Well, like I said, I was trying to make a simple MUD client to test it out. This involves opening a socket and recieving text into one field, and sending text to another field. (Technically, it's the telnet protocol, but when you're just doing it quick-and-dirty you can ignore the protocol and just send/recieve text.) This is the kind of thing I could be able to piece together with a few code samples and maybe two, three hours but I couldn't get it at all.
In RealBasic, it doesn't take long to find a timer or thread class and use that to manage your sockets. I couldn't find anything like that in Runtime Revolution after a couple hours of looking. Plus I didn't really understand how sockets worked in the language, and I couldn't find an example or tutorial in the help.
Re: Platform issues. Try this in MacOS. Open a multiline text field and fill it full of text. Position the caret at the top of the field and hit the down arrow key. When you get to the bottom line, Windows will simply "beep" at you, but MacOS will move the caret to the far right of that line. (This may or may not be what was wrong with the Runtime Revolution fields; it's been a long time since I worked with it; but this is a mistake that is commonly made on cross-platform projects that don't use native widgets but just widgets that look like native widgets. Last I tried Firefox, it had the same problem.) I'm not saying that one behavior is better than the other, I'm just saying that Mac users expect the caret to go to the end of the text and PC users expect it to stay where it is.
Re:If only I could get past the menu screen..
on
Review: Half-Life 2
·
· Score: 1
What have you done to resolve it? I'd guess it's a problem with your nvidia drivers, based on the hardware specs and the error description alone. Have you upgraded the drivers? Have you tried re-seating the video card?
No, its written into the HTML code. The author of the website can assign an Alt-letter combination to any link or form item using the ACCESSKEY attribute.
That's great and all, even though I'd never heard of it before... but should the Wikipedia be advertising a feature that does not work?
I say again, hitting Alt-X on Safari does nothing. Yet that article says that Alt-X is supposed to open up a random Wikipedia page. Therefore, that article is wrong. (And I'm sure Safari isn't the only browser that doesn't support that feature considering it's based on KHTML.)
Then again, maybe I was to assume that it didn't work since Macintosh doesn't really even have an Alt key... it has an Option key which is only labelled "Alt" for backwards-compatibility purposes.
The controls in Runtime Revolution might be native (yes, I've tried it), but the interface is more than just native widgets.
The fonts selected look wrong in both Windows and MacOS. Text field spacing was off enough that it looked and behaved weird compared to native EditFields on that platform. Fields on MacOS behaved like Windows fields, not like native MacOS fields. The Runtime Revolution IDE had very strange spacing on all the buttons and fields, and didn't look right to me at all on either MacOS or Windows. I figure that if the developers of Runtime Revolution couldn't get their own IDE to look correct, I didn't have much chance. (I found the IDE painful to use, BTW, and I don't think the help was sufficient.)
To be frank, though, I did not use the program for long... I was trying to make a MUD client and after dickering for something like 2 hours trying to make a simple thread/timer/repeating event/whatever you call it for the sockets, I just gave up and went back to RealBasic.
If it works for you, great. It does support Linux better than RealBasic does, I'm sure. But it didn't work for me.
RealBasic, IMO, is the best cross-platform RAD tool in existence today. Not that there is a ton of competition...
It's a somewhat Java-like Basic syntax, completely object-oriented. It has the capability to use ODBC (on all platforms that support it), native widgets, many types of network sockets, etc. An install on every platform consists of copying a SINGLE file, one.exe file on Windows, one.app bundle on MacOS X... no DLLs whatsoever. That's a huge plus for me. A drawback is that it relies on Quicktime to present some media formats, such as PDF, and most Windows machines don't have Quicktime installed.
