Yesterday someone asked the state of our 64-bit preparation. Well, while
Xojo does not have 64-bit support, we can already build our plugins for 64-bit. Of course without a Xojo version to test and a SDK supporting 64-bit this is more a challenge and not very useful.
For
FileMaker, we already ship 64-bit plugin for FileMaker 13 Server as well as Web Publishing on FileMaker 12 Server. We also are prepared for the time when FileMaker may support 64-bit on client.
So we await the first Xojo and Filemaker Pro alpha/beta versions with 64-bit support.
The Xojo Developers UK User Group is pleased to announce a two-day event on Thursday 13th and Friday 14th November 2014, at a new venue this year - the offices at 77 Paradise Circus, Queensway, Birmingham UK, B1 2DT.
On Thursday you can learn about iOS if you like. In the evening, we go to
Jimmy Spices, an excellent buffet restaurant with selected food from around the world.
On Friday, there are sessions to learn now things:
- Custom Control Creation for a Specialist UI (Chris Carter)
- Security Via Obesity: Being Clever About Storing Your Customers' Login Details (Hamish Symington)
- A Radical Approach to Software Licensing (Steve Cholerton)
- How Build Automation Makes Building And Distributing Xojo Apps Simpler (Tom Catchesides)
- Using CURL (Christian Schmitz)
- Using JSON & a RESTful API (Stewart Johnson)
- Xojo News Video Chat (Geoff Perlman)
- Advanced Xojo Code Language Features (Christian Schmitz)
And if we have time left, I can always talk about latest additions to MBS plugins.
More details and registration:
event website. Only 12 seats left!
The real value of conferences is meeting people in the lobby and later at the bar. The sessions are nice and you may learn something new, especially if you are new to a topic. So this month I visited three FileMaker conferences and meet more than 400 FileMaker developers from Europe. Also some Canadians from Quebec found their way to the french conference. I even had my first plugin presentation with speaking a few french sentences. And due to my local Xojo meetings, I also met over a dozen Xojo developers.
Within the last 3 weeks we got 50 new functions for our Xojo plugin. And over 80 new functions for our FileMaker plugin. This includes new functions for
RichText,
JSON,
Container,
EyeOne and
Regular Expression.
For a conference, you can bring your computer with current projects. Talk about problems you have and ask the Pros for help. Learn new things and try them in your projects. Especially if you have crashes, you can give project to an engineer from Xojo/FileMaker and let them reproduce and debug the problem. Maybe you get a fix or workaround directly. Finally you make new friends and learn which engineer to ask for help in case of a specific problem.
So next year, I hope to see you all next April in Austin, Texas for the
Xojo Developer Conference and later in July the
FileMaker Developer Conference in Las Vegas.
New in this prerelease of the 14.4 plugins:
- Added more AVFoundation functions for Mac OS X 10.10.
- Fixed memory leak with extra study data in RegExMBS class.
- Updated DynaPDF to version 3.0.36.103.
- Updated EyeOnePro4MBS class to be compatible with newer SDK.
- Fixed bugs in DNSService* classes.
- Fixed problems with UDPSocketMBS on Windows.
- Fixed crash in plugin initialization with NSVisualEffect plugin part.
Download:
macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease. Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.
Not sure if you read it already, but my case study is already five years old:
xojo.com/community/casestudies/monkeybread.php
You notice? The text says 26000 functions, but that already doubled!
If you want to tell your story, please contact Dana or Alyssa from Xojo, Inc.
All Xojo Pro users are invited to join the beta program and take a look on the xojo forum.
Something interesting may be there.
And I think Xojo engineers appreciate a little bit feedback.
Just one month left to save $250 on a ticket with the early bird offer. Already over 50 people signed up for the conference, so it may sell out like last year
The 2015
Xojo Developer Conference will take place April 29 - May 1, 2015 at the Radisson hotel in fabulous downtown Austin!
XDC is the best place for Xojo users to learn from the experts, network with other Xojo users from around the world and meet the Xojo engineers. We will have sessions for everyone wanting to get the most out of their tool - from topics for those who are just getting their feet wet, to sessions for the most advanced Xojo developer.
