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 1 today.

With this release REAL Software has changed the name of their development tool to REAL Studio. The programming language will continue to be called REALbasic. REAL Studio is available in three editions: Personal Edition, Professional Edition and Enterprise Edition.

“The primary reason behind this name change is to make it easier to differentiate between the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and the programming language itself,” says Geoff Perlman, REAL Software’s Founder and CEO. “As an added benefit, the name change better convey’s what a professional and powerful development tool REAL Studio is.”

This release adds 46 improvements and 17 new features including improved ActiveX support. Previously only a small subset of ActiveX controls were supported. Now, most ActiveX controls work and are much easier to work with. All events are supported and auto-complete has also been improved. Also with this release, REAL Studio is available in Korean. REAL Studio is also available in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

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