The year ends and it was a great year for us. We had two conferences hosted in Germany this year. First in May in Essen with ASH and second in November in Frankfurt on our own. We also participated in other events like the
Filemaker Conference in Hamburg.
With our plugins, we had several transitions this year:
On the Real Studio plugin, we had quite a few transitions:
- First we had to move 400 plugin parts from CodeWarrior to Visual Studio 2008. Also a few plugins which had already been with Visual Studio 2005 had to move to 2008 version. That change had a few side effects and it needed a few releases to fix them all. One benefit is better code output.
- Next we moved to Mac OS X 10.7 for compiling on Mac. For this move we now use Xcode 4 for the Mac Intel plugins and a copy of Xcode 3 for the PPC parts. Works well and we can support PPC a little bit longer.
- The transition to Cocoa is also huge. We updated a lot of functions to support Cocoa like our methods for the window class. For others we simply updated documentation and hint to newer Cocoa classes.
- The biggest transition so far are the new alpha channel pictures. So far we updated dozens of plugin parts to support new alpha channel pictures. At least like the old ones and ignore the alpha channel. But of course in the future we'll have to thing a lot how to handle mask and alpha channel for each of them. This is really difficult to support more than 20 combinations of Real Studio versions, platforms, picture class flavors and color depths.
On the Filemaker plugin we moved from Visual Studio 2005 to 2008 and from Xcode 3.x to Xcode 4.x. That was really a smooth transition and the only side effect is that we dropped PPC target.
For 2012, we plan to take part in a lot of events. First Real World 2012 in Orlando, Florida in May. Than of course
Filemaker Conference in Salzburg in October. In-between a couple of smaller meetings like the
Real Studio meeting 20th January in Esslingen (near Stuttgart in Germany), the
Filemaker meeting in Hamburg on 12th January and a couple more. For example we plan a spring
Real Studio meeting for London. Maybe also one in Paris or in Switzerland.
On our plugins, we'll continue our work to release a new Filemaker plugin soon with new CURL and CUPS functions. And for Real Studio we'll have a 12.0 version coming to update several plugin parts and a couple of new functions, especially with LCMS2, WMI and a new class for directory watching on Windows.
We wish you and your family a happy new year 2012! And see you soon on an event in your area
Frohe Weihnachten und ein gutes neues Jahr!
Dieses Jahr hat Michael fleißig mitgeholfen beim Backen
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year
This year Michael helped a lot with backing cookies.
Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année
Buon Natale e Felice Anno Nuovo
Michael, Monika & Christian Schmitz
New in this prerelease of the 2.5 plugins:
- Added Math.HexToDec and Math.DecToHex.
- Added new optional NoAnimation parameter to Window.Resize function.
- Trace function now works again with logging to file.
Download at
monkeybreadsoftware.de/filemaker/files/Prerelease/
Recently a client asked how to map addresses to geo coordinates in Filemaker. He had a web service doing it and wanted to script it in Filemaker with our plugins.
The website is
findlatitudeandlongitude.com. If you go there, you see a form where you can enter an address, press a button and have the coordinates shown on the right as longitude and latitude.
In order to script this website in Filemaker, you can load it in our Form utility application (included in Plugins download). There you see there is a form named load_location with a text field "loc". Our form utility shows you the Filemaker calculation line to fill text inside: MBS( "
WebView.SetFormInputValue" ; WebViewerRef; "load_location"; "loc"; Value )
Now of course we need a web viewer in Filemaker and give it a name. We use "web" in our examples as the name. So in the examples it's MBS( "
WebView.SetFormInputValue" ; "web"; "load_location"; "loc";Latitude Longitude Lookup::Address ).
Next you need to have a little script pause so the web viewer can update. Now if you check the button in the html source (or your favorite web inspector), you discover that it has javascript code calling a function load_address. And instead of using FormSubmit function from our plugin, you need to call that javascript method. So you use this command: MBS( "WebView.RunJavaScript" ; "web"; "load_address(document.load_location.loc.value);") With
WebView.RunJavaScript, you run a little javascript piece of code. And the code is what we copy right away from the html source. A lot of websites use that to load information without reloading the page.
Okay. Next we do a pause step, so the website can do the lookup and show information. 2 seconds may be enough. After that pause, we need to get the values. With your favorite web inspector you can see that the latitude is shown in a div with id lat_address in the second text inside that div. To get the value, we use javascript again. In javascript document.getElementById queries the div with the right id. The children() function gives us second child of that node and innerText gives the text inside. To run this javascript, we use
WebView.RunJavaScriptReturnTitle as we need the result. So we assign result to document.title and the plugin gives us that value in Filemaker. Final calculation for this looks like this: MBS( "
WebView.RunJavaScriptReturnTitle" ; "web"; "document.title = document.getElementById('lat_address').children[1].innerText") For longitude it's the same, just different names.
Well, I hope this example helps you. If you have questions, please don't hesitate to ask questions. Or simply ask us for a kick start help for your website. And don't forget that this breaks as soon as the website changes the layout.
Have fun. Here is the example project:
latitudelongitudelookup.fp7.zip
PS: Same can be done in Real Studio with our htmlviewer extensions.
New in this prerelease of the 2.5 plugins:
- Improved reading containers for Container.GetJPEG* functions, especially for external jpeg files. Same for PDFKit, GraphicsMagick and functions
- Please note: You need a Developer license for creating Runtimes.
- Added CURL plugin functions.
- Added CUPS plugin functions.
Download at
monkeybreadsoftware.de/filemaker/files/Prerelease/
I'll be at the meeting in
Ulm this week (8th December at 19 o'clock) and at the January meeting in
Hamburg (12th January).
Please come for a visit and learn directly about our plugins from me.
Also if you know another meeting where I can attend, please tell me.
There is a Filemaker meeting in Ulm (Germany) next week and maybe you like to attend?
I'll present my newest Filemaker plugin additions (version 2.5 preview) and the highlights from version 2.4.
Meeting is 8th December 2011 at 7pm in Ristorante Pizzeria Capri in Neu Ulm.
More details on the
website.
