ARBP Chat with Geoff Perlman
August 12, 2009
Paul Lefebvre Welcome to the first ARBP Monthly Chat! Our special guest this month is Geoff Perlman, President and CEO of REAL Software.
Paul Lefebvre So here are the chat rules:
Paul Lefebvre If you have a question, just type it and click Send. It will go in the moderation queue and will not appear in the chat until they are approved.
Paul Lefebvre I will approve selected questions to Geoff for him to answer.
Paul Lefebvre I don't expect that we will have enough time to go through everyone's questions.
Paul Lefebvre The transcript of this chat will be made available sometime tomorrow.
Paul Lefebvre That's it. The queue is now open for questions.
Paul Lefebvre I'll start Geoff off with an easy one: How is the weather down there in Austin?
Geoff Perlman Hello everyone.
Geoff Perlman Not so good. It has been over 100 degrees for quite a while now. We are looking forward to cooler weather.
Travis Hill Will the new reporting functionality have an end-user report editing component?
Geoff Perlman We currently have no plans to offer an end-user solution. There are end-user solutions already available for REALbasic.
Roger Clary Hi Geoff - What would you say is the biggest challenge facing RS today? Competition from other vendors, staying ahead of changing technology, ...etc?
Geoff Perlman I would say the biggest challenge is the same one we have always had. We want to do more with REALbasic but everything takes time and we are impatient. So we try to maximize our productivity and our understanding of the priorities of our customers.
Keith Hutchinson How easy is it to merge Realbasic applications with .net libraries (Is it possible)?
Geoff Perlman Regarding .net libraries, as far as I know, you can't "merge" a REALbasic application with a .net library. I don't believe it's possible to call a .net library (at this time) from REALbasic.
Brendan Murphy What about plans for implementing RB style libraries where we can take RB source code and generate precompiled libraries for the RB environment (or plugins generated from RB code)?
Geoff Perlman We know users want that and right now we are looking into ways to deliver that. We have taken some heat in the past for announcing new technologies prematurely so don't be surprised if I'm a bit vague. :-)
Kevin Culley Hello Geoff. I was wondering if you could flesh out some of the plans for 64bit REALbasic? Time line? Issues in developing and releasing a 64bit version?
Geoff Perlman We have been looking into the 64 bit issue and making a plan to address it. Updating the compiler is actually the easy part. Updating the framework is a much bigger job. However, all of the new Cocoa code we are writing is 64 bit ready. So that's going to make the job easier.
Stephen Copinger Greetings from Scotland: What RealStudio only features can we expect to see in the near future; in general terms if you do not want to disclose specifics yet.
Geoff Perlman We are getting feedback from REAL Studio users who tend to be full time developers. I can't really give you much in the way of details without prematurely announcing something. However, we have our first REAL Studio feature in development now.
Geoff Perlman It should be available for beta testing in R4, but probably won't ship until R5.
Andy Dent As you are not planning an end-user report editor, will there be sufficient API in the inbuilt engine that a third-party could write such a component and still use your report-writer engine?
Geoff Perlman We have not yet decided how much of the reporting engine API we will expose. What we expose, we have to support and it becomes difficult to change it in the future.
Geoff Perlman Having said that, we are not opposed to the idea of others building end user reporting solutions on top of our engine.
Jason Adams Has RB been tested on any versions of Windows 7 for compatibility?
Geoff Perlman Yes, we are testing REALbasic and apps made with REALbasic on Windows 7. I'm not currently aware of any incompatibilities.
Bob Keeney What are some of the lessons learned from the switch to Cocoa?
Geoff Perlman I think the biggest lesson learned is that hindsight is always 20/20. We wish we had done some things differently as it would have made it easier but that's often the case with technology.
Geoff Perlman For example, we started down one path that seemed to make sense but it was a big departure from how we normally do things. It didn't work out so we had to start over again. In the long run, I think we are better off.
Russ Tyndall What control is most frequently requested for addition to REALbasic?
Geoff Perlman The most commonly requested control is actually a set of controls that would allow users to build iPhone apps.
Geoff Perlman But to really answer the question, it's a gird control much like our multi-column listbox but more like a spreadsheet.
Roger Clary Is there anything in the works for RB to implement web development (ala Swordfish) or is that way on the back burner?
Geoff Perlman If there is, I certainly won't be talking about it.
