MonkeyBread Software Releases the MBS Xojo Plugins in version 20.4
The main feature of the newer plugin version is our move from Visual Studio 2008 to the more current version 2019. We now use universal runtime library, the same Visual Studio runtime as Xojo. As Windows 10 includes those DLLs by default and Windows 7 and 8 can install them, the plugin should run fine there. We worked on this for over a year to get all our libraries ported and recompiled. All parts come together and now we can ship our Windows plugins built with current tools and start to add more Windows 10 APIs over time.
We add classes for Windows Store in our new WinFrameworks plugin. You can now offer trial applications with in-app purchases to unlock the full version. Our plugin allows you to query the products, the SKU list and the status of current licenses.
For Windows we added location classes, so you can query the location of the computer, similar to our CoreLocation classes on macOS. Great for apps running on Windows tablet PCs with a built-in GPS.
To connect to Claris FileMaker Server's Data and Admin API, we got a new FMAPI plugin. The plugin class FMDataMBS for Data API and FMAdminMBS class for the Admin API takes care about authentication and sending queries. The results are provided as JSON and parsed as variants, dictionaries and arrays. This greatly simplifies talking to FileMaker Servers from Xojo. For example build a Xojo app to run on your Raspberry Pi, collect data and push them to a FileMaker database.
If you use file dialogs in Xojo for macOS or Windows, you can now use our plugin classes to modify the dialogs. For this use NSSavePanelObserverMBS class on macOS or WinFileDialogObserverMBS class on Windows. You may use both to add custom controls to a save or open dialog.
For DynaPDF Plugin we decided to implement DynaPDFErrorExceptionMBS class. If you don't implement an Error event, we raise exceptions when an error happens. This should help beginners to not miss errors. And as you can load a custom DynaPDF library, we have a DynaPDFMissingFunctionExceptionMBS class to inform you that a function is not available. To make debugging easier, we added ActiveFontInfo property, which you can inspect in debugger to see what the current font is.
The HTMLViewer classes for WebKit 2 got more preferences in WKPreferencesMBS class to enable inspector via developer extras, disable image loading, printing backgrounds and set standard font size and family. For WKWebViewMBS we added properties to disable background drawing for transparent views.
Our MapKit support on macOS got improvements with new MKMarkerAnnotationViewMBS class to display marker annotations. The MKAnnotationViewMBS class has new prepareForReuse and prepareForDisplay events to better handle reuse of views and lower memory usage. We can query all annotation views via new annotationViews function in MKMapViewMBS class.
We improved JSONMBS class with new ArrayItems function, rewrote HotkeyMBS class for Windows to use native API, added cameraDeviceDidEnableAccessRestriction and cameraDeviceDidRemoveAccessRestriction events to ImageCaptureEventsMBS class to notify you about device unlocking, we added font style handling to GMImageMBS class, added new GetVariantAsDictionaryArrayMBS function to get a dictionary array stored inside a variant and we added support for WinDataObjectMBS class to receive email attachments from Outlook via Drag & Drop.
To speed up pre-compilation in Xojo for console projects, we changed over 300 classes to mark them console unsafe. This way those classes will be ignored for console targets. Please contact us if you need one of those classes in your web or console projects.
Finally we updated bzip2 library to version 1.0.8, CURL to 7.72.0, DynaPDF to 4.0.41.118 with ZUGFeRD 2.1, GraphicsMagick to 1.3.35, jpeg to 9d, jpeg-turbo to 2.0.5, pcre to 8.44, SQLAPI to 5.1.1, SQLite to 3.33.0 including decimal extension and updated to Xcode 10.6.
See release notes for a complete list of changes.