We are pleased to announce a beta of CalendarKit 2.0! The major new feature in this release is support for Outlook calendars under Microsoft Windows. Without any code changes, existing REALbasic applications using CalendarKit are now able to manipulate calendars on both Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” and Microsoft Windows.

The only known issue is that notifications of external changes to calendars are not yet working. We will address this in an update in the near future.

If you have purchased CalendarKit, your account page will give you the option of downloading the latest version. If you are interested in learning more about CalendarKit and what it can bring to your applications, please visit http://alacatialabs.com/products/calendarkit/ and download a demo.

If you remember back to our teasers, we previewed a new product code-named ESTO. We’ve since named the product TextKit, and we’re pleased to announce that we are previewing it in a public beta.

TextKit is a REALbasic plugin that provides a rendering engine for styled text as well as a corresponding EditField-like control that works on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. Unlike most other engines, this engine is written specifically for REALbasic and is extremely extendable.

TextKit provides two classes to help with displaying and editing text: TKTextRenderer and TKTextField. Unlike REALbasic’s built-in classes, TKTextRenderer can be used to manipulate and draw text offscreen. TKTextField provides an easy way to edit and display text and objects on a window.

During this public beta, we are extending our customers a special offer: If you buy TextKit today, we’ll extend your license by twelve months from the day that we release TextKit 1.0. It’s our way of showing our gratitude for helping us improve the product.

More information about TextKit can be found at http://alacatialabs.com/products/textkit/. We look forward to hearing everyone’s feedback.

Dear readers, gather ’round, we’ve got something to share:
Click on Toybox above and see what’s in there.
We’re sure you’ll enjoy at least one of these things,
Our greatest inventions, fit for you kings.

There’s one to label your episodes of M*A*S*H,
And another, a CGS private function stash.
And a third, if you’re not yet licking your lips:
We’ll give you a way to make Dashboard web clips!

We’ll be away for the week, but please let us know
How you all liked the teasers we’ve had to show.
Even if you didn’t, post a comment anyways.
Well, we’re out — Happy Holidays.

Christmas is nigh, and a lot of other software companies are running sales or promotions to try to get you to buy their products. A discount is considered giving in this day and age, but we think that’s wrong. We’re here to give you something of substance.

But before we give our gift out, we must raise spirits. We’ve been working hard on several projects that will be released early in 2008. These projects we are very excited about. So starting later today, we will being posting a teaser for these projects on each Tuesday and Thursday until Christmas day.

On Christmas day, we will deliver our gift by unveiling a new section of our site called the “Toybox.” In it will be several toys for everyone to play with. A toy is a project that we think is very cool and should be free to everyone.

Happy holidays!

We’re pleased to release a second update to CalendarKit to address the requests of some users. Version 1.2 adds a URL property to ALCalendarItem objects, and also corrects one bug regarding Task completion dates.

If you have purchased CalendarKit, your account page will give you the option of downloading the latest version. If you’re interested in learning more about CalendarKit and what it can bring to your applications, please visit http://alacatialabs.com/products/calendarkit/ and download a demo.

Our changes in this release were user-requested. We’re always willing to take your needs into consideration when planning new releases. Let us know if there’s anything we can do for you.

A minor update to CalendarKit is now available, bringing the current release to version 1.1. This update fixes all reported bugs and introduces Tasks, or “to-dos.”

If you have purchased CalendarKit, your account page will give you the option of downloading the latest version. If you’re interested in learning more about CalendarKit and what it can bring to your applications, please visit http://alacatialabs.com/products/calendarkit/ and download a demo.

We are currently considering the possibility of porting CalendarKit to Windows. If you think Outlook integration would be beneficial to your Windows-oriented application, please let us know of your interest.

We’re always interested in hearing feedback from our users. Please let us know if there’s anything on your mind.

Kyle, TX: CalendarKit provides an API for REALbasic-made applications to interact with a user’s calendars by providing fast, native integration with calendar software. It currently integrates with iCal 3 on Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard,” and is the only supported way of manipulating .ics calendars on the new operating system.

A free demo of CalendarKit is available at:
http://alacatialabs.com/products/calendarkit

Licenses for CalendarKit cost $50 per developer, and source licenses are available.

About Alacatia Labs, Inc:
Alacatia Labs, Inc. was incorporated in the summer of 2007. We strive to operate it like a research facility rather than a monolithic corporation; in this sense, we seek to experiment and develop new technologies rather than make a buck. We’re enthusiastic about the work we do and are confident that this enthusiasm will show through our unique products.

For more information about Alacatia Labs, Inc, please visit:
http://www.alacatialabs.com/

It’s been three days since our quiet public launch, and I felt that now is as good a time as any to give a little teaser as to what to expect from us.

First, let me introduce myself. I’m Jonathan Johnson, the same Jonathan Johnson from NilObject.com and formerly from REAL Software. Along with my three co-conspirators, I founded this company and have been working hard in my spare hours to get things going.

Before the re-release of the MySQL plugin, we were originally planning on launching with a few other products for REALbasic developers. However, we saw a need and had a website ready. So we kicked into gear and released it on the same day REALbasic 2007 Release 4 was released.

We’re really excited about our product lineup that we’ll be unveiling over the next few months. As I mentioned above, we have some great stuff that’s nearing release for REALbasic. Additionally, we’re working on two consumer level products to release when Leopard breaks out of its cage, if all goes well.

But since we can’t really give too many previews until we’re a little further along, I will instead give you an opportunity to meet the rest of the developers. Over the next week, you can expect each of us to post a short entry introducing themselves. Many of you will know their names already. Each of us will have our own dedicated section of the website that we will be able to freely post about anything that we’re working on — the sort of posts that made Alacatia Labs known in the first place.

Thank you for reading, and I hope that these next few months are as exciting for you as they will be for us!

Update: Developers are now peeking out from the shadows on the Blogs page.

To coincide with today’s release of REALbasic 2007 Release 4, we are pleased to announce that we are now maintaining the MySQL database connectivity plugin. Because this plugin is no longer being offered by REAL Software, our talented development team, with over two decades of cumulative REALbasic experience, have taken on the responsibility of giving REALbasic users access to both MySQL Community Edition and MySQL Enterprise Edition servers.

We look forward to sustaining the plugin’s robustness and adding many new features. You’re invited to join our Google group that we’ve set up to offer support and discussion about the future of this product.

As always, the plug-in is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2, and is free to use, share and modify. More information can be found at: http://www.alacatialabs.com/products/realbasic-mysql-plugin/.

We appreciate your feedback and look forward to serving the REALbasic community with this and other products.

After several months of creative endeavors, we looked over our accomplishments, discoveries, and undeveloped ideas. “This one is great,” we said of some ideas. Others were labeled ‘Cool, but useless.’ In the end, we realized that we had more than enough great ideas that we should share with everyone. That day, we formed Alacatia Labs, Inc.

We are a unique company that will be focusing on experimenting with new and unexplored technologies, and along the way, releasing the unique products we come up with in our experiments.

Over the next month, we’re going to start unveiling the fruits of our labor. While not all of our lab results will be revolutionary, we hope they will be the best that’s available. After all, we are motivated primarily by our own desire for something better, and we would not settle for anything less than excellence.

So if you haven’t already, we encourage you to subscribe to our news feed or our full feed. We hope you stick around to see what exciting experiments we are working on.