My Impressions of REALbasic - No refactoring, seriously?

I've started using REALbasic for a project at work for a while now. It's a legacy product and someone somewhere decided to go with REALBasic and when you pick REALBasic you also pick the IDE from REAL Software whether you like it or not.

After using it for a couple of days I can honestly say that it's not as bad as I thought but it's not a pleasant experience.

First off, I must say I applaud the effort of trying to create a development environment that let's you create apps for both Mac OS X, Windows and Linux in a graphical IDE. But there are some serious issues with it that I think people need to know about before getting started.

My biggest grievance is that there is no proper refactoring tool, if you are used to working in Eclipse or Visual Studio it's back to search and replace. This is not a problem for small project but it quickly becomes a big problem when you realise that you forgot to rename the main window and have tons of references to "Window1".

The second biggest problem is that it enforced bad architecture in the same way that Visual Basic does. It's easy to be tempted to duplicate the event handling code under every control.

Third, If you like Basic syntax it's great. Unfortunately I don't. Stuff like using the equal sign for equality and assignment is just error prone.

Forth, you need to buy the professional edition to get access to container controls. Without them creating dynamic user interfaces is really really really tedious and cumbersome. You also need to resort to showing stuff in message boxes for quick debugging. Only in the professional edition do you get access to writing to the console.

Fifth, Why can't I just browse the source code? Why am I restricted to viewing it a piece at a time through clicking on events in the editor?

I'll post more on this as I progress...

Cudos to Google regarding spell checking

I've found myself using Google Chrome more and more in favour of Safari. And today i discovered what might be it's greatest feature if you like me need to switch between languages a lot.

This is the standard Apple Spell checker. Everything is hidden in dialogues and menus. I might as well be using Microsoft Office.

Behold the awesomeness of Google Chrome. It is not a super advanced innovation they just effectively reduced the number of clicks by half and increased visibility while doing so. It's so great that I don't even care that it's not properly localised. Go Google go!

Again with the Mac OS X spell checker...

As an expat in the Netherlands you constantly have to battle with getting the definite articles "het" (neuter) and "de" (masculine, feminine and plural) right. They are easily the Scylla and Charybdis of the Dutch language and just like our definite articles in Swedish ("den" and "det") there is no good rule to help you know when to use which.

During my Dutch course at Vrije Universiteit I got thought the rule that if in doubt use "de" since it is the most frequently used of the two.

I recently wrote a presentation in Dutch and I really wanted to get the Dutch text on the slides correct. I thought that selecting the user "Check Grammar" in the Mac OS X Spell checker would help me but unfortunately is seemed to do very little.

So I did a little test to see if the check box had any effect on the following sentences:

Dutch
De paard loopt snel. (wrong)
Het paard loopt snel. (correct)

English
The horse fast runs. (wrong)
The horse runs fast. (correct)

Swedish
Hästen fort springer. (wrong)
Hästen springer fort. (correct)

According to the spell checker all of the above sentences are correct. I have no clue what is meant by "Check Grammar" according to Apple but it certainly does not involve word order or articles. Thanks be to the almighty for online dictionaries and Wordfinder.

And shame on the UI team at apple who put the checkbox there without checking if the programmers actually had implemented the underlying functionality.

... of course Microsoft Word would be the other extreme warning about old fashioned sentence constructions left and right as soon as there is a deviation from the subject verb object word order.