REAL Software, creator of REAL Studio — a cross-platform development tool for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux developers — has begun shipping REAL Studio 2010 Release 2. The upgrade introduces 17 new features and 68 improvements.  

Improved database connectivity, reporting, ActiveX and IDE printing can be found in this release. Also flickering in Windows applications that occurred when several different types of controls were moved or resized, has been greatly reduced. Finally, this release adds more DLL placement options and a new TextEncoding feature that determines if a string is correctly encoded or not.  

REAL Studio Personal Edition for Mac, Windows or Linux is priced at US$99 and is geared for hobbyists and students. REAL Studio Professional Edition, required for cross-platform compilation, is $299. REAL Studio Enterprise Edition, made for full-time developers, is priced at $995. All editions of REAL Studio are now available and can be downloaded directly from REAL Software: http://www.realsoftware.com/download .