CompuTest

For approximately three years, CompuTest, LLC has been offering law schools a secure electronic test-taking program, Electronic Bluebook, built on the PC platform using Visual Basic. Due to a growing number of students at client institutions who use Mac laptops, CompuTest's clients recently expressed an interest in offering Electronic Bluebook in a Mac format.

In order to meet their clients' request, CompuTest began researching what would be involved in creating a Mac version of Electronic Bluebook.

With little experience in operating Macs and no experience programming Macs, their programming team initially agreed to build a simplified version of Electronic Bluebook for the Mac platform, allowing two to three months for development.

Early in their research process, CompuTest discovered REALbasic, REALbasic provided a familiar environment, similar to programming in VisualBasic, but for the Mac platform. By using REALbasic and assistance from REAL Software's network user group, CompuTest was able to deliver a beta version of Electronic Bluebook for the Mac in only 12 working days. In addition, REALbasic enabled them to incorporate the full functionality of the PC version into the Mac version in this short timeframe. They were very surprised at the amount of time and work that REALbasic saved them in porting Electronic Bluebook to Mac code.

The similarity between the language of REALbasic and Visual Basic made it possible to copy a large amount of code directly from Microsoft's Visual Basic directly to REALbasic for the Mac. For the small amounts of code that differed between the Visual Basic and REALbasic versions, it was quick and simple to learn the comparable code for REALbasic. Thanks to REALbasic, CompuTest was able to efficiently port Electronic Bluebook from a Visual Basic program on a PC to a REALbasic program on the Mac and impress their customers with the speed with which they were able to meet their customers' needs.

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