“MacCleanse is made with REALBasic so it’s not actually a native Mac app. That’s where it fails the most.”

Tim: Are you suggesting that MacCleanse does not do the job because of some underlying fault of Realbasic? If so what job does it fail to do? And: Why cant this be done in Realbasic?

REALbasic apps are just as native as apps written in Obj-C/Cocoa. Both call into the same underlying functionality in Mac OS X. The only difference (at the moment) is that one uses the Carbon API and the other uses Cocoa. But, generally speaking, they call the same functions. REALbasic doesn’t “translate” anything. When you call a REALbasic API, that API calls the appropriate Mac OS X API or APIs. If you compile for Windows or Linux, it calls the appropriate APIs on those platforms. This results in the developer saving huge amounts of time because they don’t have to learn the thousands of APIs of each operating system.

Regarding apps made with REALbasic being “huge” a very simple app will be bigger than a simple app written in Cocoa. But that is only because the Cocoa frameworks are already installed in Mac OS X. Once you create a reasonably complex app, the size difference between one written in REALbasic versus Objective-C/Cocoa becomes unnoticeable.

For example, Mail is 77 MB, iTunes is 157 MB, iMovie is 261 MB, iPhoto is 429 MB. REALbasic itself is in the middle of all of those at 261 MB or the same size as iMovie.

REALbasic doesn’t use an “arbitrary scripting language”. It’s a modern, object-oriented language that is compiled to PowerPC and X86 machine code. There is no translator nor has there ever been. It produces native, mach-o apps (just like XCode) using native UI widgets and native machine code.

REALbasic does lower the bar significantly for creating software for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. And just as the Mac lowered the bar for publishing, that means that since more people can do it, there will be variance in terms of quality. but this is NOT a reflection on REALbasic anymore than the Mac poor quality of a lot of early desktop publishing was on the Mac.

REALbasic developers don’t advertise the tools they use any more than Objective-C/Cocoa developers do. But I guarantee you have used quality apps made with REALbasic. You just didn’t know it. You can check out some examples at our web site at http://www.realsoftware.com/community/casestudies.php

Geoff, REALBasic is as far from native as anyone could possibly get (aside from runtime revoloution) because REALBasic makes a binary for your app that must be translated by some other library which is included in the application, which is in part why REALBasic apps are so big and slow. If you haven’t noticed iTunes is crappy and slow as your library gets larger.

Native means it’s coded to run on the system, not that it was made with some arbitrary script language through some faux development suite and then pumped through a translator. When I see some REALBasic made application that is actually native and runs nicely, I’ll give you some credit. But until pigs fly, I will continue to inform people about how bad REALBasic made applications are.

On a side note, is iTunes still written using the Carbon libraries? Not that it matters much (for the RealBasic vs. Cocoa debate either), but I am curious.

Mark, MacCleanse is made with REALBasic so it’s not actually a native Mac app. That’s where it fails the most. Purity is native, made with Cocoa, so it runs faster and doesn’t waste anywhere near as much disk space. I do my best to respond to everyone, so I like to think Purity covers way more of the user needs than MacCleanse. I encourage anyone who has a request to email me so I can include it right away!