Real Software has announced that they’re shipping REALbasic 4.5 today at Macworld New York. REALbasic is the company’s integrated development environment (IDE).
Lorin Rivers, Real Software’s vice president of marketing, told MacCentral that the new version has new graphics capabilities, enhanced multimedia tools, an improved user experience, a more productive IDE, and more. With REALbasic 4.5, you can easily create applications that use vector graphics (such as Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand, and Corel Draw) and easily rotate images as well, he added.
When it comes to multimedia tools, with REALbasic 4.5 you can more easily edit and create movies, Rivers said. It includes new functions for QTVR, 3D Sound, Sound Tracks, and more (over eighty new functions, in fact). It also simplifies the creation of 3D games. You can detect collisions with a new bounding box and sphere functions, plus you have more control over dynamic lighting in Rb3D, Rivers said.
The tweaked user interface applies to the traditional Mac OS and Mac OS X versions (as well as Windows). The ListBox even more flexible and powerful with resizable columns, drag-to-reorder rows, and total control over sorting. The update makes it easier to create “Wizards,” “card,” and standard preference dialogs with a new Page Panel, Rivers said. It’s also easier to include a complete set of icons for Mac, Mac OS X, and Windows, he added.
REALbasic 4.5 boasts more native Mac OS X user interface with new Sheets support. There’s also improved Mac OS X file support; REALbasic now supports getting and setting long or exotic file names, support for packages in file dialogs, and more.
Not enough? Okay, the ability to add custom features, reference materials, utility applications, and Code Editor AppleScripts to the new Extras menu has been simplified, Rivers said. Real Software has improved the IDE’s productivity by automating common code editing operations such as wrapping, commenting, and other utilities with Scriptable Code Editor, he added. In the update, it easier to manipulate the user interface with math; just type a mathematical expression such as *2 to double a value and make a control twice as wide). With REALbasic 4.5, it’s also easier to resume debugging by saving breakpoints and clearing them when finished, Rivers said.
For the power users out there, it’s now a bit simpler to create your own file format that can contain any number of other files and file types with the Virtual File System. RbScript is more powerful and flexible and can now communicate with the rest of your application. As of the latest version, you can integrate REALbasic with standard source and version control systems with Export modules and classes as XML. It can, of course, be automated with AppleScript and packs expanded AppleEvent types.
The professional edition of REALbasic 4.5 has a new Query Editor in the Data Viewer that also includes sort, resizable columns. REALbasic now supports mySQL, the popular free database that’s included with Mac OS X.