REALbasic 4 announced at MacWorld San Francisco 2002.
REAL Software has announced the release of REALbasic 4, the latest major release to the software development tool for the Macintosh. The new version of REALbasic runs natively in Mac OS 8, 9 and X and features a number of key improvements. According to REAL Software, changes to REALbasic 4 include:
- All-new ListBox: Greatly expanded power and flexibility with the addition of cell borders and gridlines, complete control over cell background painting, text drawing, and more, plus new events for tracking user interaction. New Header functionality with a Sort widget and new sort functions and more.
- All-new EditField: Now supports paragraph alignment for the whole EditField or on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis, plus new events for tracking user interaction, and enhanced for Mac OS X.
- External Project Items: provides a way to keep a single copy of commonly used code that you use in multiple projects. Update that copy, and its changes will be updated in each project the next time you open it.
- Find and Replace: finding stuff in your projects is dramatically easier, with much more control over what and where to search. Finds names, declarations, and more.
- Drag and Drop: dragging items from the Project Window to controls or the Code Editor automatically adds useful code (such as running the AppleScript, playing the sound, showing the Window and so on). Dragging a control from the Toolbar to the Project Items window creates a subclass of that control.
- RbScript: now compiled on PowerPC (both Mac OS X and previous versions of the Mac OS) and with dozens of new functions and methods.
- Multimedia, Graphics, and Games: new depth and resolution properties for pictures, pan and volume for sounds, fog for Rb3D and more
- Custom Controls: Canvas has 3 new properties: UseFocusRing, AcceptFocus, and AcceptTabs and 3 new events: GotFocus, LostFocus, and KeyDown greatly expanding what’s possible with the Canvas.
- Interactive shell: now access shell functions which run continuously. Previously, the shell only worked with functions which ran, performed their action, returned the result, and ended (such as ‘ls’).
REALbasic is available in Standard and Professional Editions for US$149.95 and $349.95 respectively. Academic and volume discounts are available, along with license-only options. If you’re currently using REALbasic 3.5, the cost of and upgrade to 4 will range from $29.95 to $89.95. The software has been localized with Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese language support.