It now listed ARM64 for Linux as an item they work on. This currently number 2 in the feedback user favorites. We are very happy Xojo Inc. finally schedules this feature for implementation. We asked for that long ago.
The feature request 42794 was created in 2016 when Raspberry Pi 3 with 64-bit CPU got available. While most Raspberry Pi computers still work in 32-bit for compatibility, you can run the newer ones with 64-bit Debian Linux distribution. And since Amazon provides ARM based server hardware for their AWS EC2 service, you may enjoy using those machines with Xojo applications soon. AWS with ARM are priced lower compared to Intel based systems. Finally Apple's recent M1 Macs run virtual machines with Linux, which could also benefit from Xojo applications.
For our plugins we have Linux ARM 64-bit support already. All our plugins are built for arm64 and wait here for a future Xojo version to test. Of course we need a newer plugin SDK, which may introduce this target and clarify a few things like the updated plugin structure.
Please know that the roadmap lists various items Xojo Inc. works on, but not all and not necessarily in the order they ship. The listed items tend to be the ones, which takes multiple releases to get finished. Smaller items, which can be done in a few days by an engineer, may not be listed there.
Client contact us in various ways. Mostly email, but some go via website chat, feedback form, text/iMessage/Signal messages, some use Skype or send private messages on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Xing. All the messages usually arrive and we get notified. But sometimes it fails.
If you don't get an answer within a reasonable time, e.g. 2 days, please contact us again using an alternative way. The idea with 2 days is that there may always be a holiday or time in an airplane while traveling, where we have no chance to look into your message.
Recently we had a client putting several support requests into a web form on our website which all were not delivered. Not sure what the outage was that let a few of many messages not come through. Other clients sent messages before, in-between and after and those worked. If the web form doesn't work, please come back via email. The client was of course very disappointed, but waited weeks before they contacted us via email about this. We could have helped quicker.
One thing not to forget is to put our domain monkeybreadsoftware.de on a white list for your spam filter or add our support email address to your contacts. This may prevent spam filters to block us. Regularly our emails get blocked and answers or even license key delivery fails. A way to overcome that is to provide a second email for us, so we can answer to that one. And finally typing your own email address into a form can be difficult. If we have you in the database or a previous email, we can correct a typo, but for new clients, we often have no way to answer them.
We also encourage users to post on the relevant forums. The community may help with questions about our plugins and often answer quicker than us. But even while we monitor a dozen forums for new posts regularly, we may still miss a message there. But feel free to refer to @Monkeybreadsoftware in your postings to call us specifically.
As always, please don't hesitate to contact us if you have questions.
We had NSSpellCheckerMBS class for macOS for years. But for Windows we had a missing spot in our class lists. Microsoft added spell checking for Windows 8 as a system wide service.
For MBS Xojo Plugins in version 21.2 we add the WinSpellCheckerMBS class to check for supported languages. Pick a country & language specification and initialize a new spell checker. Then you can check some text for error sand get an array of WinSpellingErrorMBS objects. Spell checking may suggest direct replacements, deletions or showing suggestions. We do have a Suggest() function to ask for suggestions and show them the user.
If you like, you can define auto corrections, ignore words and add words to teach the engine your custom words. Optionally you can use user dictionaries.
In general the functions work on Windows 8 and newer except a few newer functions like the Remove method, which needs Windows 10.
Please try and let us know how it works. You may need to develop your own integration to show in text area what is mistyped.
Claris FileMaker Server 19.2.1 is the last version on CentOS and will be supported till October 28, 2022. The next Claris FileMaker Server release will require Ubuntu. We expect this to be released within a few months.
Our MBS FileMaker Plugin already runs fine on Ubuntu servers with pre-release FileMaker Server software. If you’re interested in testing FileMaker Server on Ubuntu, send an email to ets@claris.com to be considered for the External Testing Site (ETS) program. Then you can install a server in a VM and install our current MBS Plugin.
If you have a Linux server, you may just spin up a new one later this year, install Ubuntu and a newer Claris FileMaker version. Then copy your database over and change DNS to point to the new server. Don't try to upgrade. Keep the old server as a backup, ready to take over if the setup of the new one fails. Once you migrated, you can then retire the old server (VM).
In case Claris decides to support Linux on ARM 64-bit in the future, we can would be happy to build our plugin for such a platform.
For my birthday last Sunday I got a lot of nice emails, greetings and comments. But a few people went further and surprised me with letters, cards and even some presents!
We collected them all and put them on a fish net in the hallway, so we can remember them.
Thanks everyone for your good wishes and heart-warming texts. The Xojo people for example printed a special postcard with several pictures with me and staff on it.
See you all soon on the next conferences!
