that I don't.

I don't know much about Java, but I have heard that it consumes obscene amounts of CPU and RAM for even small applications. It could be because it is interpreted and doesn't leverage the OS' own GUI system (it has to paint its own graphics with the JavaVM).

subego · Jan 13, 2008, 05:47 PM

Thanks!

I don't want to derail, so I'll start up a thread in developer.

Chuckit · Jan 13, 2008, 06:02 PM

Originally Posted by The Godfather

I don't know much about Java, but I have heard that it consumes obscene amounts of CPU and RAM for even small applications.

Java is a compiled language. Java apps often take up a lot of space and RAM, but that is also true of REALbasic applications. (For instance, I opened MacTracker just a minute ago and it was instantly above Camino, Transmission and VLC in RSIZE.)

The Godfather · Jan 13, 2008, 07:40 PM

That's true too.

msuper69 · Jan 13, 2008, 08:30 PM

Originally Posted by MacosNerd

I haven't done any software development now for a couple of years, since I made the jump from developer to sysadmin a couple of years ago. I am tempted from time to time to develop just because I loved programming.

Going from programming to administration is more like a backwards jump. Who wants to baby sit a bunch of computers and users. Not me. Been there. Done that. Went back into programming after getting my fill of administering a gaggle of Windows servers. Ugh. You're at the beck and call of the hardware, not to mention the OS and the rest of the software on the server.

With development, as long as I hit my milestones, my time is spent actually doing something creative.

Don't take this the wrong way, but I see administration type work as high-tech clerical work. Not for me.

MacosNerd · 09:09 PM

Well that's good for you, but I like what I do, and I wasn't asking your opinion on my job. I disagree with your assessment. I've been a programmer for over 20 years and I can safely say I've been called less at 2:00am as a sys admin then as a programmer. I enjoy working with servers, infrastructure and figuring out problems with the systems.