I've received a few emails regarding my REALbasic open source projects and figured I should set the record straight...
The PNG and ZZip C plugins have been marked deprecated for a while now, and will not be updated (at least not by me). Although I have not "officially" deprecated my native Rb projects it is also highly unlikely that they will see future updates. All these projects will remain available for download as long as they are still deemed to be useful, and/or as long as they still function in the latest version of REALbasic.
A few factors have contributed to this decision - it's been pretty clear for a while now that REAL Software is positioning REALbasic as a database/enterprise environment and paying little attention to realtime applications such as audio, 3D, and games (i.e. my areas of interest). The fact that they recently
canned their compiler engineer, further suggests they are more interested in front-end fluff than fixing long standing core issues such as execution speed and code size. I understand this from a business point of view, but it's still disappointing.
Trying to get Rb to do things it wasn't designed to do, and trying to squeeze out performance with awkward and ugly code was getting tiresome, so a few months back I took a break from all that and tried my hand at iPhone development. Long story short - with
my first iPhone game now in the wild (and doing reasonably well) I've decided to turn all my attention to iPhone development.
So that's that.
You're one of the best contributors out there and your work is well appreciated.
I know this post might seem a little harsh but I still think Rb is a great crossplatform tool in general, and I will be keeping an eye out for updates.
I want to stress that my open source projects aren't necessarily dead (well, other than the plugins). The App Store is a very stressful place so I might need an Rb break from time to time...
Don't expect any Obj-C wrappers though