News on our REAL Studio conference

Planning for the conference continues, and we already have some news for you:

Reduced price

With registrations coming in and ongoing negotiations with the hotel, we are able to reduce the price for the participation at the REAL Studio Conference 2010 in Koblenz by 20%, thus lowering the price to 199,00 Euro (including VAT). This reduced price is valid for new and existing registrations which will be updated automatically to reflect the price change.

Schedule changes

For Sunday, we've created an additional workshop about the REAL Studio Web Edition. Also, with this updated schedule, we now include a lunch and an extra coffee break on Sunday as well. The conference is set to conclude around 4 pm. If you wish to stay a little longer, we'd love to see you for dinner in a comfy restaurant in downtown Koblenz. The location is yet to be defined.

Please check back with this conference schedule from time to time: we will provide updates whenever they become available.

Discounts

Participants at the REAL Studio Conference 2010 will have the opportunity to order software licenses at a discount of 10% on average off the list price. This offer applies to REAL Studio products sold through Application Systems Heidelberg as well as to Monkeybread Software products.

If you have questions, do not hesitate to contact me.

Read also: Pricing a conference, Schedule online for the REAL Studio conference, Visiting the conference hotel and Weindorf, More Information and Registration, Tips for traveling to Koblenz for our REAL Studio conference, Tips for extra days in Koblenz, Hotels in Koblenz and Reasons to visit Germany.

Update on SOAP Kit

After we recently modified our SOAP Kit to work with SalesForce, we now optimized it to work with Apple's GSX Webservice.

This is good news as we have clients using it. If you are a service provider for Apple repairs and you have an account to Apple's Self-Servicing Account Program, you can now develop your own application for it in REAL Studio.

Our SOAP Kit takes Apple's web service description and writes over 200 REAL Studio classes for you to handle all the details. You can use this classes in REAL Studio like this:
  Sub Test()
dim partNumbers(-1) As GSXrestrictedUnitPartType
dim serialNumber(-1) As string
dim unitReceivedDate(-1) As string
dim usersession(-1) as GSXgsxUserSessionType
dim unitDetail(-1) As GSXunitDetailType

serialNumber.Append EditFieldSerialNumber.text
usersession.Append new GSXgsxUserSessionType(sessionID)
unitDetail.Append new GSXunitDetailType(partNumbers, serialNumber, unitReceivedDate)

dim r as new GSXwarrantyStatusRequestType(usersession, unitDetail)
dim w as GSXWarrantyStatusResponse = CallWarrantyStatus(sock, r)

if w<>nil then
dim it as GSXwarrantyDetailType = w.WarrantyStatusResponse.warrantyDetailInfo
MsgBox it.warrantyStatus
end if
End Sub
More on SOAP Kit

MBS REALbasic Plugins, version 10.5pr4

New in this prerelease of the 10.5 plugins:
  • Added OverlayMBS.NSWindow to get the NSWindowMBS instance behind an overlay on Cocoa targets.
  • Updated DynaPDF to version 2.5.1.541.
  • Rewrote the FileMappingMBS class and created a new FileMappingViewMBS class. Your code needs to be changed.
  • Removed isFileMappingAvailableMBS and isFileMappingPossibleMBS as they only return true on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. They were only relevant for Mac OS Classic.
  • Added new methods to the HIViewMBS class: AccessibilityActionDescription, SetAccessibilityIgnored, IsAccessibilityIgnored and SetAuxiliaryAccessibilityDescriptionAttribute.
  • Improved crash resitance for reading corrupt JPEG image from a string.
  • TidyAttributeMBS and TidyNodeMBS classes have now properties instead of methods so you can see values in the debugger.
  • Updated tidy library to current version (18th September 2010).
Download: macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease

Making Apps Developer Days

Programmieren für iPhone 4 und iPad

Hamburg 11./12. November
München 15./16. November

Mit iOS 4 hat Apple die Möglichkeiten für Entwickler stark erweitert. Wie man sie nutzt, zeigen die „Making Apps Developer Days“. Der zweitägige Workshop führt in die Grundlagen der App-Entwicklung ein und vermittelt erste Programmier-Erfahrung beim gemeinsamen Schreiben einer multitasking-fähigen App.