We continue to be a Claris Partner as we just renewed our FBA membership:
It is already nine years since we applied for this and being a Claris Partner helps:
The listing on the website as well as recommendations to prospects by Claris employers helps to bring business to your company. You get a discount for license purchase so you can make some money selling your solution bundled with the FileMaker licenses and offer one stop shopping to your clients. You can list your products on the marketplace and use Solution Bundle Agreement if you like to sell a lot of bundles. Access to beta versions, extra training sessions, exclusive partner meetings and a few test licenses are included. And you can bundle tools like the data migration utility with your solutions.
If you like to become Claris Partner, you can read more on the Claris website.
Updated DuckDB to version 0.25. Please note that the binary format for files is not compatible with older version. Please export and import into new database.
Changed a couple of internal text functions to recognize that text with UTF-8 as a BOM for UTF-16 or UTF-32 and then reinterpret bytes to handle that. Useful for Shell.ReadOutputText, when a command line tool outputs UTF-16 instead of expected UTF-8.
Changed CURL functions to not print password for SFTP transfer in debug log. Left overs from debug session in 11.1 betas.
Changed our buttons for Data Viewer to hide if we can't evaluate as no file may be open.
Changed plugin on Server to log StdOut and StdErr to log files for Windows and MacOS, as we did before on Linux.
Changed SQL errors to add field name for SQL update statements for type mismatch errors.
Changed XL.Initialize to accept empty path and pick the file name automatically per platform.
1st April 2000 I founded my company. Well, I registered as a business by getting my business registration (Gewerbeanmeldung) here in Germany.
That was 2 months before I finished school (Gymnasium). While alternative civilian service (Zivildienst) and my time at the university, the company run well and I didn't have to depend on my parents or student loans. Actually the company got me so busy over the years, that I spend less time at university and since 2007 this is my full time job.
I had a few clients in that time interested in development in REALbasic, a very young development environment which started two years earlier. At that time I had a website with a few freeware utilities, so people could see that I can do development. Two years later the demand for plugins got so high, that end of 2001 I started publishing my own plugins. And since 2006 I got into FileMaker Plugin development.
Thanks everyone for supporting me over the years!
PS: If you need a new license this weekend, use coupon code Birthday for an 21% discount.
In a good tradition to inform about a new Xojo release, please let me point to what's new and special. My point is different than the official announcement and I look forward to see other fellow Xojo developers to publish blog articles about their views.
The new release brings a few well needed bug fixes, a few new items and a few nice goodies for us. First the IDE itself is built for Apple Silicon, so you can enjoy native speed on the new Macs from Apple. On the way to this goal, the XojoScript plugin got updated for Apple Silicon and helpers are now built with Apple Silicon support. Xojo Inc. got their own LLVM based compiler to output code for Apple Silicon, update the linker and also the just-in-time compiler in XojoScript. Kudos to Xojo Inc. as they are one of the first to fully support the new CPUs.
A big change is the rewrite of JSONItem class. Under the hood they now use a C++ library alle yajl internally. This makes the JSON processing a lot faster in Xojo, but has a bit different behavior. Some of the subtile changes may cause trouble, so please try with your projects and see the improvements. Testers found and reported a few possible issues and Xojo Inc. already fixed them. There should be a big upside on performance with a little downside of smaller behavior changes. Web 2 benefits greatly from this change and gets a performance boost internally. Speaking of Web 2, the WebLocation control is back. Hurray!
If you do iOS, you may be happy to see that Apple no longer complains about some bundle identifiers used for the plugins. Now you can submit your Xojo app to the App Store once again including various plugins. Plugins enabled for iOS include the XML, SSL Socket, SQLiteDatabase, RegEx, Encodings and Crypto ones within Xojo itself.
The new UserAuthentication class looks interesting to do authentication via face or finger print on supported devices. But as far as I see it uses the same API as we do for our LAContextMBS class, which works for macOS and iOS.
The Web 2 framework got a lot of attention with new controls, a lot of bug fixes and small improvements. We still have to wait for something like a style editor and a way to get old projects migrated preserving the custom styles for individual controls. And we still have a couple of leaks in the web framework, but looks like they are not yet found and fixed. For the time being you may enjoy an improved WebFileUploader performance and the JSON speed-up.
MBS Plugin 20.5 and newer should work fine. Older versions may run into issues. Please check release notes for our plugin to learn what we changed over time. For iOS development with our plugins, please use version 21.1. Remember that our current 21.1 plugins support Xojo from version 2006r4 to 2021r1.
Nevertheless, this is a solid release and we used it for a few things the last weeks and had no issues with our projects. Please try it and report feedback to Xojo soon. What have you noticed?
The new MBS Xojo Plugins 21.2 are coming early April 2021 and include the new CDViewPortControlBaseMBS class to build a control based on ChartDirector with two connected views.
