Over a decade ago I bought REALbasic, intending to learn it thoroughly; but I had a full-time job then, and I never got beyond the basics.
So now I need to get up to speed, because a great deal has changed; but I’m finding a few problems:
Some topics don’t seem to be covered in the documentation: for instance, how to design icons and include them in your project. I thought to use Xcode for this, but:
a) the online Apple documentation only talks in generalities.
b) To judge from Amazon, there no longer seem to be any up-to-date books about programming Xcode for Mac OS — they’re all about iOS! (The latest seems to be Learn Xcode Tools for Mac OS X and iPhone Development, by Ian Piper, from 2009!)
I can deal with Swift no problem. But can anyone please recommend a modern Xcode for Mac course, with worked examples?
Also:
I used Xojo to open a Mickey Mouse I’d written in REALbasic (a time-calculator). Xojo complained about the icons being PICTs instead of PNGs (which I fixed); and also about my About box:
AquaAboutBox.name ControlSuper
This control is based on a deprecated class. It is recommended that you update this.
The documentation seems not to mention AquaAboutBox or ControlSuper (unsurprisingly, of course, if they’re out-of date).
So: can anyone tell what has superseded these? Or, preferably, where I can find a list of such features and what has superseded them?
You apparently have a window or control named AquaAboutBox whose super has been depricated. Use search to find AquaAboutBox and then it’s super to one that is current. (it may be a window type?). You change the super in the Inspector just below the control name.
There are dozens of Icon design tools on the web, but I just use Photoshop.
This brings up a dialog where you can either paste in or import a file for the icon and if the icon needs a transparency mask you can import or paste that in under that button. To view the mask ap[plied to the Icon you select preview. I never use 8 bit any more and rarely go higher than 256x256 because I’m not supporting High DPI for Windows, but you probably will want the higher resolutions for MacOS.
I guess it really depends on how you were displaying that icon. I would guess that you had a deprecated picture control and possibly the app can’t find the path to the image you used. If it were me I would add a picture the size you want to use by dragging it into the project and then adding a DesktopImageViewer control and selecting that picture in the inspector. Make sure the picture is the same pixel dimensions as the DesktopImageViewer.
I hypothesise that this is because AquaAboutBox is now deprecated. My file is called AquaAboutBox.rbw, and when I double-click it on my old Mac, REALbasic opens and displays it no problem. However, Xojo does not recognise it, and when I double-click it, it opens in Xcode (since the System thinks it’s Ruby), which of course displays gibberish.
But what may have superseded AquaAboutBox, I have as yet no idea. There’s nothing about the subject in the Introduction, and there seems to be virtually nothing even in the Documentation. A search for “About Box” in the latter gets no relevant hits, and for AboutBox produces solely this:
Sample code
This code creates and then displays a New instance of a Window called “AboutBox”:
Var w As AboutBox
w = New AboutBox
But attempting to compile this code gives:
Can’t find a type with this name
So once again I should be grateful for any help you can give, and thank you for your patience.