Office closed on monday

Monday is All Saints' Day which is for our state a holiday.

I'll certainly check mails and send our license keys, but don't expect normal activity.

Happy Halloween and a contemplative All Saints' Day to everyone

REAL Studio compiles faster on Mac than on Windows?

Is it just me or do you also see a delay on linking a project on Windows?

If you have a Mac with bootcamp and REAL Studio on Mac and Windows, can you take a project and measure it for both platforms?

I made a little measurement and wrote a bug report: Feedback Report 14311
Maybe you can comment?

Greetings from REAL Studio training in Hamburg

We had a nice training day today and talked a lot about XML parsing and generation, Web Edition and Databases, delegates, declares, classes, dictionaries, email sending and receiving, hierarchical listboxes and RBScript.

We just finished and all our participants learnt a lot. See you tomorrow on our database training day.

Please prioritize your bug reports

Currently there is a discussion going on about bug fixes for REAL Studio. But in contrast to the messages from people, you can see in Feedback that most of the top entries there are feature requests. If bug fixes would be important to people, the top 20 should all be bug fix requests.
In Feedback you can check favorite list. Mine has over 100 entries. But only the top five in my priority list count for the ranking. And in that top 5, the first entry gets more points than the fifth entry. So I have to put my number one bug fix request on the top.
Looking again on the top 20, there must be something like hundreds of people who have the iPhone support request on their top 5. But why? I think Geoff told that they plan to support iPhone as soon as possible, so supporting that request is a waste of your ranking points.
And remember, anything that you don't put in the top 5, is not important for you.

Making Apps Developer Days

In Munich, you can meet me on this event:

Programmieren für iPhone 4 und iPad

Hamburg 11./12. November
München 15./16. November

Mit iOS 4 hat Apple die Möglichkeiten für Entwickler stark erweitert. Wie man sie nutzt, zeigen die „Making Apps Developer Days“. Der zweitägige Workshop führt in die Grundlagen der App-Entwicklung ein und vermittelt erste Programmier-Erfahrung beim gemeinsamen Schreiben einer multitasking-fähigen App.

Kosten Tag 1: 199 Euro, Tag 2: 599 Euro, beide Tage: 749 Euro (alle Preise zzgl. MwSt.)



Infos und Anmeldung unter www.macwelt.de/373367

REAL Studio Trainings

Our training for Hamburg is starting on Thursday. If you want to attend and you have no yet a registration, please call Brainworks as soon as possible. If you bring your own notebook, you can even register tomorrow.

We got registrations for Zürich and Leverkusen, so I'm confident that those trainings will take place. For Munich and Berlin, we did not get enough registrations, so those trainings will likely be cancelled.

For more information and registration visit:
REAL Studio Einführungskurs (beginners)
REAL Studio Intensivkurs (advanced)
REAL Studio Datenbankentwicklung (database)

MonkeyBread Software Releases the MBS Filemaker plug-in in version 2.1

NICKENICH, Germany (October 26th, 2010) -- Monkeybread Software releases version 2.1 of the MBS plug-in for Filemaker.

The MBS plug-in extends Filemaker with over 400 functions. Very popular are our functions for controlling the webview control on your database forms. Other key features are the ability to run AppleScript or Windows Script code in your calculations, manipulate pictures and to query system informations. In version 2.1 we improve the WebView functions and created new functions for Strings, PDFKit and Backdrop. (more)

Could not find appropriate data source "mysqlc"

Guess what happens if you open a project with a mysql database inside and you don't have the mysql plugin installed?

Answer: first nothing, but as soon as you double click the database, you get a failed assertion. Of I'd expect a nice dialog telling me that I need to add the plugin and if I don't have it, where I get it. In a perfect world, REAL Studio would simply download that plugin, install it and load it.

Well, if you like to comment on this: Feedback Report 14247

Atlanta Real Studio Users Group - Monday, October 25th

We will be discussing all of the latest news from Real Software including:

*** Real Studio 2010 Release 4
*** Real Studio Web Edition
*** Real Studio Summit 2011 - March in Atlanta!

Come on out and learn and share with your fellow developers next Monday from 6pm to 9pm.

