Three Kinds of Cross Platform and REALbasic is #3
Over on Bob Keeney’s blog I offered three views of cross-platform support based on his observations regarding REAL Software’s REALbasic.
1. Cross-Platform Means Supporting Everything. Supporting native interfaces on all operating systems you claim to support as part of your cross-platform strategy.
2. Cross-Platform Means Support Only Me. Supporting no or few native interfaces but provide rough equivalents on all operating systems.
3. Cross-Platform Means Support Only the foreign interfaces your customer requires. Somewhere between 1 and 2, but appeasing only the customers you immediately have.
REAL’s strategy falls into #3. REALbasic has always been a strong player on the Mac, and unless someone tells me to contrary, its paying customer base is strongly on the Mac. That’s why the Cocoa, and why after many years of claiming Windows platform support you cannot even use Crystal Reports. Many developers I knew who started with REALbasic with REALbasic 1 through REALbasic 4 have since moved on to Objective-C programming with Apple xCode. That’s understandable since its free and REALbasic filled a much needed hole for BASIC on the Mac that was roughly equivalent to Visual Basic on Windows. However parallel to this, how many VB developers have since jumped ship to C# development?
Paradigma Software’s Valentina DB has supported REALbasic for almost a decade, but building database applications means you have to give your customer some sort of way to meaningfully display business data. That’s why we just shipped Valentina Reports. As long as REAL follows strategy #3, its customer base on Windows will not grow significantly – not without basically giving the product away on Windows. What Valentina Reports delivers is Cross-Platform #1 – native support on every platform.
