REAL Software released REALbasic 2009 Release 3 this week.  This release is somewhat bittersweet as it is not the first Cocoa release many in the community had anticipated and hoped for.  This release, however, is still full of new features and some serious enhancements that will make make many RB developers happy.

One word of warning before we get too much farther along.  The standard RB EditField control has been deprecated (as in no longer there!) and replaced with two new classes.    Make a backup of your project.  Once you convert to release 3 it is no longer backwards compatible.

The standard EditField has been deprecated in favor of two new classes, TextField and TextArea and their name belies their function.  The new TextField control is a non-styled, non-multiline text area.  The text area is a styled multiline version.  RS' explanation for deprecating the EditField and replacing it with the two separate controls is simple:  All of the supported platforms make a distinction between single line and multiline text fields.

When you first open your project containing the old EditField you'll be greeted with the standard REALbasic issues dialog and checking the checkbox and selecting resolve REALbasic will automatically replace the EditFields with the appropriate TextField and TextArea controls.  If you don't resolve them at first you can always use the super property and type in TextField and TextArea yourself.  

While the auto resolve makes a good guess, EditFields that handle both single and multi-line configurations will have to be tweaked and worked on.  If you have subclassed  EditFields you might need to do a little bit more work in converting them to the new TextField and TextArea.  In my initial testing my EditField subclasses didn't convert properly and somehow they all were renamed with a "1" appended.  The fix was simple if not annoying.

An OpenGL surface has been added to REALbasic that lets you use OpenGL.  OpenGL lets you create and use 3D images and animation in REALbasic.  Using the OpenGL surface requires that you know how to code in OpenGL which is not for the feint of heart.  This is also a replacement for RB3D and there are a couple of open source projects available that add RB3D-compatible API to the OpenGL surface.

The StringShape class received some love this release.  In addition to fixing a masking problem on rotated strings (the mask didn't rotate with the image) RS has added two new properties called HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment which, as their name suggests, lets you change the horizontal and vertical alignments.

Windows folks have two new properties for text fields called CueText and HideSelection.  CueText is the text that you'd add to the a textfield such as a search string.  The HideSelection property hides the text selection of the field when it no longer has focus.  Presumable both of these properties will make it into Cocoa and possibly Linux.

RB Linux using GTK 2.16 or better can now add ticks to their slider controls.  This will become a Mac property as well when Cocoa support is released.

The Windows class has been updated so developers have an easy way to change the focus using FocusNext and FocusPrevious.  This should be a very handy feature if you have text fields that should change the focus when the user presses return/enter.

The IDE icon editor can now assign 256 x 256 icons.  The entire dialog has been redesigned so you can drag and drop images (including Mac OS X icns files) onto the image containers.

In the IDE, users can now copy and paste entire sections of code.  This is an incredibly handy feature!  If you've ever had to copy/paste a couple of dozen methods into another class/module you'll know that this will be a huge timesaver.

Users of the Version Control Format will no longer have File System Error 0 errors and a corrupt project if the IDE can't load the entire project.  Now it will load as much as possible and give a warning afterward.  The updated error still isn't all that helpful since it still doesn't tell you what files are missing.  This one should have been thought through a little better.

The MySQL and ODBC plugins have been updated.

A memory leak was fixed in RBScript.  This was apparently a rather large memory leak.

One interesting admission from RS is that the htmlviewer sucks (at least on Linux).  Linux versions of RB will not be using the htmlviewer to view the Language Reference but the PDF version.

And along with the highlights listed there are about a hundred other fixes, changes and minor enhancements.  Hopefully release 4 will bring initial Cocoa support.

As always, you should try working with the new release before committing to it full-time.  With each new version the demo period should reset so you shouldn't have to worry about trying it out.