Component X Graphics, a Bosco Hutchings product, is being made available to other REALbasic developers. REALbasic is the development environment from Real Software.
Component X Graphics is a plug-in for REALbasic 3.5 and 4.0 and offers fast, high quality graphics functions for REALbasic, developer Brad Hutchings told MacCentral. Version 1.1 of Component X Graphics scales, stretches, flips, rotates in 0.1-degree increments, and pixelates an image. It works with bit depths from eight to 32 and offers a fast low quality mode.
“The resulting images are identical across supported platforms,” Hutchings said. “REALbasic compiles Component X Graphics into Carbon, Classic and Win32 build of REALbasic projects. Component X Graphics adds less than 60K to the size of compiled applications and uses memory very efficiently. Without Component X Graphics, REALbasic developers would have to tell their users to manually rotate the screen of their new iMac to get image rotation in 0.1-degree increments. It’s not even a possibility on Windows machines. Now, they can build the functionality into their software.”
Component X Graphics 1.1 is available from the Component X Graphics Web site. The demo is free and works just like the real thing inside the REALbasic IDE, but displays a message box and times out after five minutes when compiled into an application. Through Jan. 31, you can purchase a license for Component X Graphics for US$350. After that date, the price will be $500. The license includes updates and support for one year and allows you to deploy and distribute REALbasic applications that incorporate Component X Graphics “forever,” Hutchings said.