Ups and Downs of development with RealBasic
I started to use RealBasic in 2007. Having made the move (most of the way) to Linux I realised I needed a replacement for Visual Basic. I wish I was a real programmer but I don't have enough time or interest so I have got by with using VB to cobble together little programs to help automate or simplify certain areas of my digital life.
RealBasic seemed like a good choice because it was multi-platform, offered a familiar code syntax and while being a commercial project the Linux version was free. I had a look at some of the examples and liked what I saw. Soon I was developing my own application for working with GSP data I was collecting. I was able to knock up the interface, create object structures to hold my data and even do the basic graphical programming required to draw out map information. Overall, the language was exactly what I needed.
Unfortunately I discovered that the development environment, that is the RealBasic programming system I was using to author my application, has some serious issues running on Ubuntu 7.10 and Ubuntu 8.04. For some reason it would lockup when test running my application while playing music with RhythmBox. It would close unexpectedly and loose my entire program. I have persisted (albeit slowly) but am increasingly frustrated with this issue. This system can obviously do a lot and could be a real boon for would be developers that need a quick and easy development language to create the sorts of low cost and freeware applications that are available for Windows.