One feature of Mac OS X that won’t be included in REALbasic 3.1, the next release of the popular development environment, is core graphics, Geoff Perlman, president and CEO of REAL Software said in an e-mail message to REALbasic users.
Core graphics is the engine in Mac OS X that provides the rendering of most of the text you see. So why won’t it be supported in REALbasic 3.1?
“Support for core graphics is not something that applications ported to Mac OS X automatically take advantage of, and it’s actually quite a bit of work to support,” Perlman said. “Rather than hold up our Mac OS X version, we decided to hold off on this feature until we could take the time to get it right.”
That should happen with REALbasic 3.2 , which will support core graphics both for applications built in REALbasic and throughout the IDE, as well. That will be the only significant change in version 3.2, which could ship in early May as a free update for registered REALbasic 3.0 users.
“In the past our major releases were monolithic and spaced a year or more apart with smaller maintenance releases scattered between them,” Perlman said. “This became a problem because many of you prefer to use only official releases (rather than betas) and if a feature or bug fix you needed was in a beta of the next release, you might have to wait quite a while before that version shipped. To solve this problem, we are planning to deliver two major releases per year.”
REALbasic 3.5 is tentatively slated for this summer; REALbasic 4.0 has an estimated arrival date of early 2002. Traditionally, REAL Software’s upgrade pricing has been half of the full price. Each of these releases (3.5 and 4.0) will be a paid upgrade, but not a full price upgrade.
“We haven’t decided on pricing yet, but it will probably be around 50 to 60 percent of the normal upgrade price,” Perlman said. “The result is that the cost to upgrade from 3.0 to 4.0 will likely be about the same as the cost to upgrade from 2.0 to 3.0. There will also be minor free updates between these releases if we feel there is the need for them.”
The company released REALbasic 3.0 in February with support for Mac OS X. Specifically, REALbasic 3.0 was designed to support Mac OS X Public Beta.
“There were many changes in Mac OS X between the public beta and final release (Mac OS X 10.0),” Perlman said. “To maintain compatibility with Mac OS X 10.0, we are currently finishing up development of REALbasic 3.1. This version will be a free update for all registered REALbasic 3.0 users and will be the version that is compatible with Mac OS X.”
You can download the current 3.1 beta online.
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