Brendan Murphy One thing I would like to see is a way for third party tools to connect and communicate with the IDE and query it for information. Is such a thing on the radar?
Geoff Perlman We are always open to opportunities like that. We know that users would like a version control interface inside the IDE. When we add one, our plan is to provide a public API. We would provide SVN support and others could then add support for other version control systems.
Geoff Perlman That’s just one example of course.
Paul Lefebvre A few people have asked “What are your thoughts on iPhone and mobile development in general (Android, Palm, Windows Mobile)?
Geoff Perlman The number one feature request we get these days is for iPhone support. Cocoa is a necessary pre-requisite to that as is adding support for the ARM processor.
Geoff Perlman So far, we are not getting requests for Palm, Android and Windows Mobile in anything close to the numbers of requests for iPhone support.
Geoff Perlman So believe me when I say that iPhone support is very much in our minds but there's some work to do before we can get there.
Bob Keeney Do you expect REALbasic to have any .NET support in the future?
Geoff Perlman .NET support is very much dependent on what Microsoft ultimately does with .Net and Win32. They have been saying they will drop Win32 for some time now but that has not yet come close to fruition.
Geoff Perlman When it starts looking like it will, we will make more concrete plans for .Net support. But essentially, the more our customers ask for us to support .Net, the more likely it will happen. We get questions about it, but not a lot of requests yet.
Ron Benditt Using job postings on CareerBuilder as a barometer of market acceptance, I've seen zero postings but competing cross-platform solutions are growing. What steps are you taking to bring the product to more high-profile developers and mainstream?
Geoff Perlman CareerBuilder and other sites like it, are filled mostly with corporate jobs. Big corporations tend to standardize on one platform. Cross-platform is not important to them but it is important to vertical market developers and smaller companies.
Geoff Perlman Those developer jobs are not usually posted on sites like CareerBuilder.
Geoff Perlman Remember that cross-platform right now is a small niche in the overall programming world but that is our niche. That is where we focus.
Thomas Cunningham Of new buyers of RB, what is the percentage of Mac to PC?
Geoff Perlman When we started out, we were 100% Mac of course. Now it's roughly 50/50.
Geoff Perlman On the Windows side, we still get a lot of developers that feel that Visual Studio/.Net has become so complex and difficult to learn that they yearn for something like Visual Basic. They find what they are looking for in REALbasic.
Brendan Murphy What are your thoughts on how much progress you have made on tackling legacy bugs?
Geoff Perlman We survey you guys (our users) and you have told us how important quality is. As a result, we are devoting more time than ever before on fixing bugs. We are also looking at ways of identifying the bugs that have the greatest impact.
Geoff Perlman I think the feature to bug fix ratio over the last 12 months tells the story.
Geoff Perlman Of course, keep in mind that we have also had to devote a lot of energy to Cocoa. But once that is shipping, even more energy can be devoted to bug fixing.
Thomas Cunningham Do you think you will ever change the name of RB?
Geoff Perlman We have debated that question endlessly. I can't count the number of times. And I'm sure we will debate again in the future. However, recently surveys tell us that people are just as positive, negative or indifferent to REALbasic as they are to Java.
Geoff Perlman I'm becoming convinced that the name doesn't make the product. The product makes the name.
Bob Keeney At last Real World there was some talk about improving the language reference and making it user extensible. Any progress on that front?
Geoff Perlman We are developing a new documentation system to make it easier for us to write, edit and manage our documentation. The primary goal is to make it faster and easier improve the documentation and to make localization easier.
Geoff Perlman It is possible for outsiders to contribute but we haven't made any decisions yet on that front. My guess is that we will allow someone to have access and see how that goes.
Brendan Murphy One thing I would like to see is plugins loaded on a per project basis instead of globally. Would this big feature to implement?
Geoff Perlman We would like to see that as well. It would make project management easier. It seems like an easy feature but it's actually not.
Geoff Perlman Currently, plug-ins don't have a way to be unloaded other than quitting the IDE. So it's actually a pretty big feature and right now, we have bigger fish to fry.
Paul Lefebvre Well, that's all we have time for tonight folks. I want to thank Geoff for staying past the allocated time a bit due to the technical difficulties.
Paul Lefebvre I have some work ahead of me to clean up the chat transcript!
Bob Keeney Thank you Geoff.
Geoff Perlman You’re welcome. Thank you for inviting me. It's been a pleasure.
