REALbasic Offer

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REALbasic recently offered a free license to VB6 users. I got my license a couple of weeks ago, but haven’t dove into REALbasic yet. I’ve heard good things about the software, and I’m kind of anxious to give it a whirl.

REALbasic sent me an email today saying they are extending their free offer until April 15, 2005. You can take advantage of the

Free Offer For Visual Basic Users

This link is unique to me and I win a prize if I get a lot of people to sign up. I’m not really interested in a prize, I just wanted to get the word out about this VB6 alternative (but I won’t be turning it down, either.)

From Geoff Perlman, Founder and CEO of REAL Software, Inc.

Since we started giving away REALbasic keys to Visual Basic users two weeks ago, more than 10,000 new Windows developers like you have joined the REALbasic community. Unlike Visual Basic, REALbasic is fully supported and we will continue to improve it constantly based on feedback from you, our new users.

Giving away licenses to VB6’ers seems like a brilliant scheme to me. Time will tell, but 10,000 downloads is a pretty good start, I’ll bet.

P.S. I stole this picture from their website. Can I do that?

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11 thoughts on “REALbasic Offer

  1. re: P.S. I stole this picture from their website. Can I do that?

    I guess they won’t mind, given the free publicity that it will generate :) At least you didn’t steal their bandwidth by merely linking to it….

    Looks interesting Dick, I’ll sure give it a whirl

  2. Couldn’t sleep this morning – checked out the blog and downloaded RB and played with it for about an hour.

    First impression: It sucks!

    But will play with it some more later…

  3. Dick –

    >More info if you get a chance. I’m interested in
    >people’s impressions of it, first or otherwise.

    FWIW, the download was very smooth. And now it’s waiting so patiently for me to actually install it.

    First thing I’m gonna do (whenever I get to it) is set a reference to Excel, then see if in fact I can run Excel from within it.

    – Jon

  4. Like John, I encountered no problems with the download, installation & registration process.

    Haven’t got the time to do any more tonight, suffice to say that a tip showed up saying I could drag code examples straight to the app from the help (my quick & dirty way to test something :) )

    So I dragged some code to link to my local MySQL Database &

    Oops…

    “Real Basic has encountered an error & needs to close”

    Ho hum…

    I’ll give it another chance tomorrow, but for now, I have some beer to drink.

  5. As the others, the download was very smooth.

    Just installed it, and I have to say that it will get some time to get used to. The autocomplete feature is driving me nuts right now for example, you have to press “Tab” to autocomplete, I guess I’m used to typing the “.” and the VBE would autocomplete for me. I’ll give it another try tomorrow… but so far, I’m sticking with VB…

  6. Hi everyone.

    REALbasic is different from Visual Basic in many ways and similar in many ways. We are very interested in what we can do to make REALbasic more attractive to Visual Basic users like you. We want you to be part of the REALbasic community.

    As VB users, one of the things you’ve told us is you don’t like the MDI interface. With that in mind, we have designed an entirely new user interface for our next release of REALbasic (called REALbasic 2005). You can see a screen shot of the Windows version here:

    There are screenshots of the Mac and Linux versions as well. And this new version of the REALbasic IDE is written entirely in REALbasic so we are “eating our own dog food” as they say.

    Another thing we’ve heard is that you want to be able to add methods and properties right in the code editor so we are considering that for another release later this year.

    Bottom line: We really want to hear from you. We want to know what we need to do to get you to switch from Visual Basic to REALbasic. We may not be able to make every change right away, but we will take your feedback into consideration in planning our future releases.

    Please feel free to email me personally if you have any suggestions.

    In the mean time, there are a few things about REALbasic as it is today that you might appreciate:

    • You can create applications on Windows and compile them for Windows 98-XP, Macintosh and Linux
    • The apps you create for Windows are completely theme-savvy
    • The apps are self-contained executibles that don’t even require an installer – no DLL Hell problems
    • We provide registry support than VB does
    • We provide better array management than VB does (for example you can initialize an array like this:

    Dim myArray(-1) as string
    myArray = Array(“One”, “Two”, “Three”, “Four”)

    • REALbasic has remote debugging which allows you to run your debug app on any computer you can connect to bug debug it on your development machine

    Again, REALbasic is certainly different from VB in many ways and the same in many ways. We are working to make it more attractive to VB users like you and want your feedback.

    Here are links to a couple of stories about companies that have ported their VB projects to REALbasic (one to get to Mac the other to Linux):

    I welcome your comments and feedback.

    Geoff Perlman
    President and CEO
    REAL Software, Inc.
    geoff@realsoftware.com

  7. Hi,
    download and installation fine however the layout ?! takes me a couple of min to run a very simple msg test script. I think its necessary to bring the layout much closer to VB6.

    Lars

  8. Hi Dick (and others)

    I wanted to bring this one back to life. I recently began a trial of REALBasic as a potential replacement for VB. My early impression, there are some neat things it and other things that I definitely don’t like, the debugging tools for example aren’t in the same league. I was curious about everyone else’s experience and impressions. Any converts out there?. Regards

    Lyle Green


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