Cringely on REALbasic
Posted on December 29, 2004
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 66 views |
Robert Cringely has discovered REALbasic and likes what he sees in Getting Real:
And that’s why I like REALBasic, which feels in many ways like a return to a simpler time, except that it also does some things that we could never have done in the good old days, and that we cannot do today with Microsoft products — like making applications totally cross-platform.
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REALBasic began as a Mac shareware product many years ago and has evolved over time into the current product, which is quite mature even if not enough people know about it. The company publishes a magazine and has user conferences just like the bigger boys do. Those who’ve tried REALBasic love it.
I used REALbasic for years, since it was CrossBasic, but eventually I had to give it up in favour of learning Objective-C, as I wrote in Goodbye REALbasic. In a nutshell: as a hobbyist developer there was no way I could ever get the return on investment I was making in REALbasic, given the upgrade cycle and lack of feature-completeness that seemed intrinsic to it.
I still use REALbasic a lot, frozen at 5.5, to prototype applications and whip up small utils I need and for that it’s just fine by me. I hope it does ultimately become the VB-killer (ahh, utopia) but until then I’ll still be digging away at Obj-C.