Editor's Note
Actually, the main change this month comes from the RBM web page. It's the addition of the compilations page. This page includes listings and compilations of every article, every review, every tip, every quick tip, and every RB release ever. Yes, I made one of those summary boxes that appear in the news each month for every darned release of RB ever, from DR1r4 to 2.0.1. The Tips sections probably have more value, as they let you view all the tips we've ever published in one document. The RBM page itself has also received an update. The new page now has a toolbar, which allows you to browse back issues on a seperate page, and even search through all the issues of RBM for a specific phrase.
This issue's cover is something I've had in the works for a while, but never really bothered to figure out how to do. I got my act together, and now we have an article on AppleScripting. I'm particularly fond of this cover, because it's on a subject that not many people know much about, but it doesn't require the latest version of RB–far from it. Even people who use a DR1 version of RB will find the cover useful.
Now that that's out of the way, I can resume my monthly bashing of REAL SW. I can hardly wait!
The release of RB version 2.0 has been a hot topic for debate recently. RB 2.0 is certainly a more powerful product than 1.x, but the real issue is why on earth REAL SW chose to rename a DR2 release, and release a product with incomplete documentation, incomplete database support, incomplete Windows support, and hordes of bugs.
When RB 1.0 came out almost a year ago, it was fairly well anticipated. There had been several Final Candidate releases, so a 1.0 release was inevitable. It wasn't a perfect transition (I remember being skeptical of whether that thing called "F1" was actually a copy of RB, or just a joke), but after the first FC release, everything was fairly routine.
RB 2.0 has been quite a different story–there was absolutely no warning that 2.0 would be released. Yes, we knew that it would arrive before April 27 (the old 30 days thing), but that limit was nowhere in sight when 2.0 actually came out. It was as if Andrew Barry finished writing up DR2r82 (which it was called for a while), and then REAL SW decided that they may as well just call this version 2.0.
As one might expect, I was quite surprised, and most people on the DR2 mailing list were as well. DR2r82 was nowhere near release quality material (just try running it under System 7).
The other odd thing that occured with the release of 2.0 is that there was no stop in the flow of new developer releases once "2.0" came out. They were called 2.0.1a1, a2, etc., but they may as well have been DRs. Just look at the release dates in our news section, and you'll see that 2.0 came smack in the middle of a ten day streak of daily updates. When 1.0 came out, there wasn't another developer release of it for two months!
So if "2.0" was really a developer release, why was it labeled as release quality material? Like most things nowadays, I suspect money was the key factor. It's been a while (almost a year) since 1.0 came out, so the stream of registrations is probably slowing down a bit. As a company, REAL SW has to make money to avoid debt or even bankruptcy, so they took their easiest way to get in more money: make people buy a new version.
As long as version 2.0.1 and its followers fix most of 2.0's bugs, this strategy is fine by me–I always use DRs. However, charging $100 for an incomplete, and buggy program is hardly going to get good reviews for you. Let alone charging an extra $200 for two even more incomplete features (databases and windows)...
Frankly, releasing 2.0 before it was ready doesn't raise huge problems
for me. The real problem is that for most people, it will. REAL's income might jump
up for a while, but this stunt might come back to haunt them.
- Dan Vanderkam