REALbasic 5a6 is now available for download and testing. This
is alpha software and it may contain serious problems including possible
data loss or corruption. Please be sure to use copies of your projects and
back up frequently.
IMPORTANT THINGS TO KNOW:
1) OS X builds now uses Carbon Events for windows. This causes problems
when running with the old debugger (problems include having to click
controls many times to get them to fire events). These problems won't occur
with the new debugger or built apps (either compiler). See the 5a4 release
notes for more details.
2) Both building and running in the debugger default to using the new
compiler. Menu options are available to optionally use the old compiler.
When reporting bugs please be sure to figure out which compiler you are
using.
3) Not all features that are in an alpha will necessarily make the final
version of REAlbasic. It is also possible that at some point during the
alphas there will be no alpha/beta available that works for you. We do not
recommend using these alphas for critical development so please keep the
above points in mind if you decide to ignore this recommendation.
These alphas require a special serial number to use. Registered 4.5 users
can get a serial number at the link provided below.
If you have problems please use our new web based reporting system.
http://support.realsoftware.com/feedback/index.php
Enjoy this alpha and we look forward to your feedback,
David
Version 5 Alpha Serial Numbers:
http://register.realsoftware.com/realbasic/demo/rsweb/index.php
REALbasic 5a6 download links:
<http://highspeed.realsoftware.com/Prerelease/REALbasic5a6Classic.sit>
<http://highspeed.realsoftware.com/Prerelease/REALbasic5a6Classic.hqx>
<http://highspeed.realsoftware.com/Prerelease/REALbasic5a6MacOSX.sit>
<http://highspeed.realsoftware.com/Prerelease/REALbasic5a6MacOSX.hqx>
<http://highspeed.realsoftware.com/Prerelease/REALbasic5a6Windows.exe>
<ftp://ftp.realsoftware.com/REALbasic/Prerelease/REALbasic5a6Classic.sit>
<ftp://ftp.realsoftware.com/REALbasic/Prerelease/REALbasic5a6Classic.hqx>
<ftp://ftp.realsoftware.com/REALbasic/Prerelease/REALbasic5a6MacOSX.sit>
<ftp://ftp.realsoftware.com/REALbasic/Prerelease/REALbasic5a6MacOSX.hqx>
<ftp://ftp.realsoftware.com/REALbasic/Prerelease/REALbasic5a6Windows.exe>
Key: [Opt] = Optimization
[Fix] = Bug Fix
[Imp] = Improvement on bug, but problems may still exist
[New] = New Feature
[Chg] = Changes Previous Functionality
[Kis] = Known Issue
[Wrk] = WorkAround
[WrB] = WorkAround broken as a result of bug fix.
[Nlr] = No Longer Reproducible, Reason Unknown. Usually a
consequence of some other fix.
[Tip] = Insight into the design of a feature, suggests
possible uses.
[Nte] = Note
[Dep] = Deprecated
[Pat] = Describes a backwards compatibility issue.
[Ref] = Major refactoring, functionality should be
identical to previous.
5a6
[Chg] (IDE) Build apple event: now invokes the new compiler instead
of the old.
[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.
[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.
[Chg] (IDE) Compiler: New compiler is now the default.
[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).
[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
[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.
[Fix] (Mac) New compiler: menu items no longer have extraneous
ampersands
[Fix] (All) New compiler: Multi-line constants no longer cause
internal errors
[New] (IDE) New compiler: new preference lets you choose whether to
see all errors at once or one error at a time
[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
[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
[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
[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.
[Fix] (All) New compiler: The MemoryBlock->Ptr conversion works
again, as does the Window->WindowPtr conversion
[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
[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
[New] (IDE) New debugger: now has a popup menu which lets you open a
window for each module showing its protected variables
[Fix] (IDE) New debugger: now notices when you've stepped out of all
user code and returns to Run mode
[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.
[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.
[Dep] (All) Socket error #104 is deprecated. You will never see
another socket error #104.
[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
[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).
[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".
[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.)
[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.
[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.
[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.
--
David Grogono
dave at realsoftware dot com
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