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FEATURE

Postmortem

Writer

Issue: 1.1 (August/September 2002)
Author: Daniel Kennett
Author Bio: Daniel Kennett has written several small programs with REALbasic, and successfully released a few of them to the public.
Article Description: Follow the development of a shareware word processor
Article Length (in bytes): 14,713
Starting Page Number: 11
Article Number: 1001
Related Web Link(s):

http://www.iconfactory.com/
http://www.esellerate.net/
http://www.versiontracker.com/
http://www.kennettnet.co.uk/software/

Excerpt of article text...

Writer was my first REALbasic baby. It started off in the REALbasic 2 days, and I learned to program with it. It slowly evolved until it got to version 4.5, when I decided to rename it from "KennettText" to "Writer," relabel it version 1.0, and throw it out to the big bad world. Back then it was really poor. There were no exception handlers at all, and if you tried to open the wrong kind of file it would throw an exception and quit. Despite this, Writer did quite well. Now, I realise this was because the "Made with REALbasic = piece of crap" era hadn't yet started. As Writer slowly developed, I began to see more and more REALbasic programs on VersionTracker, and I tried many of them to see what others had done. I wasn't impressed with many; they either looked horrible or looked beautiful but weren't programmed well, and threw exceptions everywhere. At first, the "Made with REALbasic" bashers were other programmers who worked with complicated languages such as C, and weren't too happy at seeing how quickly and easily you could make programs in REALbasic. They looked through the programs and blamed every single bug they found on this wonderful development environment. To this day, I see silly mistakes I make blamed on REALbasic by everyone.

By this time, Writer looked fairly decent, was virtually exception-proof, and had started to mature into a fairly useful piece of software. I learned from other people's mistakes and made Writer the most stable, good-looking program I could. Now, at version 2.6, it is a successful and popular program that I am proud to show off to everyone I can, especially at work. "Hey, my program can do that much more elegantly!" In the next few pages, I will share my learning experience with you, going through the most important aspects of creating a successful program and what happens when you screw up.

Interface

The first thing people judge your program by is its interface. Even if your program is stable, fast, and the most useful thing on the planet, not many people will use it if it looks ugly. You really have no excuse not to do this, as REALbasic makes it simple to make a nice interface. Controls are snapped to their proper places when you drag them to your project's windows, and all you have to do it to set the right font, text size, and size of the control to fit its caption or contents.

After you have made your interface look right, the next things to consider are icons. Nicely done icons that are used for your application's main, document, and (if appropriate) toolbar icons add the extra sparkle and polish that is needed to make your product shine. However, badly done icons are worse than no icons at all! If you really want icons, but don't have a drop of artistic talent (like me), you may want to consider getting a specialist to do it for you. This isn't cheap, and should only be considered if you are making a big product and expect to get a considerable income from it, or if you are dirty stinkin' rich. My experience with such companies isn't very good, as after much thought and consideration I invested in spiffy icons from Acorn Creative, only to find that they were unable to complete my project due to "funding issues," and I lost my icons and my money. However, don't let that put you down. Take a look at http://www.iconfactory.com/. They are one of the industry's best, but are pricey. If you do consider them, bear in mind they designed the icons for the popular MP3 player Audion, and the (not-so-popular among Mac users) operating system Windows XP. Much as I dislike Windows, I love its icons. If I had the money, I'd go for IconFactory in a flash.

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