Holiday Teaser 2: Fast and Pretty Graphics

December 18th, 2007 by Jonathan Johnson

If someone asked me to state what I dislike about REALbasic’s Graphics API, I would state:

  • It can’t be extended/overridden for different output devices (ie, a PDFGraphicsContext)
  • The API is structured around ancient QuickDraw philosophies, not around modern CoreGraphics/GDI+ apis.
  • It’s much slower on OS X than it needs to be.
  • Does not support CoreText.
  • The TextFont/Bold/Italic properties don’t offer much flexibility for fonts, and don’t support all of the fonts on the system.
  • Rotation/alpha/scaling are related to Object2D, and can’t be performed independently.
  • Rotation doesn’t work when printing on all platforms.
  • Curve drawing is limited to Object2D.
  • Subpixel rendering is not available outside of Object2D.
  • Object2D has a funky way of handling positions, rotations, and scales (feel free to ask me more about this if you disagree; it should be its own post).
  • It doesn’t work in console applications.

Well, what we have coming up solves all except the last item (at least initially).

Salivation: begin.