Kosten Tag 1: 199 Euro, Tag 2: 599 Euro, beide Tage: 749 Euro (alle Preise zzgl. MwSt.)



Infos und Anmeldung unter www.macwelt.de/373367

Pricing a conference

Yesterday someone asked about the price of our conference. The price is 249 Euro. That's including VAT, so for businesses it's really 209.24 Euro.

A conference has costs and we need to cover them:
In details it includes the fees for the hotel conference room for two days including food and beverage. Beverage includes all non alcoholic drinks in the conference room, coffee in the breaks and some drinks for lunch. Snacks are offered for the coffee break in the morning and in the afternoon. Also a three-course meal for lunch or a buffet, depending on the number of people we have. For saturday evening we planned to offer a guided tour through the historic district of Koblenz and later a dinner with all participants. Sunday evening should have a lunch and/or dinner for everyone. But that depends on where we actually have the event end. The friday is optional and I expect everyone pays for himself.

If you like to join, please register. If price is a concern for you, please email us so we know about it.
In the feedback session on the end we will discuss the conference including sessions, location, date and price.

If you have questions, do not hesitate to contact me.

Read also: Schedule online for the REAL Studio conference, Visiting the conference hotel and Weindorf, More Information and Registration, Tips for traveling to Koblenz for our REAL Studio conference, Tips for extra days in Koblenz, Hotels in Koblenz and Reasons to visit Germany.

Schedule online for the REAL Studio conference

Join us in two weeks from October 8th to 10th for in-depth, advanced, technical sessions in beautiful Koblenz, Germany. If you have no yet registered and you like to attend, please call Application Systems Heidelberg as soon as possible.

Registration and more detailed information:
www.realsoftware.de/realcon2010

The schedule is now online: english and deutsch

We had discussions with a few more people for presentations, but as they did not yet give a definite answer, we didn't include them. So we'll add them over the next two weeks as soon as we know exact details. If you want to join, please register. We have some time left in the plan if you want to present your application or some interesting topic.

If you need any help, do not hesitate to contact us.

Read also: Visiting the conference hotel and Weindorf, More Information and Registration, Tips for traveling to Koblenz for our REAL Studio conference, Tips for extra days in Koblenz, Hotels in Koblenz and Reasons to visit Germany.

Web apps memory usage

I was asked for the memory usage of the web apps and it's like this currently:
  PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  VSIZE
22993 chat 9005    1.2%  0:15.92   1    49   233  7.00M  6.77M  19.2M   215M 
22040 Map 9002     1.2% 17:48.79   1    49  3076   145M  3.27M  44.2M  2.99G
21175 simplebar    0.9% 11:56.19   1    49  1985  64.8M  3.75M  51.2M  1.93G
21174 simplePie    0.0%  7:05.87   1    49  1512   212M  3.53M   187M  1.62G
21169 PDF Test 9   0.0%  4:29.73   1    49  1432  43.0M  4.89M  48.7M  1.39G
21167 Infos 9001   1.1% 12:17.13   1    49  2636  69.5M  3.32M  30.3M  2.55G
21166 animated b   0.9% 20:36.78   1    49  2315   136M  3.75M  69.0M  2.39G
This is an 10 seconds average from top. And this is an older Mac Mini with 1.4 GHz. As you see the apps with pictures need more memory and if no session is running, the usage is hard to measure at all.

SOAP Kit Update

Over the last weeks we updated our SOAP Kit. One client wanted to use it with SalesForce.com and we got our SOAP Kit working well with their SOAP services. The login and logout commands works just fine in our test project, so we hope our client can write his business application now.

If you are interested in using SOAP Kit, please contact us and let us check with a little sample project whether SOAP Kit works with your WSDL. While SOAP and the WSDL have standards, every implementation has it's little differences in handling arrays, messages or session IDs.

More information on SOAP Kit: www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/realbasic/SOAP/

Some Web Apps in action, second try

Thanks to John Callis from Clarity Legal LLC, we can show a few of our web apps live: We removed the animated stuff as it's simply too slow from this server for most users.
Some of them will not work for you due to bugs. Remember this is made with alpha software. Please try with Safari. Windows and/or Firefox do not work well.

