Entries by Frank

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.

My new iPhone/iPod touch game Pinch 'n Pop! is now available on the App Store. I've set the price at $3.99 and I'm refusing to take part in the App Store yo-yo pricing shenanigans/scams - we'll see how that goes...

I know it's been quiet around here lately, and apart from a huge PHP/Javascript/Ajax job that sucked up most of my time over the summer I've been secretly hacking away at an iPhone/iPod touch game called Pinch 'n Pop! I (almost reluctantly) download the iPhone SDK a few months back expecting to build some of the examples then get bored and move on, but it was surprisingly refreshing to code for such a closed system. After a week-long crash course in Objective-C/Cocoa I was pretty much sold - though I quickly ditched Objective-C for straight C once I had a few wrappers around the Cocoa Touch APIs. I like the idea of Objective-C, and it might make sense for UI-heavy stuff, but ugh - not for games...

Pinch 'n Pop is in Apple's hands at the moment but not yet available in the App Store. I'll post an update once that happens.

Just a quick note to mention that I've evaluated the new FMOD Ex 4.18.00 stable release and it remains compatible with the current (v0.8b) build of my FMOD Ex Audio Classes for REALbasic. If you're a new user please be sure to manually patch the classes for full compatibility with FMOD Ex versions 4.14 and up.