Meet us next week and let's talk about plugins, Real World news and other topics:
Real Studio
6th June 2012, 19:30 o'clock, Block House Othmarschen, See
website
Filemaker
7th June 2012, 19 o'clock Block House Wandsbeck. See
website
If you are interested in an extra meeting with me, we can arrange something for 7th June.
The Swiss Academy of Sciences is looking for a software engineer to help them with developing software using Real Studio. If you are interested in a job, please check this job offer.
see:
scnat.pdf
Also there was recently an offer fro a apprenticeship place in Germany:
Ausbildsstelle Fachinformatiker(-in) Anwendungsentwicklung.
On Real World I saw an interesting new app called RB Package Maker Studio. If you are planning to release something on the Mac App Store, you should check it out. You can easily setup your app and reuse the same values for future versions. It does the code signing, the plist changes and packaging for you.
Of course with new sandboxing requirement on the Mac App Store soon to come, please make sure your app is working well as Cocoa app.
It was nice to see this app in Orlando at Real World conference demonstrated by Ingo Molitor. For more details, check the
website.
Real World was great, amazing, epic! Whatever adjective you like to give it, but it was an excellent event. The hotel is quite a nice one for the given location and price range. Also we had more than 100 people visiting the keynote. I stopped counting, but I simple saw we had 100 seats and more people standing in back than free seats. Maybe 110 or so including Real Software staff. The sessions were great. I didn't see all of them as I spend more time in the lobby talking to clients.
From the sessions I saw and the ones I was told about, people were very happy with them. For some having two sessions the same time is bad, so we may think whether events should be rather a day longer and have less parallel sessions. Perhaps have general sessions like keynote, web edition walkthrough and database overview in big audience and than split between beginner and advance sessions in parallel.
From the announcements in the keynote, I got a few people being unhappy with the license changes coming. Think about it: iOS as a new target will greatly extend what you can do with Real Studio! You can deliver solutions to your client with desktop, web and mobile combined. Whether this license on the end costs $100 more or less, should not be a problem. And for all others, the great improvement is that you can use latest IDE whether you have license or not. And only when you need to deliver product, you can order one or drive to your buddy with a license. Would be interesting to see if the final license will allow to offer build as a service. But as most other details, it's not yet defined. But as you can read in comments on
Bob's article, Geoff already told us that all Personal license users will be upgraded to Desktop. Pro users will get upgrade to Desktop + Console + Database Servers. And Enterprise also get Web in addition. Web licenses will also be upgraded. I expect them to get Database Server + Web. Exact details will follow, but for now
everyone (!) should go and buy himself a 2 year upgrade. Even if your license expires in 2013, you can buy upgrade to 2015.
On the fast food front (see
older article), I was disappointed with Taco Bell (didn't like it this year), but become good friend to Quiznos and Steak 'n Shake. Especially I love to get those fluffy american pan cakes and I love the free refills on the soft drinks. Things you don't get in Europe too often.
For next Real Worlds, well, I'd love to visit more locations. Like having something on the west coast or north east would be nice. For the flights it doesn't matter much whether we fly to Orlando or Seattle. Due to the different angles going down from green land, but same distance Seattle and Orlando cost the same and take the same time.
Also I hope we can have another conference in Europe. Maybe I have time the next weeks to go scouting for a good hotel…
About 64 bit:
Mac: Spring 2013
Win/Linux: Summer 2013
And LLVM:
32 bit OSX in Q1/2013
64 bit OSX in Q2/2013
Windows/Linux Q3/2013
only for building and old compiler for running in debug mode
Real Studio 2012r1
old IDE, new framework and new IDE with r2.
Changes in RS 2012r1:
* Apps use less memory
* Apps are 1 megabyte smaller due to framework changes
* HTMLViewer on Windows can use Webkit.
* Incremental BLOB support for databases
* WeakRef
* Updated Plugin SDK
* over 350 bug fixes (a lot of for Cocoa)
Beta soon, ship in August.
Lot's of people and we'll see in the keynote in a few seconds.
Geoff is now on stage doing the keynote
So maybe we have some notes later for you.
Or simply check the twitter messages:
twitter.com/#!/realsoftware
If you arrive early for Real World, you can stay in this wonderful hotel. Nice warm weather and a pool & SPA to relax
You can walk or drive to Downtown Disney. Don't go too early. A lot of shops open at 9:30am, some not before 10:30am:
In general this is a nice place to walk around and visit shops and restaurants. Between you see a lot of disney figures, some nice buildings, big Lego statues and a paddle steamer. This is like a Disney park without attractions: only shops and restaurants. But if you like, take a boat tour or go up with the hot-air balloon. In general it seems better to visit this in the evening when they turn on all the lights and the sun doesn't burn you.
If you like lakes and nature, you can drive a few miles to south east and visit lake Kissimmee
and lake east Tohopekaliga, two huge lakes.
And this picture is from
Osceola History Site, where you can see a couple of old houses and learn how people lived here more than 100 years ago. They have some nice buildings including a black smith and an old school.