Download of the projects: webapps.zip

Update on our REAL Studio Conference

We got already several registrations and we hope for a few more. So register soon to reserve your seat.

So far we have sessions with Stephane Pinel from REAL Software about the new Web Edition and the Cocoa target. Also Jens Boschulte of Dynaforms will demonstrate the DynaPDF engine which we use in our DynaPDF REALbasic Plugin. Also we'll have a few sessions with me about a few of our products.
We have a few more on our plan, but we are waiting for more confirmations for those presentations. One of the reasons the session list is not yet online.

Also if you visit the Photokina exposition in Colonge this week, you can visit the booth of Application Systems Heidelberg. Do not expect them to present REAL Studio there, but at least you can meet the persons in charge for REAL Studio in Germany. I'll be there on friday.

Read also: Visiting the conference hotel and Weindorf, More Information and Registration, Tips for traveling to Koblenz for our REAL Studio conference, Tips for extra days in Koblenz, Hotels in Koblenz and Reasons to visit Germany.

REAL Studio Trainings

As you may know, we have trainings with Brainworks Training:

Our topic list for those days is on the website, but depending on your needs, we can discuss and learn additional stuff:
  • REAL Studio Web Edition
  • Accessing database servers which are not directly supported by REAL Studio like Microsoft SQL Server, InterBase/Firebird, Sybase, DB2, SQLBase or Informix.
  • Helper applications for better performance with multiple CPUs
  • Getting started with ChartDirector or DynaPDF Plugins from us.
For more information and registration visit:
REAL Studio Einführungskurs (beginners)
REAL Studio Intensivkurs (advanced)
REAL Studio Datenbankentwicklung (database)

MBS REALbasic Plugins, version 10.5pr3

New in this prerelease of the 10.5 plugins:
  • Split MacOSX plugin into two parts to reduce memory consumption on precompiling.
  • Updated JPEG Library to version 8b.
  • Added optional sample parameter to TiffPictureMBS Scanline and Scanlines.
  • Updated DynaPDF to version 2.5.1.540.
Download: macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease

Visiting the conference hotel and Weindorf

Today we visited the hotel for our REAL Studio Conference 2010. On this occasion, we decided to have lunch at the restaurant Weindorf, situated right next to the hotel conference hotel. More on the 'Weindorf' later. Let's continue our visit to the conference hotel Mercure.

This is the hotel from outside if you come to the main entrance:
(more)

Tips for traveling to Koblenz for our REAL Studio conference

Some tips for you for traveling to our conference by train, airplane or car.

by train

You arrive on the Koblenz main station with your train. From the main station to Hotel Mercure is just one kilometer (less than a mile), so you can walk or take a taxi or the bus.

For the bus, you can find several bus lines going to the Rhein-Mosel-Halle, the station next to the hotel. The ticket you need is the level 1 ticket for 1.65 Euro. You can take buses of the lines: 10 to Arzheim, 9 to Immendorf, 8 to Sayn, 27 to Asterstein, 318 and 319 to Stromberg. (more)

DynaPDF 3.0 is already under development...

We are satisfied to announce that DynaPDF 3.0 is coming soon. DynaForms told us that all new customers, and customers who have purchased a license of DynaPDF 2.x after April 26, 2010 get the upgrade free of charge!

The major upgrade is planned for the end of the year. More information will be published in the next months on our blog and on the dynaforms.com website.

REAL Studio Conference 2010: Registration started

Join us from October 8th to 10th for in-depth, advanced, technical sessions in beautiful Koblenz, Germany. Just 249 Euro (early bird offers and discounts available), including food and beverage in the Mercure Hotel on the banks of the river Rhine as well as an accompanying social programme.

If you plan your trip, make sure you arrive either Friday around 6 pm or Saturday around 9 am. If you leave on sunday, you can do so on the evening around 4 pm. Exact times will be posted with the session list next week.

Follow this link to sign up and participate at the REAL Studio Conference 2010 (English)

Über diesen Link gelangen Sie zur Anmeldung für die REAL Studio Conference 2010 (Deutsch)

Read also: Call for Speakers for REAL Studio conferences, Tips for extra days in Koblenz, Hotels in Koblenz, Reasons to visit Germany and REAL Studio Conference 2010.

