REALbasic To Support Cocoa in 2009

REAL Software has just announced that REALbasic will support Cocoa, Apple's framework for Mac OS X softwre development. REAL Software has engineering resources devoted solely to Cocoa development. Cocoa support will be in beta in the first quarter of 2009 and will begin shipping mid-2009.

"We put a lot of effort into keeping REALbasic a modern product," stated Geoff Perlman, Founder and CEO of REAL Software. "Carbon was great technology for the switch from Classic Mac OS to Mac OS X. Now it's important for us to lay the foundation for our future on the Mac and that is Cocoa."

Most REALbasic users will get the benefits of this modernization without having to make changes to their projects. Current REALbasic projects should recompile without any problems. Users will not need to learn the Cocoa APIs - they will continue to use the same REALbasic language they use today. REALbasic plugins that have no user interface should work without any modification. Plugins that have a user interface will need to be rewritten in Objective-C using the Cocoa APIs.

With support for Cocoa will also come a number of new features including editfields that support spell-checking, however applications built with this first release of Cocoa will still have the same User Interface as applications have today, but will be built with the Cocoa framework. Future releases will include more Cocoa specific features, but users can access those framework-specific features, like Core Animation, with this first release via Declares.

More information about this will be available in Q1 2009, when Cocoa is in beta. To join the REALbasic Beta Program, please visit the REAL Software Feedback System: http://www.realsoftware.com/feedback/.

Daughters' Sports Team Inspires Dad: Software Veteran Turns to REALbasic to Power Volleyball Stat Software

Jack Damm is a software pioneer who wrote his first spreadsheet package in 1972 when electronic spreadsheets were in their infancy. Ten years later Canadian business intelligence company Cognos (now owned by IBM) bought his company, and he continued to work there designing PowerPlay and other business intelligence products. In 1990 he was able to retire to spend more time with his family and tinker with software when the mood struck.

The mood struck during a volleyball game when he was carefully writing down the game's stats by hand. "Volleyball is almost as statistics intensive as baseball," Damm explains. There are a lot of records to keep. "Hitters, the players who spike the ball, have hitting percentages equivalent to a batting average. If you hit 300 or more over the course of a season you are hitting well." Among the actions coaches need to track are attacks, passes, digs, serves, aces, assists, blocks and errors.

"The programmer in me said 'this really ought to be a computer application,'" Damm says, so he wrote a program for his Palm Pilot. At a tournament a coach saw him tapping the screen with a stylus rather than keeping notes on paper. "Where did you buy it?" he asked. "I didn't buy it, I wrote it," Damm replied. When the coach asked to try it, Damm beamed the program between their Palms. The next week another coach asked to try it. Before long about a half dozen coaches were using the program. Read more...

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