Well I have finally bitten the bullet and got the Realbasic programming Rapid IDE. I liked the multi-platform potential (even though slashdot.com is talking about MacOSX offering native Windows XP apps one day soon) and the larger .exe files were not a big problem.

Aside from crashing (blipping out of existance) now and then it has indeed allowed me to rapidly come up with some nice stuff.
Not having seen .net I do like the IDE interface though it is a bit expensive to use SSL and I can only upgrade for 6 months before paying more money to get newer updates.

For now I am bouncing off the forums and the 2 manuals to try to get the little things that I need and overall people are friendly and I am finding solutions. Below are some of the free essentials that I found while learning to make my first program.

• 
  
• Windows Functionality Suite
• 
  
• XMLPreferences (even though the download is .sit and so needs Stuffits file expander)
  
• 
  
• Utool
• 
  
• String Utilities
• 
  
• and the document Update Yourself at RBLibrary
• 
  
• ChartPart
• 
  
• TrayApp & Toast plugins from Control-D
• 
  
• and of course going through all of the examples.
• 
  

Most of these came from RBGarage which has a great list of useful modules and add-ons for Realbasic.

The only down side so far is that much of the examples seem to have a mac focus and I am more interested in getting a Windows program running.

Tags: realbasic