Some Web Apps in action

Thanks to John Callis from Clarity Legal LLC, we can show a few of our web apps live: The animated things will certainly run very slow over the internet, but the other things seem to run quite well.
Some of them will not work for you due to bugs. Remember this is made with alpha software. Please try with Safari. Windows and/or Firefox do not work well. Update: Now all web apps are offline. We'll try again in a few weeks with the next REAL Studio version.

REAL Server going back to SQLabs

REAL Software finalizes currently an agreement with SQLabs, the original authors of REAL Server, to take over development and support for REAL Server. REAL Server licenses and renewals will be managed through SQLabs. For current REAL Server developers this will not affect your update plan. For more information about SQLabs visit SQLabs

I think this is a good move as the development of the server was stalled for some months now. I hope that Marco Bambini will fix the outstanding bugs and produce a nice stable version with plugins for us :-)

Update on our REAL Studio Conference

For our REAL Studio Conference 2010 from 8th to 10th October 2010, I can give an update:

We are confident that one of the engineers of REAL Software will come to present about the new REAL Studio Web Edition and the new Cocoa target. Sign up will finally come in the next days and if you like, you can already plan your visit. On friday night, there will be some welcome event for those who are already in Koblenz. On Saturday morning to Sunday afternoon, we'll have a lot of sessions. So if you want to enjoy the whole conference, you can make sure you arrive on friday afternoon and leave on sunday evening.

Read also: Call for Speakers for REAL Studio conferences, Tips for extra days in Koblenz, Hotels in Koblenz, Reasons to visit Germany and REAL Studio Conference 2010.

MBS REALbasic Plugins, version 10.5pr2

New in this prerelease of the 10.5 plugins:
  • Added SQLConnectionMBS.SetFileOption.
  • Added SQLDatabaseMBS.Option and SetFileOption methods.
  • Added new UnZipMBS Constructors for string and memoryblock.
  • Added ATSUTextLayoutMBS.SetHighlightingMethod as well as two constants for it: kInvertHighlighting and kRedrawHighlighting.
  • Updated DynaPDF to version 2.5.1.538.
  • Updated FontActivateMBS to work with unicode pathes on Windows.
Download: macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease

Map web app sample

Today I made today this map application with REAL Studio Web Edition. We show a huge picture with tiles:


Download: map.zip

I would be happy if this map application would run a little bit faster by using better caching and less load requests: Feedback ID 13570

Call for Speakers for REAL Studio conferences

Every conference needs good sessions. If you like to speak about a REAL Studio related topic, you can submit your session proposal for both the REAL Studio Summit 2011 as well as for the REAL Studio Conference 2010.

We are particularly interested in topics that fit into one or more of the following tracks:
  • Solidifying REAL Studio development — This track will appeal to all REAL Studio developers. Sessions should cover either REAL Studio fundamentals, aimed at those newer to REAL Studio, whether moving up from older versions or coming to REAL Studio from other languages; or REAL Studio best practices, aimed at helping all REAL Studio developers improve.
  • Taking advantage of REAL Studio — The sessions in this track should showcase the projects in REAL Studio, providing attendees with enough information to put those projects to work for them. These sessions should be deep dives into specific REAL Studio projects. We also expect to offer a single "What's new in REAL Studio?" session.
  • Extending REAL Studio — The sessions in this track will look at ways to extend REAL Studio's reach, by using it together with other products or by taking advantage of native extension capabilities.
  • Web Development — This track will cover topics related to developing websites and web applications.
  • Technology and Business for the REAL Studio developer — This track will look at tools, technologies and techniques to make life as a developer easier and more productive.
Feel free to suggest other topics if they have a connection to REAL Studio and you believe attendees will find them valuable.

Read also: Tips for extra days in Koblenz, Call for Speakers, Hotels in Koblenz, Reasons to visit Germany and REAL Studio Conference 2010.

New video about Web Apps with ChartDirector plugin

We have a new video about web apps with ChartDirector. Take a look:

All videos

Is REAL Server dead? I hope not!

Recently we started worrying in REAL Server. We at MBS have plugins available for it and some of our users depend on this server product for their products and services.

