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Made in the Shade

Using Core Graphics in a REALbasic Project

Issue: 5.6 (September/October 2007)
Author: Toby Rush
Author Bio: Toby Rush is a music instructor, consultant, freelance programmer, web designer, husband and Dad in Greeley, Colorado.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 11,728
Starting Page Number: 46
Article Number: 5618
Related Web Link(s):

http://developer.apple.com/documentation

Excerpt of article text...

One of the few places where REALbasic has not quite kept up with the cutting edge is in the graphics department. To create graphics, REALbasic uses an API designed around QuickDraw -- a technology that is actually older than the Macintosh itself. Though its power and capability have made it a viable solution for more than 20 years, the QuickDraw technology is being replaced in Mac OS X by Quartz, which is part of the modern graphics system referred to as "Core Graphics."

Core Graphics has some very nice capabilities that QuickDraw lacks, including dealing very naturally with varying levels of transparency. But since REALbasic's graphics commands are based on QuickDraw, accessing these Quartz-ey goodies will take a little extra work and some tinkering under the hood.

By tinkering under the hood, of course, I mean calling the Core Graphics toolbox functions directly, and to do that, we need to use REALbasic's Declare statement. So put on some overalls that you don't mind getting dirty, grab a hard hat, and let's get to work!

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