Just a few minutes with REALbasic last night, and the proverbial lovefest continues (not as strong as the vim lovefest, mind you. I'm going to have to research the vim charity a little and see if they're on the up and up...).

Yesterday's "breakthrough" was the interactive shell mode that apparently was added to the last version of REALbasic. Though this is basically just opening a pipe to the command line (only works in OS X and Windows), I had a spellchecker poc (of sorts) in just a few minutes using aspell which I'd installed on my iBook a few days ago with fink just for kicks.

Why is this good? Well, now you can slap a REALbasic GUI over top of most any command line UNIX app (actually *any* app, but if it's got a GUI already...) in OS X and have it maintain state and resources very easily. Before (and the way it still is in VB 6.0, afaik), you just fired off a command line and read the reponse without maintaining any sort of connection. The Shell was a one-shot process. (Note: I'm sure there's some way of having a persistent shell in VB 6.0; it's all 0's & 1's, after all, and if you're willing to travel outside of traditional VB 6 coding (APIs, etc), I haven't found a thing you can't do in VB.)

This also makes for very easy integration with xplat headless apps. So if I want to write something in Java and have a GUI in OS X, REALbasic once again comes to the rescue.

An interactive shell is also the final thing I needed to do a Quake 1 server browser "the way I want to", so I suspect I'll be able to hack that up pretty quickly.

And in fun "Link of the Day" news, my original Quake 2 server browser still has its site up at AOL. What a hack. No threading, nothing. The master server list is dated now as well, so I don't think you'll even find a server. But it was the first Mac Quake 2 server browser! Woohoo!

Looks like they've taken down pages that don't get many hits, so it's not all there. I'm surprised it's still there -- I should probably ask them to take it down again.