Now we released those plugin half a year ago. It's working well. Our plugin is rock solid, has no known bugs. But we only sold a few licenses. So we asked people what they think about our plugin and why they don't use it. I was faced with the answer that the plugin is excellent, but REAL Server is not. Seems like most people use some 2008 versions of REAL Server as they tend to be more stable. Now you need 2009 versions to use plugins. So unless those people get a rock solid 2009+ server, they won't upgrade. And without the upgrade they can't use the plugin!

The last version you can download on the REALsoftware website is the 2009r1.2 version. Over a year without an update! But actually this is the version we tested our plugins against. The latest beta is 2010r1 beta 5 from March 2010. It made some progress there with a lot of bug fixes.

In March 2010 I wrote a test suite for me to check how well REAL Server works. You find it in Feedback on ID 11754. Now this test app did not work 100% and found an error after a couple of minutes.

But what happened since March 2010? I think it was not much.

If you worry, too, please contact REAL Software and tell them!

HDR Sample with REAL Studio

Some months ago I worked on getting HDR working in REAL Studio. After trying a few things myself, I quickly found that I should not reinvent the wheel and use some of the available tools. I found two open source tools which in combination can be used to get HDR images created.

You can download the project below. Sample images are included as well as those open source tools we use.
HDR.zip

Tips for extra days in Koblenz

If you have an extra day or extra days in Koblenz for your visit, we have a couple of tips for you:

First of course you can visit the historic downtown of Koblenz. Walk to the Deutsches Eck, take a look on castle Ehrenbreitstein, visit the churches and the fountains in the pedestrian areas. Also you can go shopping on the Löhrstraße, the main shopping street. Also you can visit the Löhr Center, a mall with 130 shops and located right next to Löhrstraße.

The next hundred kilometers south of Koblenz along the Rhine, you can visit several beautiful castles. For example the castle Stolzenfels (5 km south) or the castle Marksburg (10 km south). If you love castles, you have a lot of choices. The most beautiful one may be castle Elz (20 miles outside Koblenz). Or you can visit castle Bürresheim which you see in the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as castle Brunwald.

To the west, you can enjoy the Moselle valley. If you take the train to Trier (90 minutes and 40 Euro for round trip ticket). Take a seat with window on the left side in driving direction as the train has most times the moselle on the left side and you see more. Trier itself is the oldest city in Germany with around 2000 years. Visit the roman ruins, the porta nigra, the cathedral and the throne sale of the roman emperor, the Basilica of Constantine.

To the north, 100 km away is the city of cologne (Köln). You can go there by train in about an hour (40 Euro for round trip ticket). Visit one of the largest cathedrals, the Kölner Dom. Next to it, you can visit the Hohe Straße, the famous shopping street in Köln. Walk through the historic downtown and go in one of the typical bars there.

Closer places to visit are the city of Andernach (25 km to north) with it's historical downtown, the castle, the Rhine and the famous cold water geyser. From Andernach you can easily get to Maria Laach, a Benedictine monastery in a valley with a the lake in a nature reserve. Visit the over 900 year old church and take a walk to the lake. The 8 square miles large area is good for hiking with it's big woods and nice viewpoints.

Finally we have another thing you can do: Rent a car. Go on the highway and drive to the A3. German highways are often without speed limit and you can get a speed ticket if you drive too slow or slow down other cars. Minimum speed is 40 mph and suggested speed is 80 mph. And if you like and there is no speed limit, you can drive 200 mph. Be aware, that there are speed limits and you have to pay speed tickets. 20 mph too fast can cost you 100 Euro on a highway. For more information, watch here and here on youtube.

Read also: Call for Speakers, Hotels in Koblenz, Reasons to visit Germany and REAL Studio Conference 2010.

Tip of the day: Move file to trash, the right way

If you want to move a file to trash, you could use f.movefileto f.trashfolder, but that will overwrite existing files in the trash. You can use our MacFileOperationMBS class to move a file on Mac to the trash. And it uses the same code as the Finder, so files are renamed when the same name is already in use in the trash:
Sub MoveFileToTrash(f as FolderItem)

dim r as FolderItem
call MacFileOperationMBS.MoveObjectToTrashSync(f, r, MacFileOperationMBS.kFSFileOperationDefaultOptions)

End Sub
Requires Mac OS X 10.5.