We arrived yesterday in Orlando, Florida. Real World will be later this week, so we have still some time left to prepare presentation, meet friends/clients here and enjoy the nice hotel.
For the conference, I expect something like a 100 people to show up. Okay, I know from 2 that they are ill and won't come, so it could be less. But still there are a couple of locals here which not yet decided, so we'll see. Still with 90 people the conference is not long enough to talk 15 minutes to each...
If you want to join us here, please Register on the
Real Software website. Also you can get some
discounted Disney Park tickets here. And if you fly on wednesday and return on sunday you can get one of the cheaper flight tickets. This gives you time to visit Disney part on friday night and saturday while you only invest three work days for the trip.
If you arrive at the hotel, drop us a line via SMS or email and we'd happy to say hello.
New in this prerelease of the 12.3 plugins:
- Added drawFocusRingMask and focusRingMaskBounds events to CustomNSViewMBS class.
- Changed functions for printing htmlviewer/webview on Mac to not reset page settings too often.
- Updated DynaPDF to version 3.0.15.39.
- Modernized WinSpeechMBS class.
- Added GetDriveTypeMBS function for Windows.
- Added description method to ABMultiValueMBS, ABSearchElementMBS and ABRecordMBS classes.
- Added groupForName and peopleForEmail functions to ABAddressBookMBS class.
- Changed Length and Time properties to be Int64 in VLCMediaPlayerMBS class.
- Added VLCMediaTrackInfoMBS.CodecString.
- Added drawFocusRingMask, focusRingMaskBounds and noteFocusRingMaskChanged methods to NSViewMBS class.
- Fixed events on NSTextFieldMBS class. They now work again.
Download:
macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease
A couple of users are receiving notifications this month about their DynaPDF license expiring. While you can continue to use old plugin with old license, we ask everyone to order an update to benefit from new features and bug fixes in the future. To give you an idea what changed over the last year in DynaPDF, here is an overview:
The rasterizer got updated regularly to better handle all the PDF features. We want to provide a robust PDF reader which can read all the broken PDF files you may find on users computers. With the addition of functions like RenderPDFFile, RenderPageToImage and AddRasImage, we made it much simpler to render directly into a jpeg, tiff or png file. This is very useful for best performance in Web Edition applications. Of course you can still render into pictures in memory or to memory blocks.
A few features have been added to the rasterizer over time to complete PDF render features. This includes soft masks, transparency groups, blend modes, axial shadings, shading and tiling patterns, vertical text writing mode and much more. Also the rasterizer engine got a couple of optimizations, especially with clipping. And you can run the raster process in a working thread and receive updates on progress to show PDF while rendering it.
DynaPDF now has Color Matching. This is used for rasterization so we can color match RGB, CMYK, Gray and Lab colors to RGB for displaying on screen.
DynaPDF got support for huge PDFs. It can read PDFs larger than 2 GB and output PDFs at a maximum size of 4 GB. Of course we have a couple of functions to keep memory usage low as such big files won't fit into memory. You can import PDF files with using proxies, so we do not load PDF data in memory until we need it. Also with using UserUnit functions you can create even larger PDFs in page size by changing pixel grid.
For the general PDF library, we got a couple of new functions like inserting bookmarks. Font handling has been improved to work with more fonts including old style resource fork Mac fonts and CID Fonts. Also there is now a JBIG Decoder, a lossless image compression standard.
New in this prerelease of the 12.3 plugins:
- Updated DynaPDF to version 3.0.15.38.
Download:
macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease
NICKENICH, Germany (May 16th, 2012) -- Monkeybread Software releases version 12.2 of the MBS plug-in for Real Studio.
The MBS plug-in comprises a collection of several plug-in parts which extend the Real Studio development environment with 1,500 classes featuring over 41,000 documented functions. Our plugins support all three platforms Mac OS X, Windows and Linux with all project types desktop, web and console.
Some of the highlights on the 12.2 update:
With the new VLC Plugin part, you can now use the VLC libraries from the famous VLC application and play video with them. This gives you nice cross platform video playback on Mac, Windows and Linux. Also you can use it to create thumbnails or extract frames.
For Windows we added a class WinUSBMBS to talk to the winusb.dll in order to control USB devices. For HID devices, you can still use our WinHIDMBS class, but the new USB class is more general for any kind of device.
We improved our security related functions and added new SHA-512 class.
For Mac we added more Cocoa controls like date picker and level indicator. Also we improved our NSGraphicsMBS class.
New functions on the htmlviewer help to query current html code when you turn htmlviewer into editable mode. Users can change a html document there like in an editor and you receive modified html code. Also we added support functions to apply CSS style and insert text.
Finally we updated DynaPDF to version 3.0.15.37 and libXL to version 3.2.4.
See
release notes for a complete list of changes.
If you have questions, please don't hesitate to contact us. Also you can ask questions at Real World in Orlando next week.
New in this prerelease of the 12.2 plugins:
- Added more NSImageMBS methods.
- Added DynaPDFMBS.GetMissingGlyphsString function.