On, the other drawback. The developers and marketers of RealBasic have their head in the sand and have NO CLUE what they are working with. With about 1 minor revision and a decent-sized advertising campaign, these guys could conquer and destroy Microsoft VisualBasic. RealBasic does everything VisualBasic does but cross-platform and without reliance on numerous.dll files with version conflicts. Instead, they're advertising it as some stupid game development tool, wasting their time maintaining a "sprite surface" object and an entire 3D framework based on, get this, Quesa, which is in turn based on QD3D... two obsolete technologies layered atop each other. Let me save you some time: RealBasic SUCKS for game development. It has no native support for OpenGL or any decent sound libraries.
Since this is Slashdot, I'll also say that RealBasic includes very very skeletal Linux support, but I think Redhat only. I could be wrong, I don't use Linux.
Pretty much the only competition is Macromedia Director and Runtime Revolution... both of those produce alien-looking not-quite-native interfaces. (Although at least Director is good for game development.)
To begin, a random page on the Wikipedia database is loaded (keystroke: Alt-X).
I've never heard of Alt-X before... it doesn't do anything on Safari. Is this some kind of weird shortcut I've never heard of before which seeks out and clicks the 'random' link of whatever page you're on?
No crap! I'll take a bus to work when the bus line CROSSES THE COUNTY LINE WITHOUT REQUIRING A TRANSFER! Sure, the bus in Snohomish County runs every hour, that's great, and the bus in King County runs every hour, even better, but they seem to be specifically timed so that I spend 45 minutes waiting for the damned transfer... if I drove, I could finish the entire commute even in crappy traffic in 45 minutes.
So in short, I agree with you entirely. Mass transit in Washington State, at least, really really bites.
Games that say "internet connection required" will either be games that are online-only (for instance, MMORPGs), or games that specifically note on the box "internet connection required for multiplayer." I challenge you to find a counter-example... I buy a hell of a lot of games, and they've always been clearly labelled.
our state name correctly! Washington State! It's not very often that the word "Washington" appears in news stories and actually refers to our state, so it would be nice if when it did it was at least capitalized correctly.
Emporer's New Groove, Lilo and Stitch. Arguably Atlantis. To say that everything Disney makes is crap is a really weak argument... they make good movies, they make bad movies, like any other studio. Now what really disappoints me is when Disney, having made a good movie like Lilo and Stitch, will proceed to utterly destroy the IP with various tacky direct-to-video movies and poorly-animated TV series. I wish they'd just leave well-enough alone.
are not equilivant statements, BTW. Although if myvar happens to be an int, they could be.
An equilivant english statement would be "increment myvar" which is admittedly longer to type, but not nearly as bad as your example. (And to extend your example, yes, you'd expect people to know what "increment" means. Which, apparently, you're still foggy about.)
AppleScript is not that bad a language, firstly. It does what it's designed to do with a minimum of fuss... what are you comparing it to? VB Script? Javascript? Of the three I prefer AppleScript.
In addition, AppleScript is actually a subset of an earlier programming language invented by Apple for use in the Hypercard database application called Hypertalk. Hypertalk, although verbose and slow, was very very powerful and would shine on modern hardware if only somebody gave it a chance.
I'd love to see a Hypertalk-like language come back from the deadly. Applescript is *close*, but not quite there, and Hypertalk seems to be a very obvious no-brainer choice for visual programming.
Is it slow? Yeah, it's slow... no doubt. What you'd do is put the power in the methods of the objects, and just let Hypertalk tie the objects together. (For instance, Hypertalk might be too slow to negotiate a fast FTP download, but it's certainly fast enough to contain a statement like "if startDownload is true then tell ftpSocket to start download and place the result at global downloadLocation"
Yes, but part of his argument was that the article he looked at (Alexander Hamilton) was internally inconsistant. People would change a sentence here and there without reading/editing the rest of the text, and as such it suffered from factual inconsistancies (such as Hamilton's birth date being either 1755 or 1757 depending on which paragraph you were reading, and two different dates for his resignation as Secretary of the Treasury.)
No one is denying that an encyclopedia isn't meant to be a authoritive source to give you ALL information about a given subject, but I believe it is a reasonable expectation that the article you read about the subject at least be internally consistant.