REAL Studio and iOS

Today Apple made a statement about the App Store guidelines. Now they allow third party tools to build applications. Also they provide their guidelines for you to read so you know what rules apply for your app submission. There is a copy on engadget.

Now REAL Software posted on their blog about this. People are happy and expect to see something soon, but well, they may be disappointed.

REAL Software is working on several things currently:
  • The Cocoa target has taken years and it is not even complete.
  • Web Edition is going beta soon.
  • They are working on LLVM compiler/linker.
This projects all take resources. Don't expect an iPhone target before 2012. They are busy doing other things first:
  • Finish the Cocoa target and compile REAL Studio Mac IDE with it.
  • Get Web Edition done and release version 1.0
  • Get LLVM compiler rock solid in RBScript.
  • Write linkers for Mac, Linux and Win32 for use with LLVM.
  • Once Cocoa and LLVM is done, start working on 64 bit support, the number 3rd on the wish list.
  • Build an linker for iPhone apps, sign tools and all the utility needed to compile iPhone apps technically.
  • Port the framework to iOS
  • Add window editors to the IDE which work with iPhone target.
As you see there are a couple of things they have certainly on their wish list.
I personally expect them to give priority first on finish Cocoa. Not sure where Carbon is going with Mac OS X 10.7 or 10.8, but someday it will be dropped. Cocoa target must be working well before that date. Next the Web Edition must go on the market to make sales with it. Before they start with iPhone stuff, the LLVM work must be done. And the compiler as well as the code it generates must be rock solid. Once the LLVM compiler is good and they adjusted their frameworks to work with it, they can write linkers to actually build applications. Apple may have done LLVM linker for Mac and iPhone. Maybe some Linux guys wrote a linker for Linux, but for Windows? They may need to write their own. And having an iPhone compiler/linker alone does not help. We need like the Web Edition to have a new set of controls, a new window editor and a couple of new framework functions. All those touch events must be handled and you certainly don't want to write a declare for every little thing you want to do.

So I hope they get it done, but I don't expect something on the iPhone too soon. I actually prefer having 64 bit support before iPhone support.
What do you think?

Registration for REAL Studio Trainings started

Together with Brainworks Training and Application Systems Heidelberg, the REAL Studio distributor in Germany, Swiss and Austria, we will offer trainings for REAL Studio:

October 28 to October 30, 2010 in Hamburg, Germany
November 11 to November 13, 2010 in Munich, Germany
November 18 to November 20, 2010 in Berlin, Germany
December 2 to December 4, 2010 in Zürich, Swiss
January 13 to January 15, 2010 in Leverkusen, Germany

For more information and registration visit:
REAL Studio Einführungskurs (beginners)
REAL Studio Intensivkurs (advanced)
REAL Studio Datenbankentwicklung (database)

For the best results, we suggest you take all three days and have a great time with us.

What could be do with REAL Studio Web Edition?

Today I had a client on the phone and talked about the coming REAL Studio Web Edition. He didn't think about having any use for the Web Edition, but I quickly found a few ideas to give him:

Basicly any application that displays database records could be turned into a web app. You login and view the contents of a database. Whether it's your sales, some website statistics or a bug database. Thinking about the bug database, REAL Software could turn the Feedback application into a web app. Probably not with the 1.0 as Feedback needs to have implemented some new HTML features like file drag & drop. And a solution on how to upload those files in the background. Next you could write an online shop using the web edition. Any application querying and filling a database could be a web app.

I see a market for creating business software. I made a couple of applications for organizing stores, taking orders and writing invoices over the last years and those applications can run in the web. We can take orders with a simple order app which inserts data into the database. For creating invoices we either have a link on the webapp to the PDF for opening in the browser or download. Or we have a button for printing where the server will print the invoice on a selected printer. For the user it will make no difference if the invoice is printed on his computer or the server prints it on a printer next to the user's computer.

Okay, all those examples are basicly web apps with a database. But that is what most developers code in REAL Studio anyway. And with the web apps we would have a very simply installation. Our apps are multi user, multi core and cross platform instantly. We could deploy our app with a little Mac mini or a cheaper linux box. And as its a binary, we can easily charge for it.

