By kcully Published on May 3, 2006

A REALbasic story

This story doesn't really involve code, or applications, or forms, or data. It involves a telephone call and two people talking.

Yesterday my phone rang several times from telemarketers. Many of them were automated calls from computers telling me that I've qualified for a small business loan. I wonder how I get those to stop? But that's not what I'm wanting to convey to you.

At about 10am I received a call and the caller ID said "REAL SFTWR INC". I had only just blogged about my first real impressions of REALbasic just a couple of hours earlier. I was intrigued.

The caller said that his name was Geoff and that he was calling from REAL Software. Someone had spotted my blog entry and passed it along to him and he decided to call. Now that's what I call being pro-active!

We talked for over two hours. We spoke of my background as a FoxPro developer. What I thought about learning REALbasic. How REALbasic compared to VFP. What the strengths were of FoxPro, and what the plans were for REALbasic for the future. We spoke for a long time about how FoxPro's strengths is in data and our xBase ï¿½cursorï¿½ concept as compared to the recordset concept that VB and RB has. Geoff was also very interested in the Fox Forward conference that I'm hosting as well as the Atlanta FoxPro Users Group meetings we hold.

Geoff told me some about their plans on an integrated report writer, and their efforts to make REALbasic accessible via Apache CGI or as a dedicated web server. REALbasic's threading model makes this more feasible compared to VFP web hosting

Like I said, we spoke for quite a while. We even spoke of Apple's change over to the Intel processors. Good geek talk.

So why blog about a telephone call? Because when was the last time someone called you about a product that you've purchased just to make sure that you're happy? Or someone actively asking you your thoughts on how to improve the product? This is true customer service! Oh, and by the way as I didn't know this at the time we were talking, Geoff Perlman is the president and CEO of REAL Software. I'm not sorry at all that I plunked down my $399 for RB for Linux with this kind of attention!