[Ham-Mac] REALBasic Programming?

[Steve Muncy]

On 4/7/02 5:33 AM, "John Seney" <wd1v@amsat.org> wrote:

> Anyone using REALBasic and having any success?
> 
> Any ham radio applications?
> 

I've used REALbasic for several freeware programs, and some personal
programs not released to the public. I've written a remote control program
for the Elecraft K2, and I'm currently working on a simple logging program.
My primary interest is writing programs for MacOS X (that's all I run
anymore), but REALBasic does a good job of supporting anything from 8.6 on.
(My K2 remote program runs only on OSX -- it runs poorly on prior systems,
so I didn't release a OS8/9 version.)

Personally, I feel that REALbasic has gotten a bad rap -- it is a good tool
for developing some aps, and not so effective for others. As for comments
that some pretty bad software has been written in REALBasic, you can make
that claim for any language. I've seen some TERRIBLE programs written using
CodeWarrior. At my work, we use several professional programs written using
REALBasic that are EXCELLENT -- and very professionally done.

I would never even think about going back to something like THINK Pascal.
Pascal for the Mac is a basically a dead language. Looking to the future,
I'd definitely learn Objective C and use Cocoa if I were serious about
writing "the next best application." For weekend, casual developers like me,
REALBasic is a really good tool.

The real challenge is this -- we need more development of ham radio aps for
the Mac platform. It bothers me that I sometimes must fire up Virtual PC
just to run a ham radio ap -- and with OSX and the latest version of Virtual
PC, that is not very reliable. I'd be very happy if more more weekend-coders
adopted REALBasic to churn out some good amateur radio aps.


-- 
Steve Muncy, NI5V       <mailto:smuncy@mac.com>
Dalllas, TX USA         <http://homepage.mac.com/smuncy/hamradio/
QRP-ARCI #10330    QRP-L #2191    FISTS #7412    QCWA #30705
ARRL Life Member