For more information visit here!
www.atlantausergroups.com/events/atlanta-real-studio-users-5

My Case Study

Not sure if you read it already last year, but my case study is already one year old:
realsoftware.com/community/monkeybread.php

Comments?
If you want to be there, contact Dana from REAL Software and tell her your story.

MBS Filemaker Plugin, version 2.1 final candidate

New in this prerelease of the 2.1 plugins are a few Mac OS X only methods to get and set printer settings for the Webview.Print method. On Windows it seems difficult to do the same as IE does not give us options to set. Also I ported the String functions from our SQLite Extension to Filemaker. This accent removing can be good for searches as well as the soundex function.

• Added String.RemoveAccents.
• Added String.RemoveAccentsCaseInsensitive.
• Added String.SoundEx.
• Added WebView.SetPrintParameter.
• Added WebView.GetPrintParameter.

Download: monkeybreadsoftware.de/filemaker/files/

Our trainings in the press

Nice that they show our trainings announcement on their news pages: Macwelt and Macgadget.

Please sign on soon to make sure the trainings take place and are not cancelled due to a missing participants.

MBS REALbasic Plugins, version 10.6pr1

New in this prerelease of the 10.6 plugins:

• Made changes to the picture handling so it works with Cocoa target on both REAL Studio 2010r3 and 2010r4.
• Fixed pathes typo to paths.
• Added WindowsTimerMBS class.
• Added ClickThroughMBS class.
• Added QTTrackMBS.DisposeTrackMedia.
• Added QTTrackMBS.DeleteTrackReference.
• Added LinuxHIDInterfaceMBS.InterruptWrite.

Download: macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease

One week till REAL Studio Trainings in Hamburg

Our training for Hamburg is starting next week. If you want to attend and you have no yet a registration, please call Brainworks as soon as possible.

Also I think I will offer participants and other REAL Studio users to meet for a dinner in Hamburg on the evenings before. If you want to join, please email me. For the case I have internet access, I can post time and meeting point here.

For more information on our trainings in Hamburg, München, Berlin, Zürich and Leverkusen:
www.realsoftware.de/schulungen/

Changes on Cocoa picture handling in REAL Studio?

With our current 10.5 plugins the overlay example looks like this in REAL Studio 2010r3:

In REAL Studio 2010r4 the same code produces this pictures:

Maybe REAL Software decided to change the layout of the pixels, but I didn't notice a note about this.
As soon as REAL Software clarifies whether this is a bug (they'll fix it) or whether the changed it on purpose (we'll change plugins).

#if TargetCarbon

Some older code uses #if TargetCarbon lines and you may get into trouble with this in the new Cocoa target. Now let's say you have this code:

  Sub Delay(t As Integer)
    #if TargetMacOS then
      Dim ft As Integer
      #if TargetCarbon then
        Declare Sub Wait Lib "Carbon" Alias "Delay" (numTicks As Integer, ByRef finalTicks As Integer)
      #else
        Declare Sub Wait Lib "InterfaceLib" Alias "Delay" (numTicks as Integer, ByRef finalTicks as Integer) 
      #endif // TargetCarbon
      Wait t, ft
      #endif // TargetMacOS
  End Sub

As you see we have a branch for Carbon and one for Mac OS Classic. Now with the Cocoa target, the TargetCarbon constant is set to false. And you application on compilation tries to use the old InterfaceLib declare for Cocoa. In the crash log of your application you will see lines like this:

Dyld Error Message:
  Library not loaded: /System/Library/Frameworks/InterfaceLib.framework/InterfaceLib
  Referenced from: /Users/cs/Desktop/Test/Test.debug.app/Contents/MacOS/Test.debug
  Reason: image not found

So your #if needs to be updated. Core, Carbon and Cocoa APIs can be called from Carbon and Cocoa applications. This may not always make sense, but it's possible. Like the Delay function above which is part of Carbon, but can be used in Cocoa applications. So the #if should not use TargetCarbon, but use TargetMachO as that's the constant which targets both Carbon and Cocoa.

Mac App Store announced

Today Apple announced a Mac App Store. A cool idea and I think no Mac developer wants to be outside. The service fee is quite high with 30%, so you'll certainly want to make additional sales outside their store. But this raises questions:

• For example what does Apple define as a minimum level of an application?
• What must I comply to? support as minimum?
• Do they want a clause in the contract that their price is the best price available?
• How would we handle updates? Especially as some apps come from the store and some not?
• Can we query in our app the status whether we are installed by the store or do we have two binaries?
• Does Apple test our apps and check quality?
• Do they limit our possibilities?
• Is maybe Carbon not allowed?
• Is my application rated 18+ if I offer some browser window?
• Can I use libraries/plugins? Do I need to provide license proofs or information on those libraries?

A lot of questions and we'll see how things will work out. Having a central store is a great idea and I hope I get my apps more visible to millions of users

REAL Studio 2010r4

This week REAL Software announced REAL Studio 2010r4. This update has a few nice features like the new segment control or the new database features. But one thing annoys me: Label. We had a statictext class in REALbasic since the beginning. Now they changed over time class names (StaticText to Label, LittleArrows to Progresswheel, Socket to TCPSocket and others). This annoys me as I have to provide plugin examples which should run with all versions, but with current REAL Studio you see this warning dialog for deprecated stuff on every example project I have. Ouch. It would be a little change to the IDE to make Label the new class in use for Statictexts and leave the old ones in place. Also it's a little work to have the compiler accept name aliases for classes. This way you could use Socket or TCPSocket to reference the same class in code. This changes in names could be silent. Old projects use StaticTexts, new projects use Label and some use both names. No problem and less confusing to users.

PS: Seems like REAL Studio 2010r5 shows a lot of improvements on the Web Edition. Some more things work now on Internet Explorer and I hope they get everything working there this year. Would be good if we could start coding soon our web apps and demonstrate them to management people. And management in a lot of big companies has often Windows...

REAL Studio Trainings

We are happy that registrations for REAL Studio trainings in Germany and Switzerland are coming in. Trainings in Hamburg, from October 28 to 30, 2010, already have sufficient participants, but we'll of course accept further registrations.

Available REAL Studio Trainings:

Hamburg/Germany: October 28 to October 30, 2010 (Thursday through Saturday)
Munich/Germany: November 11 to November 13, 2010 (Thursday through Saturday)
Berlin/Germany: November 18 to November 20, 2010 (Thursday through Saturday)
Zürich/Switzerland: December 2 to December 4, 2010 (Thursday through Saturday)
Leverkusen/Germany: January 13 to January 15, 2011 (Thursday through Saturday)

At each location we'll take a close look at REAL Studio over the course of a full three days. Day One is an intensive introduction into REAL Studio. Day Two allows us to go into further detail about specific REAL Studio features. On Day Three we'll focus on working with databases. All days maybe booked individually. Discounts are available for those of you who participate on more than one day.

While we have predefined daily schedules, we are prepared to adapt our agenda to the needs, wishes and interests of all participants.

Possible topics include:
* REAL Studio Web Edition
* Accessing database servers which cannot be used with the built-in features of REAL Studio; e.g. Microsoft SQL Server, InterBase/Firebird, Sybase, DB2, SQLBase and Informix
* Tools and utilities for performance optimization on multi-core systems
* First steps with our ChartDirector and DynaPDF plug-ins

Please register soon: This grants us the peace of mind to announce which trainings are secured and actually take place. And, please, name an alternative location just in case we cannot go through with your primary choice.

Please follow this link for more information and registration: www.realsoftware.de/schulungen/

Our trainings are in German. If you are interested in English tranings, please email us. We are planing additional trainings in the future and would love to know which cities are of interest.

REAL Software is hiring!

Geoff Perlman, Founder and CEO of REAL Software, Inc. today posted this job offer. If you are interested, email him at geoff@realsoftware. In contrast to job offers a few years ago, you don't need to move to Austin, Texas. You can work at home as long as you can join the daily conference calls and overlap enough with their schedule. So this job offer is not just for americans, but also for people from europe or africa.

We are looking for someone with excellent REAL Studio and web skills to join our web framework team. In this role you will be creating new web controls and classes as well as improving the IDE's web project support.

The ideal candidate has:

Excellent REAL Studio/REALbasic skills
Excellent knowledge of OOP
Thorough knowledge of HTML, JavaScript and CSS
Created custom canvas-based controls

Additional skills you have that you should mention (assuming you have them) are experience with svn and experience with UI design.

You can work from home but we need you to be able to overlap with our schedule at least 50%.

If you're interested, please email Geoff directly.

New MBS REALbasic Plugin Version 10.5

Today we release our new REALbasic plugins in version 10.5.

New in this plugin version are classes for Drag and Drop on Windows. We have an alternative class set so you can start drags and accept drops without REAL Studio's events. This way we can support drags with ghost images and custom cursors.

We added new ColorSync functions to better create a transformation. You can specify source, intermediate and destination profiles with option flags and intent values. Also we added those new ColorSync classes Apple added with Mac OS X 10.6. This may be the way to go in future Mac OS X versions.

Next we updated a few of the libraries we use in our plugins: DynaPDF 2.5.4.543, SQLAPI 3.7.33, JPEG Library and tidy library. If you use our SQL Plugin, you will have to change your code as we modified the way on how to find the library.

If you need to add accessibility support to your Mac OS X Carbon application with REAL Studio, we have now a few HIViewMBS methods to support this. So you add code to a window and find your controls and give them a description text.

This update is required if you want to use REAL Studio 2010r5 and newer as we changed a few things. Also if you want to use our plugins on a Windows IDE, we highly recommend to use this release. We split the MacOSX plugin into two parts as the Windows IDE of REAL Studio loves to crash with that plugin.

Tip of the day: DynaPDF Error event

With our DynaPDF plugin you can create, modify and import PDF files. The plugin is very powerful, but you should have correct error handling in your application.

For error handling, we have an Error event. There you can get the type, code and message for the error. And you can decide whether your app should continue or stop. As you get warnings and errors here, you should at least have some code to decide this. Most apps want to inform the user about warnings, but allow continue after the warning. While on an error you may want to stop or continue. This depends on the error.

You can find some sample code for the error event in our Create PDF example project. As you see there, we show a message dialog and ask the user whether he wants to continue or not. Also we allow to ignore all warnings.

Now you can improve your code by using special error handling. For example before you load a new font, you could load a standard font (like Helvetica) with the same style. If your new font fails to load and you ignore the error, you can still write text with the default font you loaded before.

Another way to handle errors are exceptions. We had a lot of users not using the error event. And they complained about things that did not work. If you set a font with an invalid font name and you ignore all errors, you will see no text (if you didn't set a font successfully before). To help those users we introduced code to raise an exception for any unhandled error. So you know about that an error happened even if you forgot to use the error event. But the exception way does not allow you to continue after an error or warning. So better use the error event.

A few more pictures from our REAL Studio conference in Koblenz last weekend

Actually we were over 20 people, but it's difficult to get all on one picture.

Two weeks till REAL Studio Trainings in Hamburg

Our training for Hamburg is starting in two weeks. If you want to attend and you have no yet a registration, please call Brainworks as soon as possible.

For more information and registration visit:
REAL Studio Einführungskurs (beginners)
REAL Studio Intensivkurs (advanced)
REAL Studio Datenbankentwicklung (database)

Order REALbasic developer magazine yearly books

We make a collective order for REALbasic Developer yearly books. Ordering them from the USA to Germany is not cheap and sending them to you home here in Europe costs also some money. But on the end I hope to have it significant cheaper for everyone.

So if you want to have one or more of the REALbasic Developer year books (number 1 to 8) or for example the Ramblings on REALbasic book by Aaron Ballman, please email me.

I want to send this order to RBD end of this week.

Look, I got a new T-Shirt

My mum visited dad on the REAL Studio conference and I got a new T-Shirt
Greetings Michael

MBS Filemaker Plugin, version 2.1pr5

New in this prerelease of the 2.1 plugins are a few Mac OS X only methods to get the image of a website as well as images from PDF documents in your database. Very good for preview generation.

• Added WebView.RenderImage.
• Added PDFKit.GetPDFPageCount.
• Added PDFKit.GetPDFPageText.
• Added PDFKit.GetPDFText.
• Added PDFKit.GetPDFPageImage.

Download: monkeybreadsoftware.de/filemaker/files/

Update: The documentation has been updated.

MBS REALbasic Plugins, version 10.5pr5

New in this prerelease of the 10.5 plugins:

• Added window.ConstrainWindowToScreen method.
• Fixed crashes with corrupt GIF files.
• Fixed crashes with corrupt TIFF files.
• DynaPDFMBS.InsertImage now supports console targets.
• Changed compiler flags for Windows so some plugin parts include less debug information and run faster. This affects: SQL, Matrix, GraphicsMagick, Rockey2, DynaPDF, WindowsScript, WIA, ChartDirector5
• Fixed DynaPDFMBS.GetMissingGlyphs.
• Added XMPFilesMBS.Constructor with Folderitem parameter.
• Added XMPFilesMBS.OpenFile with Folderitem parameter.
• Updated DynaPDF to version 2.5.4.543.
• Added classes for Drag & Drop on Windows: WinDataObjectMBS, WindowsDragSourceMBS and WindowsDropTargetMBS.
• Added ColorSync classes for the new ColorSync APIs in Mac OS X 10.6: CSDeviceMBS, CSManagementModuleMBS, CSMutableProfileMBS, CSProfileMBS and CSTransformMBS.
• Added CFErrorMBS and CFUUIDMBS classes.
• The ColorSync classes are now console safe.
• Added new methods on ColorSyncWorldMBS and ColorSyncProfileMBS classes.
• Added ColorSyncProfileSetItemMBS class.
• Fixed DescriptionUnicode and NameUnicode on ColorSyncCMMInfoMBS class. The texts were too short.
• Fixed memory leak in ColorSyncBitmapMBS.
• Added new Constructor and GetCMMSignature to ColorSyncWorldMBS class.
• Added ConvertMovieToFileTrack2 and ConvertMovieToFile2 to QTMovieExporterMBS class so you can get the folderitem for the saved file.
• Fixed a bug in the XLSDocumentMBS constructor.
• Improved CFDictionary <-> Dictionary conversion to pass through CF objects.

Download: macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease

More pictures from our REAL Studio Conference

Christian Bader put some pictures online on facebook. Enjoy.
We'll post more in the next days.

REAL Studio Training in Hamburg

If you want to attend the REAL Studio training in Hamburg, please register this week. And if you plan to attend, please email me about what topics you are interested.

Our topic list for those days is on the website, but depending on your needs, we can discuss and learn additional stuff:

• REAL Studio Web Edition
• Accessing database servers which are not directly supported by REAL Studio like Microsoft SQL Server, InterBase/Firebird, Sybase, DB2, SQLBase or Informix.
• Helper applications for better performance with multiple CPUs
• Getting started with ChartDirector or DynaPDF Plugins from us.

For more information and registration visit:
REAL Studio Einführungskurs (beginners)
REAL Studio Intensivkurs (advanced)
REAL Studio Datenbankentwicklung (database)

REAL Studio Summit 2011 - Registration started

The registration for the REAL Studio Summit started.

You can register now for $250. Purchase soon, because this early bird pricing ends November 30th. After December 1 the price is $350 and after February 1, 2011 it's $450. Sign up now!

Take the chance to visit Atlanta, meet other REAL Studio developers and learn from REAL Software engineers first hand about news on REAL Studio. A lot of sessions will show you what others did with REAL Studio before and how to use some of the famous tools for developing. Other sessions will show some best practices on development techniques like databases. Over time more sessions will be added and if you like you can do a presentation yourself. And of course you can chat with me about our REAL Studio products.

More details are available here:
arbpmembers.org/real-studio-summit-2011

REAL Studio Conference 2010

Greetings to everyone from our conference in Koblenz. A few people already left for their journey home, but we took this picture with most attendees:


Picture download: Konferenz-Gruppen-Foto.zip

Tomorrow REAL Studio Conference in Germany

Tomorrow our REAL Studio conference starts in Koblenz with a get together for dinner. If you have no yet registered and you like to attend, please call Application Systems Heidelberg as soon as possible.