- Fixed LineMBS control to show color on Cocoa target, too.
- Added OptionTCPKeepAlive, OptionTCPKeepIdle and OptionTCPKeepIntervalto properties to CURL classes.
- Added a lot of new methods to WebViewMBS class related to editing a webpage.
- Updated LibXl to version 3.2.4
- Added new functions AddrToRowCol, GetTopLeftView, RowColToAddr, SetTopLeftView to XLSheetMBS class.
Download:
macsw.de/plugin
Did you know that Fedex has a web service?
You can integrate your application directly with the
Fedex web services and for example register packages for pick up with them.
So the good thing is that you can take their WSDL and send it through our SOAP Kit Utility. It generates the classes required and you can easily talk to their web service by calling some new methods generated by our utility app.
You can of course do the same with building the SOAP requests and parsing the replies yourself. For sending/receiving you can use our CURL plugin functions or simply a HTTPSocket.
I hope I have them all here:
Please join a group near you, so you can talk to other Real Studio developers.
We had a nice meeting here in Wiesbaden with the Rhein-Main Real Studio group. Everyone told what he does with Real Studio and also we did a little bit of coding on the big screen. Exchanging ideas and showing solutions to problems in the group is really a benefit for everyone. Next time we'll take a deep look at a few of the user solutions.
If you like to join the group, please visit the
group website and take part in the discussion.
Also check the other german groups for
Hamburg,
Munich,
Baden Wurtemberg,
Vienna,
Switzerland,
Berlin and
Leipzig.
Browsers store cookies for websites, so they identify you. Looking in a typical browser's cookie list, you see thousands of them. So either you don't care for that or you manage it. I now got the Cookies app from Mac app store. What you can do is to mark important cookies from websites where you want to have auto login enabled to be your favorites. And for all other cookies, you set: delete them on browser quit. This way all the advertisement tracking stops working.
Well, on our own website, over the years I tried clustrmap and google analytics to learn about who visits the website. I stopped clustrmap yesterday. I disabled google analytics last year, but finally I deleted last scripts from them, too. Our websites still have the website chat, which we may reduce so it does not set a cookie unless you use it. Especially as there are privacies laws coming to European union which may require us to make cookies an opt-in or opt-out thing.
Check this cool example from David Della Rocca with a nice toolbar made in Real Studio with our plugins:
It supports toolbar items with segmented buttons, normal buttons, buttons with menu and search fields. Also you can have flexible space and show the standard customization dialog.
The project will be included in future plugin downloads and you can get a copy here:
toolbar.zip
New in this prerelease of the 12.2 plugins:
- Added EventCode parameter to EdsObjectEventHandlerMBS ObjectChanged.
- Added pipe policy methods to WinUSBMBS class.
- Added HTMLViewer.IEDrawToHDC function.
- Improved WMI security functions for remote connections.
- Changed OverlayMBS class to show window even if you forgot the mask on Windows.
Download:
macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease
If you have a few extra days and you want to spend some time beside the conference and Disney parks, you could go here:
Maybe worth a visit? See you at
Real World!
It's still time to sign up and plan your trip.
Today our podcast has its forth birthday.
I hope you enjoy our videos at
www.monkeybreadsoftware.com/filemaker/video.
And you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes:
iPhone/iPod or
High Resolution.
Do not hesitate to send us suggestions and wishes for new videos.
The May/June 2012 (10.4) issue of Real Studio Developer is now available!
London Calling by Richard & Trisha Duke
A report from the April 2012 RSUL Conference in London.
Extreme Programming with Real Studio * by Tam Hanna
Extreme Programming (XP) is one way to manage programming projects. Is it the right strategy for your needs?
Using Materialized Views * by Craig Boyd
Most database management systems include a handy but frequently overlooked tool in Materialized Views. Find out what they are and how to use them.
HOTP Authentication * by Mattias Sandstrom
When you need real security, instead of static passwords, you need to use dynamic ones. Here's how to use Google Authenticator with Real Studio.
When Threads Share * by JC Cruz
How to use mutual exclusion so that different threads can share the same resources.
In our regular columns we've got articles on how to handle consulting projects that go bad, cookies in web apps, the art of simplicity, adding a user interface to RBScripts, and much more. Enjoy!
Real World was great, amazing, epic! Whatever adjective you like to give it, but it was an excellent event. The hotel is quite a nice one for the given location and price range. Also we had more than 100 people visiting the keynote. I stopped counting, but I simple saw we had 100 seats and more people standing in back than free seats. Maybe 110 or so including Real Software staff. The sessions were great. I didn't see all of them as I spend more time in the lobby talking to clients. 
Lot's of people and we'll see in the keynote in a few seconds.
We had a nice meeting here in Wiesbaden with the Rhein-Main Real Studio group. Everyone told what he does with Real Studio and also we did a little bit of coding on the big screen. Exchanging ideas and showing solutions to problems in the group is really a benefit for everyone. Next time we'll take a deep look at a few of the user solutions. 
If you have a few extra days and you want to spend some time beside the conference and Disney parks, you could go here: