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Re: REALbasic 5a6 available

To: REALbasic Betas <realbasic-betas at lists dot realsoftware dot com>
Subject: Re: REALbasic 5a6 available
From: Kevin Ballard <kevin at sb dot org>
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2002 19:09:03 -0500
On Wednesday, November 27, 2002, at 06:57  PM, David Grogono wrote:

[Chg] (IDE) Build apple event: now invokes the new compiler instead
            of the old.

Ok, that's good. I prefer the key combos :D

[New] (IDE) Build Settings: The "Macintosh Name", "Mac OS X Name" and
            the Window's "Application Name" fields can now take
            constants as their values, allowing you to easily assign
            different names for different language versions of your
            product.

Interesting....

I have no use for this, but I know others will.

[New] (IDE) Code Editor: all source code is now stored (and edited)
in Unicode. This means that you can have any combination of
            characters from any script system in your string literals,
            comments, Notes, and so on.  When opening a project from an
            older version of REALbasic, the source code is converted
according to the current source code font. So, for example,
            if your editor is set to use Osaka, then old projects will
            be assumed to be in Shift-JIS.  On Windows, at least for
            now, old projects will always be assumed to be in MacRoman.

W00T!!!

Finally, "extended ASCII" characters will have a known encoding to RB! This will solve a common newbie (and oldie too!) problem!

[Chg] (IDE) Compiler:  New compiler is now the default.

Yay.

[Fix] (Mac) Control captions: now respect the encoding of the caption
            string in most cases, including all built-in controls such
            as PushButtons, GroupBoxes, etc. (but not including
            BevelButtons).

So this means we can now use non-ASCII characters? (I have no idea if you could before, BTW)

[Fix] (IDE) Drawers: No longer crash on systems that don't support
            them.  On these systems drawer windows are converted to
            floating windows.

[Fix] (Car) FolderItem.ExtensionVisible: fixed several bugs related
            to this property.  It should now always reflect the
            hidden/visible state of the file extension on disk, or as
            chosen by the user in a Save dialog.

[Fix] (Win) FolderItemDialog: fixed setting the initial directory of
            the Open and Save dialogs.

[New] (Mac) Graphics.StringWidth: now encoding-savvy on classic MacOS
            (as it already was on Carbon).

[New] (IDE) Help menu: items added for various REALbasic web pages.

[Fix] (Mac) New compiler: application menu items no longer show up on
            a blank menu next to File

[Fix] (IDE) New compiler: can now report errors that occur in
            constants, instead of returning Internal Error

[Fix] (All) New compiler: declare functions that return Ptr values
            can now be assigned to MemoryBlock variables

Yay!

[Fix] (OSX) New compiler: duplicate Quit and Preferences menu items
            are gone.

[Fix] (Mac) New compiler: fixed the last fix for the crash-on-quit
            bug, and added a workaround for a bug in MacOS X.

Oh good.

[Fix] (Mac) New compiler: menu items no longer have extraneous
            ampersands

[Fix] (All) New compiler: Multi-line constants no longer cause
            internal errors

Goodie.

[New] (IDE) New compiler: new preference lets you choose whether to
            see all errors at once or one error at a time

Ooohhhh...

[Fix] (All) New compiler: no longer has problems when two controls in
            different windows have the same name

[Fix] (IDE) New compiler: no longer reports "internal error" when a
            compile error occurs in a property

[Fix] (All) New compiler: no longer reports a syntax error when using
            the FolderItem.Alias property or when defining any variable
            or method named Alias

[Opt] (Mac) New compiler: now "bakes in" string literals like the old
            compiler did, instead of reconstructing them at runtime;
            this is faster

I'm not quite sure what this means, but it's probably good!

Let me take a stab - it keeps a fully-built string object for string literals in the application, rather than just the string literal itself that it builds a string object around. Is this right, or just a totally wild guess?

[New] (Mac) New compiler: now supports AppleScript project items

[New] (All) New compiler: now supports the Sort method for arrays

[New] (All) New compiler: object parameters can now be optional, with
            a default value of Nil

Goodie.

[Fix] (All) New compiler: once again lets you assign a Variant to any
            object reference

[New] (All) New compiler: overloading algorithm can now distinguish
            between Subs and Functions

Ooohhh...

[Fix] (All) New compiler: statements of the form If (foo) = bar Then
            no longer generate syntax errors.

[New] (All) New compiler: string literals are now compiled into the
            app as UTF-8 strings.

Yay.

[Fix] (All) New compiler: The MemoryBlock->Ptr conversion works
            again, as does the Window->WindowPtr conversion

Yay.

[Fix] (All) New compiler: variants now work on the right side of an
            arithmetic expression

[Fix] (All) New compiler: variants work with And, Or, and Not
            operators

[New] (IDE) New debugger: can now display properties belonging to
            intrinsic classes

Yay.

[Fix] (Win) New debugger: data shows up in the debugger window again

[Fix] (IDE) New debugger: no longer crashes when displaying a Color
            variable

[Chg] (IDE) New debugger: no longer leaves ".debug" files scattered
            around.

[New] (IDE) New debugger: now has a button to open a window
            displaying global variables

Yay!