Registration and more detailed information:
www.realsoftware.de/realcon2010

If you need any help, do not hesitate to contact us.

REAL Studio 2010r4 and plugin compatibility

From time to time, we update our version compatibility table.

So you need 10.4 plugins if you want to use:

* Cocoa target
* Console targets with pictures
* REAL Studio Web Studio

So if you are using REAL Studio 2010r3, we recommend to upgrade to current plugins to keep you away from some trouble.
For example we recently discovered, that plugin version 8.2 to 9.2 are not compatible to REAL Studio 2010r4 beta versions.

A few days left for the conference

Just a few days are left till we start our REAL Studio conference. It's not to late for you to join us in Koblenz on the upcoming weekend.

If you want to attend, please register soon. We have some hotel suggestions posted on the weekend.

If you want to learn about

* the new REAL Studio Web Edition
* the way to Cocoa
* the future LLVM based compiler
* interesting applications made with REAL Studio
* plugins for pdf, charts, sql databases and much more.

take the chance and visit us in Koblenz.

If you have questions, do not hesitate to contact me.

Read also: Last Minute Hotels in Koblenz, Schedule online for the REAL Studio conference, Visiting the conference hotel and Weindorf, More Information and Registration, Tips for traveling to Koblenz for our REAL Studio conference, Tips for extra days in Koblenz, Hotels in Koblenz and Reasons to visit Germany.

Statistics on our web apps

We had a seven webapps online the last weeks and they are still running. Due to some memory leaks we have to restart an app every few days, but that should be fixed soon. So far we had thousands of visitors or maybe just a few hundred. We wrote logs to a database and here are a few numbers:

Webapp	Sessions	Unique	IP Addresses
simplebar with ImageMapHandler	1451	215	199
chat	3484	207	184
Map	3609	297	266
PDF Test	751	198	190
Infos	1351	317	292
simplePie with MouseClicks explode	910	249	223
animated bar	1198	214	197

Each web app made a lot of session. Sessions happen if a crawler like Google queries the website. So we did a query how many unique combinations exist between Browser, platform and IP address which gives better idea about how many users are there. Also we checked how many unique IP addresses we have.

The PDF Test web app created 180 PDF files.

We had this browsers:

Browser	Number of sessions
Andriod	1
Blackberry	2
Firefox	139
InternetExplorer	26
Opera	12
Safari	2815
SafariMobile	33
Unknown	456

Conclusion:

It may be difficult to know whether a user got on our app or maybe google just queried the page content. You see that on the PDF example, where we only got 180 PDFs for for over 751 sessions.
And if you want to store data in a web app, you have to think about using a database. Even for logging. To write you need exclusive access and your web app may run in several instances and server several users at the same time. So you can't write to text files. Using a database leaves the locking up to the database server and your app is just a client.

Last Minute Hotels in Koblenz

For last minute bookings in the next days, you can check this hotels:

Hotel Continental Pfälzer Hof, listed for 40 Euro on booking.com
B&B Hotel Koblenz, listed for 46 Euro per night on hotel.de
Höhmann, listed for 46 Euro on hrs.de
Reinhard, listed for 47 Euro on hrs.de
City Hotel Kurfürst Balduin, listed for 48 Euro on hotel.de
Akzent Hotel Hohenstaufen, listed for 58 Euro on hrs.de
Trierer Hof, listed for 64 Euro on hrs.de
Ibis Koblenz, listed for 66 Euro on hrs.de
GHOTEL hotel & living, listed for 68 Euro on hrs.de
Top Hotel Krämer, listed for 74 Euro on venere.com
Mercure Hotel, listed for 127 Euro on hrs.de

If you have questions, do not hesitate to contact me.

Read also: News on our REAL Studio conference, Pricing a conference, Visiting the conference hotel and Weindorf, More Information and Registration, Tips for traveling to Koblenz for our REAL Studio conference, Tips for extra days in Koblenz and Reasons to visit Germany.