Yeah, but Server 2003 costs (at least) three times more than Windows XP. That's a fine option for those who don't mind software piracy, but spending that much money for a game machine is too much for this Macintosh user to stomach. So I stick with Windows XP Pro. (It was definately worth using 2000 Pro to play games over 98, though, I'll hand you that... but then again, 2000 Pro didn't cost an arm and a leg.)
My favorite is when people use the word "Adobe" to refer to "Photoshop."
"Oh yeah, I touched-up that image using Adobe." "Adobe what?" "Adobe. To touch-up images." "You mean Adobe Acrobat? Adobe Photoshop? Adobe Illustrator? Adobe ImageReady?" "No, the one that does images."
One small note about SoundPlay: there is a slider that allows to you alter the speed of playback infinitely (well, as much as you can in the digital realm, anyway) in real-time, with instantaneous response...and if you slide the bar far enough, it starts playing BACKWARDS at variable speeds, too.
Pssst, you can do that with Quicktime Player also. I believe the keyboard shortcut is to hold control, then press the 'skip-forward' button, but I haven't tried it in many years so I could be wrong.
Interestingly, the new Myst game, Myst IV requires a DVD drive to run and it isn't selling all that well from what I've heard.
Me? I'll buy a DVD-ROM when my CD-ROM drives stop working. They're both only about a year and a half old and they work fine and, as of yet, there's nothing out there I want that's on DVD-only except Myst IV... and I can live without Myst IV.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, like I said, I was trying to make a simple MUD client to test it out. This involves opening a socket and recieving text into one field, and sending text to another field. (Technically, it's the telnet protocol, but when you're just doing it quick-and-dirty you can ignore the protocol and just send/recieve text.) This is the kind of thing I could be able to piece together with a few code samples and maybe two, three hours but I couldn't get it at all.
In RealBasic, it doesn't take long to find a timer or thread class and use that to manage your sockets. I couldn't find anything like that in Runtime Revolution after a couple hours of looking. Plus I didn't really understand how sockets worked in the language, and I couldn't find an example or tutorial in the help.
Re: Platform issues. Try this in MacOS. Open a multiline text field and fill it full of text. Position the caret at the top of the field and hit the down arrow key. When you get to the bottom line, Windows will simply "beep" at you, but MacOS will move the caret to the far right of that line. (This may or may not be what was wrong with the Runtime Revolution fields; it's been a long time since I worked with it; but this is a mistake that is commonly made on cross-platform projects that don't use native widgets but just widgets that look like native widgets. Last I tried Firefox, it had the same problem.) I'm not saying that one behavior is better than the other, I'm just saying that Mac users expect the caret to go to the end of the text and PC users expect it to stay where it is.
What have you done to resolve it? I'd guess it's a problem with your nvidia drivers, based on the hardware specs and the error description alone. Have you upgraded the drivers? Have you tried re-seating the video card?
No, its written into the HTML code. The author of the website can assign an Alt-letter combination to any link or form item using the ACCESSKEY attribute.
That's great and all, even though I'd never heard of it before... but should the Wikipedia be advertising a feature that does not work?
I say again, hitting Alt-X on Safari does nothing. Yet that article says that Alt-X is supposed to open up a random Wikipedia page. Therefore, that article is wrong. (And I'm sure Safari isn't the only browser that doesn't support that feature considering it's based on KHTML.)
Then again, maybe I was to assume that it didn't work since Macintosh doesn't really even have an Alt key... it has an Option key which is only labelled "Alt" for backwards-compatibility purposes.
The controls in Runtime Revolution might be native (yes, I've tried it), but the interface is more than just native widgets.
The fonts selected look wrong in both Windows and MacOS. Text field spacing was off enough that it looked and behaved weird compared to native EditFields on that platform. Fields on MacOS behaved like Windows fields, not like native MacOS fields. The Runtime Revolution IDE had very strange spacing on all the buttons and fields, and didn't look right to me at all on either MacOS or Windows. I figure that if the developers of Runtime Revolution couldn't get their own IDE to look correct, I didn't have much chance. (I found the IDE painful to use, BTW, and I don't think the help was sufficient.)