When using MBS FileMaker Plugin, you may need to combine a lot of functions together to get some work done. That makes our toolbox of functions so flexible to use for your needs. Let us show you four examples:
Regularly import files from hot folder
First you start with Schedule functions to run a script regularly every few minutes in FileMaker Pro. Independent of SetTimer script step, so you can have multiple of them.
You look into a file path with Files.List to get a list of file names in the folder.
By using our List functions you compare the current file list to the one from last run. For example List.And would find similar files in both files, while List.FindUnequals would find the ones different.
Next you use Path functions to build file path by taking folder path and the file name. Use Path.AddPathComponent to not care about slash vs. backslash.
A function like Hash.DigestFile may quickly get you a SHA512 secure hash of the file.
You can do a search in FileMaker to check whether the hash is known. Or use our FMSQL functions to do the check with a FM.ExecuteFileSQL call to do a "SELECT COUNT(*) WHERE hash=?" SQL query to count the records and either get back 0 or 1.
To read the file you may use Container.ReadFile function and get it in a variable first.
You can then create a new record for the file with FileMaker script steps. Or you use FM.InsertRecord to create record for it without switching layout.
If you do a document database, you may go for a PDF document and use our PDFKit functions or DynaPDF functions to extract text for PDF, maybe split the PDF and make preview pictures for the pages.
For image files, you may use GraphicsMagick functions or CGImageSource functions to extract metadata for image files like camera model or GPS coordinates.
For next MBS Xojo Plugins we add a new RabbitMQ plugin part to wrap the open source RabbitMQ C library and bring the functionality to Xojo.
RabbitMQ itself is an open-source project implementing a message-broker software. It's a server software to do message queues and then there are various clients available to use the services.
The connection class allows to connect and then use the services. This includes managing queues and exchanges, so you can declare a new queue if needed. Then you can send messages to the queue or receive messages. We already got 10 example projects made for you to try the various things by translating a few C examples. Since you can install RabbitMQ yourself on a local VM, you can just try it locally.
We built the plugin for all platforms we support, which includes macOS, iOS, Windows and Linux for both 32/64 and Intel/ARM targets. We include OpenSSL library, so you can use with and without SSL options. As usually the plugin handles memory and error management and hides a couple of low level stuff, especially all the value serialization with arrays, tables and variants.
Coming soon for 20.2 pre-release for you to test. Let us know if you have questions.
Feedback is welcome. The conversion process creates an index of functions, script steps and guides. We also remove some JavaScript to make it work better.
For Windows and Linux, you can use Zeal application.
But first what is DynaPDF?
The DynaPDF library is a full featured PDF library for C developers and we provide you a Xojo integration as a plugin. With DynaPDF you get functionalities to create, edit, merge, analyze or sign PDF files within your Xojo application. With DynaPDF you can e.g. write an invoice for your customer in which you integrate a barcode with payment information and attach the always same terms and conditions to the PDF document. This invoice can also be converted to PDF/A for archiving purposes.
While your users can open a PDF and do some operations in Acrobat Reader (or the full Acrobat product), our plugin allows you to do things automatically in your code. You write the code to use the plugin to apply changes to many PDFs. Like process a folder of 100 invoices, extract text from each and look for vendor names in them to tag them automatically. Or use regular expressions to find the bank account and amounts.
Different Licenses If you want to use the MBS Xojo DynaPDF Plugin, you need a suitable license of DynaPDF and the MBS Xojo DynaPDF Plugin. You can of course just test the plugin without a license and try all functions before you order. There are four different license levels available for DynaPDF. Which license you need depends strongly on which methods you plan to use. For example, if you only want to insert links in a new PDF document, a starter license is sufficient. If you also want to add a page to an existing PDF document, you need a Lite license for the import feature. If you want to read images from existing PDF files or import single PDF pages from another PDF document, you need a Professional license. Same applies for rendering pages for display or printing. With the additional PDF/A converter license, you get the possibility to convert already existing documents from PDF to PDF/A. All MBS DynaPDF licenses can be used for Xojo, FileMaker, C/C++, C#, Delphi, Lazarus, PHP, VB, VBA, and VB .Net with the appropriate DynaPDF versions.
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Have you seen the updated roadmap from Xojo Inc.?
Client contact us in various ways. Mostly email, but some go via website chat, feedback form, text/iMessage/Signal messages, some use Skype or send private messages on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Xing. All the messages usually arrive and we get notified. But sometimes it fails.
We had 
New in this prerelease of version 11.2 of the MBS FileMaker Plugin:
Today Claris International Inc. informed the public, that they switch from CentOS to Ubuntu for their favorited distribution for Linux servers.
1st April 2000 I founded my company. Well, I registered as a business by getting my business registration (Gewerbeanmeldung) here in Germany.
In a good tradition to inform about a new Xojo release, please let me point to what's new and special. My point is different than the 
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