Why do I use RB on my Mac? Because I do like the promise of the tool. I love what it wants to be... hopes to be... might be. But, the reality is that paying every couple of years to support a dream is not the same as using the tool on a regular basis. Imagine the users flocking to a tool that was a slick as what some single-platform tools offer. There's a lot of money to be made and coders to make happy.
The "big problem" is Cocoa -- the controls come close to everything I want and can't have in RB. Could I pay for several plug-ins and get almost what I want? Maybe. Almost, sort of, kind of... I am a Mac convert, no question about it. But, I do have to use PCs at the university and I still run Delphi and other tools on my Macs when I must. (But only when I must!) This is the db/data grid I use in Delphi and C++ thanks to how easy it integrates with Borland/CodeGear tools: http://www.woll2woll.com/InfoPower.html Yes, I paid $299 for the package (at the time) during a promo, but it was worth every penny. I can create a "drill-down" data view that is stunning (or a mess like the sample screen). Once you see what I use on the PC side, you can understand how I come to prefer the NSTableView control on the Mac over anything I can do with REALbasic. Let's talk "value" -- minus the cross-platform, granted. Cross-platform is a tough sell when I can run Parallels in a pinch, so make it worth something beyond what already exists. Visual Basic Express or C# Express.... free. Yes, free. VB Express can do everything I generally want from a database frontend -- except run on a Mac. Darn. Still, I can use Parallels or Fusion if nothing better comes along. I usually have Access available for reporting and it's good enough. To avoid MS, I could use my beloved Delphi. Upgrades are generally $249 (never trust the "list price") for about two years of updates. So, for two years, I paid $550 total and had a great report writer (included with Delphi), access to every imaginable database, and a lot of cool toys in the box. The new Delphi for PHP and Ruby look promising, but I'd lose a lot of native OS widgets. Still, neat solutions from a company I had written off as dead. Apple -- no charge, great tools, and I can do almost everything I did with Delphi. I'm still struggling to grasp how I might access MySQL or PostgreSQL as easily as I can use Core Data, but there are some free libraries that come close. I also really, really miss the report writers that I had on the PC, so I will admit that I query data via Fusion on OS X with an install of Windows XP x64. So, REALbasic would need to average $250 or less a year, with a great database grid, to match Delphi + InfoPower, be free to match MS or Apple, ... or be such a killer solution that I don't care what I am (or the university is) charged. Any contract programmer knows this: if the tool gets the job done, and I can charge the client, I don't care about the costs along the way. Happy clients make happy programmers make for a successful tool vendor. Clearly, some of us want a bit more database push because consulting is often (usually?) business-centered and that means data. Lots of data. - CSW _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