There are a couple of limits to web apps. For example accessing the local file system is not an option. We can offer downloads and uploads, but we can't do things without the user doing it. Access to hardware like a barcode scanner is also not possible. But for this we could of course create a simple utility in REAL Studio directly which uploads data to a database. Imaging this: Our little utility app is running in the background and connected to the barcode scanner. The user takes the barcode scanner and scans an EAN. Our utility app launches the browser to show the page of our web app with a special URL including the EAN code. Splitting this into two apps, the hardware access app and the web app makes some extra work, but as I recently worked on an application with 4 completely different measurement devices to control, having it split into 4 measurement apps would make the application much less complex and easier to maintain.

What would you do with the web edition?

Call for Speakers

We are looking for speakers for our REAL Studio conference in Koblenz. On our plan are already a couple of sessions and we still have a few free. So if you like to talk about something, please contact me.

Also we want to make short application sessions: Do you have an application and you want to show it for maybe 15 minutes? So other developers can see what you have done with REAL Studio and maybe you can give a few sentences about how you did certain features. And of course there may be a question about your application.

Checking licenses...

From time to time we have to spend time on checking serial numbers. We search with a few search engines, we check a couple of forums and download tons of applications.
To give you a few statistics of todays search: We downloaded 827 popular applications. After unpacking, we found 744 applications. Some archives failed to download, some failed to unpack and some do not contain applications. But from those 744 applications, we got 93 applications made with REAL Studio. That's 12.5% in this sample and I think it got more compared to my last search.
From that 93 REAL Studio made applications, we found 50 using our plugins. That's more than half, but for statistics, it's a too small sample.

Sadly we found one application using an unknown serial number. Seems like someone hacked the plugins!? Well, we will have to think about consequences on this case.

Hotels in Koblenz

We got people asking for hotels for the conference:

Best is of course to simply take the Mercure Hotel Koblenz (4 star) where the conference will be. So you can meet people on the breakfast and enjoy long talks on the bar.

From there to the main station (1 km away), you find a couple of alternative hotels like the Brenner Hotel or the IBIS Hotel, both rated with 4 stars.
But you can still find good offers on the internet for hotel rooms for less than 50 Euro a day. For example the Hotel Hamm or the B&B Hotel Koblenz.

If you stay a few days more in Koblenz, we can certainly help you with trips in the surrounding land to visit some nice places.

Reasons to visit Germany

There are a lot of reasons why you could visit Germany beside visiting our REAL Studio conference and here are a few ideas:

Recently I visited the mall in Koblenz. The Löhr Center with 130 shops and in the supermarket there I met a british family who came for a visit. And why? Because they can buy beer much cheaper here than in the United Kingdom.

Some people come to drive 200 mph on the highway. Yes, Germany has 7500 miles of highways all over the country and around half of them have no speed limit. Actually you get a fine if you drive to slow or slow down other cars. See Video on Youtube.

Another people come to visit old historical sites. Especially americans like to see buildings with ages they can't find at home. You can visit roman buildings like the former residence of the roman emperor: Trier. Or along the rivers Rhine you easily find dozens of old mid age castles (e.g. Castle Elz) and very nice historical town centers.

Famous for Germany is the Oktoberfest in Munich. This year it ends on 4th October 2010, so you can visit it before our conference. This year is the 200th anniversary with a special program for visitors.

If you are interested in second world war history, you can for example visit the Nazi party rally grounds in Nürnberg. Or the west wall, the World War II defense line has a couple of places you visit with bunkers and tank barriers. If you come to Berlin, visit the Reichstag and the Wilhelmstraße where the Nazi Government resided. There you can find the building of the Air Ministery (now finance ministry) and the place where Hitlers bunker is below the Reich Chancellery. Also the Bendlerblock, where the Ministry of Defence was and still is.

From the alps in the south to the sea on the north you can see beautiful landscapes. You can email us if you need more information.

