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Issue 1.4

COLUMN

A New Year for REALbasic

Thoughts from the Publisher

Issue: 1.4 (February/March 2003)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: When RBD publisher Marc Zeedar was a kid he used to create magazines just for fun. Now he's doing it for a living! You may contact him at editor@rbdeveloper.com.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 4,851
Starting Page Number: 5
Article Number: 1400
Related Link(s): None

Full text of article...

The year is now 2003 -- it seems like just yesterday we were worrying about Y2K. I attended Macworld Expo 2003 in San Francisco and wow, was it exciting! What a great way to kick off the new year.

Last year wasn't the best year economically for many companies, but there was a revitalization on the show floor, and with over 90,000 attendees, the expo spoke of good things for 2003.

Part of that was due to excitement Apple generates with new products, such as the 17" PowerBook G4 and cool new software like Keynote and the Safari web browser, but it's also because Mac OS X is reaching critical mass. More and more companies are writing software for Mac OS X, and soon OS 9 will soon seem as dated as OS 8.5.

I got to meet a number of REALbasic Developer readers at show, and it was cool to hear what you're doing with REALbasic. I also met many, many people who were very interested in learning to program, and I hope this magazine will be a great encouragement to you, as well as a valuable source of important information.

REALbasic 5

REALbasic 5 is on the horizon (it should be available for Mac OS about the time you read this and for Windows soon after), and it brings a number of exciting improvements. The biggest is under the hood: RB5 includes a brand new compiler, which eventually will lead to faster, smaller applications, and better language features. Beyond that, RB5 has improved support for Mac OS X (metalic windows, drawers, and more).

Our policy is to use and write about the current version of REALbasic, but of course magazines have a lead time of several months, so for this and the next issue, most of what we publish will be compatible with REALbasic 4.5. But we do encourage you to upgrade as soon as possible as we're all anxious to explore the new features of the latest update.

Magazine Changes

A magazine is like a living organism: it must grow or it dies. I've tried to resist making impulsive changes to RBD and I think that's been a good policy. However, things don't always work, and sometimes changes are needed.

Beginning with this issue, we're dropping the "REALchallenge" programming contest. According to our recent reader survey, this was not a very popular column, and few readers submitted entries in the contest. That might have been due to the long lead times required for magazine production: awards were to be announced several months after submission. In Internet time, that's a decade. Our writer, Sean Beach, wanted to move on to other activties, and so we've decided to kill the column for now.

It's possible we'll eventually bring back the column in a different form, or perhaps we'll do an annual contest instead. Stay tuned.

In This Issue

Despite missing one column, we've got a plethora of stuff for you this issue.

Kicking things off is our cover story by Electric Butterfly's Dave Wooldridge (of UniHelp fame) on software marketing. If you've ever been intimidated by the various tasks of selling your software, here's the article you need to read. Dave explains about establishing brand identity, getting noticed by search engines, writing press releases, advertising, handling payments, and more.

Next, if you've been struggling to make your program fit in with the Mac OS X "Aqua" appearance, Mike Benonis has some handy tips for you. We've also got a handy "Aqua Checklist" compiled by Doug Grinbergs of mactester.com.

If you're interested in graphics, you'll be fascinated by our interview with Claes Lundstrom, a boat designer who wrote the amazing, full-featured $795 TouchCAD in REALbasic.

For our Postmortem, Thomas Reed details the challenging in rewriting an existing program (Coffee Break Pro) in REALbasic.

And of course all our regular columns are back: Matt Neuburg's column is on hashing, Thomas Cunningham's has a great primer on graphics from the beginner's perspective (which compliments Thomas Reed's Adanced Techniques' graphics focus), and if you're interested in a challenging subject, be sure to read Didier's "Beyond the Limits" which explains how to do steganography (that's the process of hiding secret messages inside a picture) in REALbasic.

End of article.