CyphersTECH Consulting » realbasic

40% Sale Almost Over

Anthony G. Cyphers — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:06:46 +0000

In just a few short days, our 40% off sale will end. We’d like to encourage anyone contemplating a purchase to make it before this sale ends. Once this sale is over, we don’t plan to have another sale on all of our products again until Thanksgiving (at the earliest).

The coupon code for this sale is HGhm2Tunf8pT, and is only valid when you purchase directly from CyphersTECH Consulting via our website.

Let’s have a sale…

Anthony G. Cyphers — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:45:05 +0000

Thanks to all of our wonderful customers, we had a great year in 2009 and 2010 is already looking much brighter…

That being the case we’re gonna cut our product prices by 40% until March 1st. Any REALbasic product that you purchase directly from us, and use the discount code HGhm2Tunf8pT will get you 40% off of the final checkout price. We hope everyone will take advantage of this offer now, we’re not planning another sale until the Holidays roll back around.

“Advanced” REALbasic Developer

Anthony G. Cyphers — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:34:33 +0000

Just a short while ago, a customer referred to me as an “advanced” REALbasic developer. This came as a bit of a shock to me, and I’m not entirely sure why…

You see, I’ve been working with REALbasic since 5.5, and before that I had spent many years with Quick/Visual Basic. Sure, that’s a long time in the life of RB, but I’ve never considered myself to be anything more than novice. I always assumed that since there were members of the community out there who I looked up to (Aaron Ballman, Bob Keeney, Steve Garmin, Christian Miller, Norman Palardy, Dave Wooldridge, and a few more), that I couldn’t be at or near their level.

I realize over the years I’ve dropped out of sight in the RB community, except for the occasional press releases, and product announcements, but I still follow most of what’s going on. I’ve watched silently as these great faces in the community have accomplished great things, powered forward in their respective fields, and come to be some of the most widely known names we see as REALbasic devs.

I continued to develop my skills, taking on customer contracts, playing with new features as they became available to me, helping friends with projects, and developing software for my various employers, but I never stopped to evaluate what I know or the quality of my work. At one point is that supposed to happen? At what point do you finally just stop and ask yourself: “Am I an advanced developer?” I’m still not quite sure the label fits me, but perhaps that just some form of subconscious modesty.

At any rate, I’m thankful for all the excellent customers and friends I’ve found in the REALbasic community, and I do hope to begin participating in the RS forums again. I hope to see you there.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Anthony G. Cyphers
President
CyphersTECH Consulting

Expanding the ARBP Discount

Anthony G. Cyphers — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:32:56 +0000

Beginning today, members of the Association of REALbasic Professionals will receive the same discount they received previously on just GraffitiSuite for all products. Every purchase made with the ARBP member coupon code will receive 25% of their total. This is only valid if purchasing directly through our online store, and not via third-party.

REALbasic and Snow Leopard: Redraw what?!

Anthony G. Cyphers — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:15:35 +0000

A customer has tasked me with updating some of the UI elements in their application. Among the problems they listed was a redraw bug in Snow Leopard, where the controls on windows with a set background color would display a slightly different color in their background even with the Composite property set to True. After about an hour of testing different workarounds, I found what I believe to be an excellent solution.

In this application, all of the windows have a set background color, but only a few displayed the error. I had absolutely no luck in determining the difference, so I can only assume that it’s an inconsistent REALbasic bug. Here’s how I fixed it:

Add a new object to your project, mine is named “WindowHack,” and set it’s Super to “Window.”
Open the window subclass, and navigate to the “Paint” event.
Inside the “Paint” event, add the following block of code:
#if TargetMacOS then If Me.HasBackColor Then g.ForeColor = me.BackColor g.FillRect( 0, 0, g.Width, g.Height ) End If #endif
Now set the Super of the windows with the problem to “WindowHack” and test.

This seemed to be the most elegant solution I could find to the problem and, quite honestly, the root of the issue still eludes me. Any thoughts on what might be causing this inconsistency?

In the big guys’ store

Anthony G. Cyphers — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 23:43:33 +0000

We just finished adding our products to the REAL Software third-party store. Now you can buy your custom class goodness when you renew your license. Don’t just sit there, go check it out. There’s all kinds of good stuff in the store.

RB: Hate that flicker

Anthony G. Cyphers — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:24:53 +0000

I’m currently working on a project for a client that requires a cross-platform UI class which is pretty standard. It has working alternatives on Windows, Mac, Linux, and anything else you can think of. They want a certain style within the application, regardless of OS, and I don’t blame them for it.

Now, that’s all fine and dandy…so what’s the problem? Windows + REALBasic = Problem. We all know that flicker on Win32 is a pain in RB. I’ve managed, over the years, to work out a system to negate that issue. Except, of course, in this circumstance.

We have a custom UI class, inside that we have a PagePanel, and inside that we have various different elements. On Mac, everything works beautifully. Once we switch over to Win32, however…ugh. See, that class itself is flicker-free. Until we put the PagePanel on it and start changing values, that is. Anytime that PagePanel’s value changes, our entire custom class has to be redrawn with one of those beautiful little flickers. What a pain.

About the only thing I can think of to get around this problem, would be to manage showing/hiding of child elements in code, and drop the PagePanel. Of course, that’s not the route we want to take with this project.

Anyone else have an idea?