Thursday 8 May 2008

Telling the truth

We all know that REAL Software can't be bothered to document REALbasic properly, so it comes as no surprise that I can find no reference in the docs to the pairs class, the only new feature RS is advertising for 2008r2.

Of course, Aaron has stepped in and documented this on his blog so it's no great hardship for me personally, as I check his blog most days.

What does come as a bit more of a surprise is that, even now, the RS website is claiming

Windows: Unlike most other Windows development tools, REALbasic generates self-contained executables which are not dependent on external dlls or pre-installed frameworks. The single .exe file produced by the REALbasic compiler is all you need to distribute to you customers.
This has been mentioned on the forums, I've PM'd members of RS staff about it hours ago, I've cleared every browser cache in sight and connected via different ISPs. It's still there.

Does the U.S.A. have no laws about false advertising? In a litigious society like the U.S. are people actually putting up with this sort of thing?

The single executable is a central claim about the way that RB can be deployed and should have been removed from the website as soon as RS realised they might be going to change it.

Of course there will be changes to how RB works over time but anyone who has bought or renewed RB recently could be forgiven for feeling they have been badly misled.

It's a real shame because 2008r2 seems to be a really nice release. Why doe RB's documentation and advertising so often end up wrecking the positive feel we would otherwise get?

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

What external DLLs are required for the deployment of an RB app?

Anonymous said...

Thanks for pointing the page out to us, it should be updated now. Our website has thousands of pages (in several languages), and we miss stuff on occasion, even the big stuff unfortunately. Sorry for the confusion -- we're not trying to be sneaky or underhanded.. just simple human error.

Steve Garman said...

@anonymous: In a simple "Hello World" app, no DLLs are required but if you use (internal or external) plugins, there will be one DLL per plugin. The RB website has now been corrected to describe this behaviour.

@Aaron: I really do know that it's simple human error. The problem is that nobody has felt it important enough in the last 90+ days to find that statement so that it doesn't look like RS are trying to rip off their customers.

Somebody very senior (or a P.A. to somebody very senior) should be doing this sort of thing.

Would I be right in thinking that the final decision to allow the abandonment of the single .exe was made at a very high level?

Anonymous said...

@Steve -- I don't discount the fact that the mistake sucks. I just wanted to point out that it's an honest mistake to miss a paragraph out of a few thousand web pages, even when it's an important paragraph.

Yes, the final decision was made at a high level. This wasn't just a lark decision. It was an important one that had to be made.

Anonymous said...

For what its worth....

I spotted the mistake. I wasn't bothered by it. I don't feel it is a litigious lie or an underhand act. It wasn't deceptive either.

I have read the reasons for changing the model and accept it was necessary. It is not "going down the MS route".

I have good faith in the RB engineers and the progress being made.

Barry Traver said...

I wasn't sure where to post this, so I decided to post it here and let you decide where it should be put.

I downloaded and tried out your miniBrowser.rbp in your "Stuff I should look at to see if it still works."

When I try to run the program with RB2008r2, I get this error message:

"HTMLViewer1 on Window1 implements the event "Action," but its superclass HTMLViewer has already implemented the event."

Then RB (sometimes) crashes.

The same thing happens when I try to run the the .xml file.

Does your browser "still work"? If (as I presume) it does, what am I doing wrong?

Warm regards,

Barry Traver

Steve Garman said...

@Barry,
No it appears it doesn't work in rb2008r2. It looks like HTMLViewer no longer has an action event.
You can make it work easily enough though.
HTMLViewer1 has an Action event with a comment in it. Go in and remove the whole comment from the event. When the event is completely empty, the Action event should disappear.
Hopefully the demo will then compile.

Barry Traver said...

I haven't looked at the actual source code yet, but when I try to run dragIn.rbp, the program gives me an error (something about button1 not existing).

I _love_ resizeable.rbp I don't have an immediate idea of a practical use for it, but it's impressive enough that it deserves to exist simply as a programming "magic trick" ("how did he do that?"), deserving to exist elegantly on that basis alone.

I've run chkbox.rbp, but I haven't figured out yet what it does. (I do like, however, diginum.rbp and dragBMP, which work fine -- the only new one I've had trouble with thus far ia dragIn.rbp.)

Barry Traver

Barry Traver said...

You said this about your browser program: "No, it appears it doesn't work in rb2008r2. It looks like HTMLViewer no longer has an action event. You can make it work easily enough though. HTMLViewer1 has an Action event with a comment in it. Go in and remove the whole comment from the event. When the event is completely empty, the Action event should disappear. Hopefully the demo will then compile."

It does, and the program works fine after that. Thanks for sharing the code!

Anonymous said...

@Mr. Steve Garman,

Please re-establish the links to some of your sample codes, as those links are now broken. E.g.

http://rb.sgarman.net/adLBcolour.rbp
http://rb.sgarman.net/dropBMP.rbp


Would love to try them out. Thank you much.

Steve Garman said...

@Anonymous - I've re=established most of the links. Will have a go at adding the rest soon.