Software Made Simple

Hacker is the name of the comic strip that runs in REALbasic Developer Magazine. The magazine is a great bargain at just $50 per year (6 issues). It has lots of useful REALbasic articles, columns and reviews. And you get to read my incredibly exciting column on databases, called Databases for Real.

But even better than all that is the comic that runs on page 5 of every issue. It’s by Dan Wilson and is really quite good. It about the geekiness of a programmer named John, who happens to use REALbasic. But I think even you non-REALbasic developers will like it. Geek humor is universal. Among geeks, anyway.

Here are some samples from his web site, Leap of Faith Studio:

RBDevZone has had a wiki for some time, but it is built using DotNetNuke and the wiki in there is pretty weak. I was happy to see that today, Charles Yeomans, REALbasic guru and fellow REALbasic Developer Magazine columnist, has created a wiki (using MediaWiki) for REALbasic. From his blog posting:

The goal is to collect documentation of the language and framework that goes beyond what Real Software could provide. Things like platform-specific behavior, or tricks and traps that ensnare the new or unwary are unlikely to make it into any official documentation. To offer one example, when are control references in a window non-nil? As it turns out, Mac OS X and Linux behave quite differently. This sort of thing is hard to know in advance, and it could change over time.

Anyone can read the wiki, but you’ll need to create an account to edit. My intention is to keep the content focused on documentation, so please save discussions of Real Software’s business and development practices, Mac v. Windows debates, etc. for other forums. I’d like to ensure that the content remains available even if I don’t; I would be especially interested if someone would figure out how to do that. It looks like there are ways to dump mediawiki content.

Go forth and create content!

If you’ve been a REALbasic developer for a while, you may remember that the ResExcellence web site used to have a regular REALbasic column. It was first written by Erick Tejkowski (author of REALbasic for Dummies) and then by Seth Willits. But ResExcellence is now more and these great articles and sample code was lost.

Until now.

I have received permission from both Erick Tejkowski and Seth Willits to republish their articles at RBDevZone. So far, only a single article is online, “Wiggle Window”, but more will appear in the coming weeks. I need to review the articles, identify the ones that are still relevant and update them so that they work with REALbasic 2007. I’m soliciting help, so if any REALbasic developers out there are interested in updating some articles, please let me know.

The articles will be free to read at RBDevZone, but you will have to register (also free) if you want to download the accompanying code.

I hope you find some of these articles useful.