To be frank, though, I did not use the program for long... I was trying to make a MUD client and after dickering for something like 2 hours trying to make a simple thread/timer/repeating event/whatever you call it for the sockets, I just gave up and went back to RealBasic.
If it works for you, great. It does support Linux better than RealBasic does, I'm sure. But it didn't work for me.
Oh, I and I guess I should link to the actual website of the product, sorry. :)
http://realbasic.com/ RealBasic's Homepage. You can download a free trial, I recommend giving it a try.
RealBasic, IMO, is the best cross-platform RAD tool in existence today. Not that there is a ton of competition...
.exe file on Windows, one .app bundle on MacOS X... no DLLs whatsoever. That's a huge plus for me. A drawback is that it relies on Quicktime to present some media formats, such as PDF, and most Windows machines don't have Quicktime installed.
.dll files with version conflicts. Instead, they're advertising it as some stupid game development tool, wasting their time maintaining a "sprite surface" object and an entire 3D framework based on, get this, Quesa, which is in turn based on QD3D... two obsolete technologies layered atop each other. Let me save you some time: RealBasic SUCKS for game development. It has no native support for OpenGL or any decent sound libraries.
It's a somewhat Java-like Basic syntax, completely object-oriented. It has the capability to use ODBC (on all platforms that support it), native widgets, many types of network sockets, etc. An install on every platform consists of copying a SINGLE file, one
On, the other drawback. The developers and marketers of RealBasic have their head in the sand and have NO CLUE what they are working with. With about 1 minor revision and a decent-sized advertising campaign, these guys could conquer and destroy Microsoft VisualBasic. RealBasic does everything VisualBasic does but cross-platform and without reliance on numerous
Since this is Slashdot, I'll also say that RealBasic includes very very skeletal Linux support, but I think Redhat only. I could be wrong, I don't use Linux.
Pretty much the only competition is Macromedia Director and Runtime Revolution... both of those produce alien-looking not-quite-native interfaces. (Although at least Director is good for game development.)
http://realbasichelp.com/ is the best forum on the web for RealBasic issues and questions.
To begin, a random page on the Wikipedia database is loaded (keystroke: Alt-X).
I've never heard of Alt-X before... it doesn't do anything on Safari. Is this some kind of weird shortcut I've never heard of before which seeks out and clicks the 'random' link of whatever page you're on?
The enormous diesel ship engine everyone was sending the link to a few months back runs at _90_ rpm.
I didn't get the link... could someone provide details? I'd like to take a look.
I always wanted one of those thought-controlled green-lens... things... what was that thing for, again?
I always enjoyed how the human dropship pilots in Starcraft said the same lines, in a very similar voice, to the pilot in Aliens.
No crap! I'll take a bus to work when the bus line CROSSES THE COUNTY LINE WITHOUT REQUIRING A TRANSFER! Sure, the bus in Snohomish County runs every hour, that's great, and the bus in King County runs every hour, even better, but they seem to be specifically timed so that I spend 45 minutes waiting for the damned transfer... if I drove, I could finish the entire commute even in crappy traffic in 45 minutes.
So in short, I agree with you entirely. Mass transit in Washington State, at least, really really bites.
Games that say "internet connection required" will either be games that are online-only (for instance, MMORPGs), or games that specifically note on the box "internet connection required for multiplayer." I challenge you to find a counter-example... I buy a hell of a lot of games, and they've always been clearly labelled.
our state name correctly! Washington State! It's not very often that the word "Washington" appears in news stories and actually refers to our state, so it would be nice if when it did it was at least capitalized correctly.
