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Take a look on Arbed, the advanced RB editor

Thomas Tempelmann released recently his Arbed application. The idea is to provide advanced functionality developers don't get as part of REAL Studio.

First you can load a project into Arbed. Now you can export your project to both html and plain text. This export source feature was built into REAL Studio 10 years ago, but they removed it later when the IDE was rewritten. Exporting to html is great as you can put source code on your website this way. Personally I used a php script for formatting, but this script is no longer supported so it was never updated for web edition. So now I can export source code to html of web projects. And of course we can use the html to print the source code.

Having a second application to read projects is a good idea. Especially if you have corrupted projects and need to rescue stuff. With the normal IDE it could happen that the IDE crashes on loading the project. So with Arbed you have a second chance to recover.

The next great feature is project comparison. From time to time I need to document what changes I made. Project comparison makes that very easy. Also if something does no longer work, I can pick the older version from my time capsule and compare what I modified.

Another reason to use comparison is if you loaded a project in a newer version and you converted by accident statictexts, editfields or the whole project format, so it won't run again in older version. Now if you make changes and want to port them back to the older version of project in an older REAL Studio version, you can see your changes.

Need full text search over several projects? Arbed can search over all project files in a folder. So if you know you coded a method to do something special and you want to reuse it in a newer project, you can search for it. Of course you can index projects on Mac with Spotlight, but not everyone uses a Mac and Spotlight does not index everything.

This localization features is very handy. I often start developing an application in only one language (English or German). A common feature request later is to localize it. Arbed shows all strings in the project. You can select which ones should be localized and Arbed creates the localized constants as well as changes the code where the string was used to use the constant.

There are more features like controlling Arbed with command line or consolidate projects. For me Comparison is number one feature. HTML Export the second and Localization the third in my favorites.

For more details, visit tempel.org/Arbed/Arbed
05 03 11 - 12:18