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Happy new Year 2012

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 :-) Claris FileMaker Plugin
31 12 11 - 21:33