MBS REALbasic Plugins, version 10.5pr1

New in this prerelease of the 10.5 plugins:
  • Removed SQLGlobalMBS functions to specify location of libraries. Now this is an option on the connection and works on Windows, too.
  • Updated SQLAPI++ to version 3.7.33 in the SQL Plugin part.
  • Fixed a bug with Graphicsmagick Plugin missing it's delegate config file.
  • Added DynapdfPDFChoiceValueMBS class.
  • Added DynapdfMBS.GetFieldChoiceValue function.
  • Updated DynaPDF to version 2.5.1.536.
  • Added LCMSMBS.CreateProfilePlaceholder.
  • Added DNSUtilMBS.LookupMT.
Download: macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease

REAL Studio Trainings

Together with Brainworks Training and Application Systems Heidelberg, the REAL Studio distributor in Germany, Swiss and Austria, we will offer trainings for REAL Studio:

October 28 to October 30, 2010 in Hamburg, Germany
November 11 to November 13, 2010 in Munich, Germany
November 18 to November 20, 2010 in Berlin, Germany
December 2 to December 4, 2010 in Zürich, Swiss
January 13 to January 15, 2010 in Leverkusen, Germany

Each training is three days long and you can pick which days you need. There will be discounts if you take more than one day.
First day is dedicated for beginners and gives a good entry into REALbasic development. The second day is dedicated for advanced developers and the third day is for database topics.
Details, prices and registration will follow next week.

REALbasic Developer Magazine 8.6 published

The September/October 2010 (8.6) issue of REALbasic Developer is now
available!

Here's a quick preview of what's inside this issue:

Inside REAL Studio Web Edition * by Marc Zeedar
Get the inside scoop on the revolutionary new way to create powerful web
apps just as easily as desktop applications -- with this upcoming brand new
edition of REAL Studio!

Gofer It! * by Jens Bendig
If you need to obtain information from the user via several windows,
coordinating those windows can be a nightmare. For instance, what happens if
the user cancels the task in the middle? Fortunately, the Gofer cleverly
solves this problem!

REAL Studio Does Cocoa * by Marc Zeedar
The latest version of REAL Studio supports compiling for Cocoa. But what
does that mean? Should you try this beta feature? Marc explores this new
capability.

Trapping for Errors * by JC Cruz
Unsure how to handle those dreaded "Unhandled Exception" errors in your
programs? Confused by how REAL Studio deals with crashes? Don't worry: JC's
got the answers!

In our regular columns we've got articles on asynchronous programming,
succeeding with failure, ODBC, and much more. Enjoy!

REAL Studio Conference 2010

The German REAL Studio Conference 2010 is closing in quickly.
Join us from October 8th to 10th for in-depth, advanced, technical sessions in beautiful Koblenz, Germany. Just 249 Euro (early bird offers and discounts available), including food and beverage in the Mercure Hotel on the banks of the river Rhine as well as an accompanying social programme.
Sessions are to be held in either German or English. Translation help will be provided. REAL Studio Conference 2010 is also conceived as a networking event. The conference is an ideal opportunity for sharing your thoughts and your own development experience with fellow users and developers.
MonkeyBread Software joined forces with Application Systems Heidelberg, distributor of REAL Software products Germany, Austria and Switzerland, to bring you the first convention for REAL Studio users in the German-speaking region since 2008.
Registration and more detailed information will be available soon on our website:
www.realsoftware.de/realcon2010
Also make sure to read the MBS Blog:
www.mbsplugins.de
Want to hold your own presentation at REAL Studio Conference 2010? Please contact us.

PS: The registration will start next week on the URL above.

Runtime error with DLLs

Yesterday a plugin user called me. One of his application users had this error dialog:


It looks like a typical cache trouble error, but in this case it was a virus scanner which put our DLLs into a quarantine so the application was not allowed to load them. In this case the ChartDirector plugin was not loaded so REALbasic failed to find the constructor (_init) for the CDPlotAreaMBS class.
This was fixed today with changing the virus scanner settings.

Discount on REAL Studio upgrades from Pro to Enterprise (including Web Edition)

If you want to upgrade from REAL Studio Pro to Enterprise, you can use the coupon code WEB10 when upgrading in the store. You get Enterprise Edition today and Web Edition when it ships!
Between now and 15th September Pro to Enterprise upgrades will be $500 instead of $700.
REAL Software Webstore

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