Emporer's New Groove, Lilo and Stitch. Arguably Atlantis. To say that everything Disney makes is crap is a really weak argument... they make good movies, they make bad movies, like any other studio. Now what really disappoints me is when Disney, having made a good movie like Lilo and Stitch, will proceed to utterly destroy the IP with various tacky direct-to-video movies and poorly-animated TV series. I wish they'd just leave well-enough alone.
myvar ++;
and
Increase the variable myvar by one please.
are not equilivant statements, BTW. Although if myvar happens to be an int, they could be.
An equilivant english statement would be "increment myvar" which is admittedly longer to type, but not nearly as bad as your example. (And to extend your example, yes, you'd expect people to know what "increment" means. Which, apparently, you're still foggy about.)
AppleScript is not that bad a language, firstly. It does what it's designed to do with a minimum of fuss... what are you comparing it to? VB Script? Javascript? Of the three I prefer AppleScript.
In addition, AppleScript is actually a subset of an earlier programming language invented by Apple for use in the Hypercard database application called Hypertalk. Hypertalk, although verbose and slow, was very very powerful and would shine on modern hardware if only somebody gave it a chance.
I'd love to see a Hypertalk-like language come back from the deadly. Applescript is *close*, but not quite there, and Hypertalk seems to be a very obvious no-brainer choice for visual programming.
Is it slow? Yeah, it's slow... no doubt. What you'd do is put the power in the methods of the objects, and just let Hypertalk tie the objects together. (For instance, Hypertalk might be too slow to negotiate a fast FTP download, but it's certainly fast enough to contain a statement like "if startDownload is true then tell ftpSocket to start download and place the result at global downloadLocation"
Yeah, and I thought it was amazing that NASA would send up Forrest Gump in Apollo 13... no wonder that mission had so many problems!
Or, wait, maybe I can actually seperate the characters from the actors...
Yes, but part of his argument was that the article he looked at (Alexander Hamilton) was internally inconsistant. People would change a sentence here and there without reading/editing the rest of the text, and as such it suffered from factual inconsistancies (such as Hamilton's birth date being either 1755 or 1757 depending on which paragraph you were reading, and two different dates for his resignation as Secretary of the Treasury.)
No one is denying that an encyclopedia isn't meant to be a authoritive source to give you ALL information about a given subject, but I believe it is a reasonable expectation that the article you read about the subject at least be internally consistant.
Yeah, but Server 2003 costs (at least) three times more than Windows XP. That's a fine option for those who don't mind software piracy, but spending that much money for a game machine is too much for this Macintosh user to stomach. So I stick with Windows XP Pro. (It was definately worth using 2000 Pro to play games over 98, though, I'll hand you that... but then again, 2000 Pro didn't cost an arm and a leg.)
My favorite is when people use the word "Adobe" to refer to "Photoshop."
"Oh yeah, I touched-up that image using Adobe."
"Adobe what?"
"Adobe. To touch-up images."
"You mean Adobe Acrobat? Adobe Photoshop? Adobe Illustrator? Adobe ImageReady?"
"No, the one that does images."
I read that blog entry, and I don't get it. He gets fire? Is fire a type of modchip for XBox?
One small note about SoundPlay: there is a slider that allows to you alter the speed of playback infinitely (well, as much as you can in the digital realm, anyway) in real-time, with instantaneous response...and if you slide the bar far enough, it starts playing BACKWARDS at variable speeds, too.
Pssst, you can do that with Quicktime Player also. I believe the keyboard shortcut is to hold control, then press the 'skip-forward' button, but I haven't tried it in many years so I could be wrong.
Interestingly, the new Myst game, Myst IV requires a DVD drive to run and it isn't selling all that well from what I've heard.
Me? I'll buy a DVD-ROM when my CD-ROM drives stop working. They're both only about a year and a half old and they work fine and, as of yet, there's nothing out there I want that's on DVD-only except Myst IV... and I can live without Myst IV.
Stop posting that goddamned quote! Holy crap! I've read it like 60,000 times already and I'm sick of seeing it in EVERY SINGLE STORY!
And Moderators, do your job and start moderating these things as "redundant" or something.