[New] (IDE) New debugger: now has a popup menu which lets you open a
            window for each module showing its protected variables

Yay.

[Fix] (IDE) New debugger: now notices when you've stepped out of all
            user code and returns to Run mode

Ok.

[New] (IDE) New debugger: now remembers where you put the window and
            its dividers

[Fix] (Mac) Polygon: Quickdraw polygon's now draw in color again.

[Fix] (All) PPP Socket code was rewritten to be more consistent
            between Mac OS X, Mac OS 9 and Windows.  The status codes
            returned by System.PPPStatus are now consistent across
            platforms.

[New] (IDE) REALbasic File Format: REALbasic now warns you if you
            open a file that was last saved in a newer version of
            REALbasic. For instance if you open a version 5.5 (in the
            future of course) project in version 5.0 you will get a
            warning.

Coolies!

[Fix] (All) RoundRect: Fixed round rect drawing so that they behave
more like Quickdraw when rendering in Quartz. Specifying an
            OvalHeight, and OvalWidth in Quickdraw will result in the
            same basic shape in Quartz.  The Quartz code also now
            handles extreme cases like negative ovalWidths/ovalHeights,
and ovalWidths/ovalHeights beyound the size of the rectangle.

[New] (All) ServerSocket: Added a new property to the ServerSocket
            class.  ServerSocket.IsListening as Boolean will specify
            when  when the server socket is listening for incoming
            connections.

[Fix] (All) ServerSocket: Fixed a leak so they unbind from their port
            when the app quits.

Oh good.

[Dep] (All) Socket error #104 is deprecated.  You will never see
            another socket error #104.

Yay.

[Fix] (All) Socket Error: error #104 (Invalid port (don't have access
            to that port)) changed to socket  error # 107.

[Fix] (All) SocketCore: Fixed spurious 106 (Out of State) errors when
            trying to read data from a closed socket.

[Fix] (Mac) SocketCore: No longer caches DNS resolutions because it
            degraded performance if done correctly

Ok.

[Nte] (All) Sockets: updated the General Socket Read Me.

[Fix] (All) SSLSocket: made the SSLConnected, SSLConnecting and
            LastErrorCode properties read only.

[Fix] (Mac) Stack limit: set back to 256K for the main thread (in
            4.5, it was unintentionally changed to 64K).

Ouch. Thanks.

[Fix] (All) Starting RB no longer causes your machine to attempt a
            connection to your ISP if you're on a dial-up machine

[Fix] (Mac) Str function: implemented workaround for problem where
            str(0) returned "-0".

Oh good!

[New] (All) System.PPPConnect now takes an optional parameter that
            determines whether user interaction is prompted while
            attempting  the connection.  Due to Mac not having standard
            dialogs to prompt for user input on dial-up connections,
            this feature  does nothing on the Mac.

[Opt] (Mac) Text encoding: several optimizations now make dealing
            with text encodings faster, especially when working with
            strings that contain only ASCII characters.

[Fix] (Mac) TextConverter.Convert: now more robust to bugs in MacOS
which caused the conversion to fail under certain circumstances.

[New] (Mac) Uppercase, Lowercase, TitleCase, Trim, RTrim, LTrim,
            Replace, ReplaceAll: now encoding-savvy and in particular,
            work correctly for UTF-8 and UTF-16.  (UCS-4 support is
            still weak.)

Yay

[New] (OSX) Window.Composite: A new property on Windows called
"Composite" enables some OS X Jaguar only functionality. It
            allows controls to be used on a metal background, or a
            background picture without an ugly rectangle surrounding
            the control.  It also fixes the weird drawer behaviors that
            existed in 5.0a4 and 5.0a5 (Compositing is turned on for
            drawers regardless of how the property is set in the IDE.)
            CAUTION: Many controls will have to be rewritten to be
            compatible with this mode.  REALbasic will attempt to warn
you about items that might not be compatible (Including some
            of our own Controls).  REALbasic fails to warn about
            Listboxes and Editfields which are currently not fully
compatible. REAL Software will work to have most if not all
            of our controls compatible by the time we ship 5.0.  Many
            plugins may have to be reworked as well, REAL Software is
            committed to working with plugin developers so that their
            plugins can be compatible.  Please check the list of known
            issues before reporting problems with control
            incompatibilities, we don't need feedback reports on these.

Dude!

[Nte] (OSX) Window.Composite: does nothing for the following window
            types: Modal, Movable Modal, PlainBox, and Shadow Box.
            Since Rounded Window's are mapped to Document Windows
            compositing is used on Rounded Windows.  Drawer Windows
            always have compositing turned on regardless of what you
            have the checkbox set to.

[Fix] (Mac) Window.Title: now respects the string encoding, and
            supports Unicode under Carbon.

Cool.

[Kis] (Win) Windows IDE: many but not all plugin controls cause a
            crash on launch when built with the Windows IDE.
            Bevelbuttons and Disclosure triangles are examples of
            such controls.  These have been working and will likely
            work again in 5a7.

Well, this looks like a very great release! Keep up the excellent work!

--
Kevin Ballard
kevin at sb dot org
http://www.tildesoft.com
Email from Korea or China must go to <kevin dot nb at sb dot org>


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