UltraUpdater 1.0 Now Available
March 18th, 2010, by Paul Lefebvre in Controls, Source Code, User Interface
UltraUpdater adds auto-update capability to your REAL Studio applications with only 2 lines of code! Check it out here: http://www.rbdevzone.com/ultraupdater/

Resizable Sheets
April 4th, 2008, by Paul Lefebvre in Featured Articles, ResExcellence, User Interface
I needed this in a project I was working on and it turned out that Seth Willits had written about how to do this in a ResExcellence post from 2006. Download the code to try it out. To use it, simply include the ResizableSheet class in your project and set your sheet’s Super to it. And of course,...

CGS Private Functions
January 6th, 2008, by Paul Lefebvre in ResExcellence, Source Code, User Interface
by Seth Willits Mac OS X is full of private APIs available only to Apple to use in their own software and the operating system. Clever developers, much more knowledgeable than I, have been able to reverse engineer some of these APIs and do some neat things with them. I was fiddling with the CGSPrivate...

Alternating Color ListBox (like iTunes)
October 10th, 2007, by Paul Lefebvre in Controls, ResExcellence, User Interface
by Bob Keeney Many years ago, Erick Tejkowski posted a tutorial on alternating row colors to get the same style as an iTunes type listbox. The solution is simple, but yet many people still ask how to do it. We’ll step through the process on how to do this with REALbasic 2007. Create the Class Code...

MessageDialog Sheet
October 10th, 2007, by Paul Lefebvre in ResExcellence, User Interface
by Seth Willits The MessageDialog class is an important user interface element that if not done correctly, sticks out like a sore thumb on Mac OS X. Users expect a consistent message interface between applications, so it is critical that developers adopt and embrace the MessageDialog class as a part...

Quartz Gradients
September 15th, 2007, by Paul Lefebvre in Controls, ResExcellence, Source Code, User Interface
by Seth Willits Continuing the article about drawing a simple rectangle with a Quartz shadow, in this article we take a look at axial gradients. The code for this is actually a major pain to explain (I admit I don’t know everything there is to know about it as well), so, sorry, but I’m going...

Wiggle Window
September 13th, 2007, by Paul Lefebvre in ResExcellence, Source Code, User Interface
by Erick Tejkowski Should you accidentally enter the wrong password while logging onto an OS X machine, you’ll notice that the login window wiggles back and forth a few times. In fact, it looks like the login window is shaking its head “NO!” at you. This week we’ll look at how...