Apple made an announcement for developers recently:
64-bit and iOS 8 Requirements for New Apps
Starting February 1, 2015, new iOS apps uploaded to the App Store must include 64-bit support and be built with the iOS 8 SDK, included in Xcode 6 or later. To enable 64-bit in your project, we recommend using the default Xcode build setting of "Standard architectures" to build a single binary with both 32-bit and 64-bit code.
This means that both FileMaker with FileMaker Go and Xojo with their iOS support have to build apps with 32 and 64 bit support as universal apps. Those apps will than use the native architecture of the phone they run on. This avoids the need to load 32bit libraries on a 64bit Phone and saves memory. Currently FileMaker Go 13 ships with code for armv7 and armv7s, but all 32-bit.
We already have a few improvements for MBS Xojo Plugins for Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite:
As Xojo and FileMaker both wait for 64-bit support, we more and more feel the pressure from Apple to move to 64-bit. With Mac OS X 10.10 the following frameworks are 64-bit only and can't currently be used for plug-ins in FileMaker Pro and Xojo:
- Accounts
- AVKit
- CloudKit
- CoreAuthentication
- CryptoTokenKit
- EventKit
- FinderSync
- GameController
- GLKit
- Hypervisor
- LocalAuthentication
- MapKit
- MediaLibrary
- MultipeerConnectivity
- NetworkExtension
- NotificationCenter
- Social
- SpriteKit
- vmnet
Also some features are no longer available in 10.10 for 32-bit applications like NSSharingService.
New in this prerelease of the 14.4 plugins:
- Updated ChartDirector Control example for retina.
- Updated FontActivateMBS function to use CoreText.
- Fixed problem with functions returning CGGradientMBS objects.
- Fixed problem with RemoteControlMBS.MacMousePositionY.
- Fixed problem with wrong formatted date when sending emails.
- Updated SQLAPI++ 4.1.4.
- Fixed possible crash in AVCaptureStillImageOutputMBS.captureStillImageAsynchronously method.
Download:
macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease. Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.
If you just need the size of an image on Mac OS X in your Xojo app, well using
CGImageSource can be much faster than opening the image for that. By using Picture.Open you load the whole image in memory which can take a few milliseconds. Loading just the file header with metadata can be much faster. So the following code uses
CGImageSourceMBS class to open the image and read the properties of the first image:
// open an image file
dim path as string = "/Library/Desktop Pictures/Galaxy.jpg"
dim f as FolderItem = GetFolderItem(path, FolderItem.PathTypeNative)
Dim c As New CGImageSourceMBS(f)
// properties for first image
dim p as Dictionary = c.PropertiesAtIndex(0)
dim w as integer = p.Value(c.kCGImagePropertyPixelWidth)
dim h as integer = p.Value(c.kCGImagePropertyPixelHeight)
On Monday we had a nice meeting in here Winterthur for dinner.
Talked about news in Xojo like upcoming iOS, migration from Carbon to Cocoa, comparison between Xojo and Delphi, going to the XDC 2015 in Austin and other topics.
PS: There is a second meeting here on saturday.
New in this prerelease of the 14.4 plugins:
- Fixed a bug with handling NSWindow in a NSDictionary in some conversion.
- Fixed a bug with CURLEMailMBS class's handling of CC addresses.
Download:
macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease. Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.
The Xojo Developers UK User Group is pleased to announce a two-day event on Thursday 13th and Friday 14th November 2014, at a new venue this year - the offices at 77 Paradise Circus, Queensway, Birmingham UK, B1 2DT.
On Thursday you can learn about iOS if you like. In the evening, we go to
Jimmy Spices, an excellent buffet restaurant with selected food from around the world.
On Friday, there are sessions to learn now things:
- Custom Control Creation for a Specialist UI (Chris Carter)
- Security Via Obesity: Being Clever About Storing Your Customers' Login Details (Hamish Symington)
- A Radical Approach to Software Licensing (Steve Cholerton)
- How Build Automation Makes Building And Distributing Xojo Apps Simpler (Tom Catchesides)
- Using CURL (Christian Schmitz)
- Using JSON & a RESTful API (Stewart Johnson)
- Xojo News Video Chat (Geoff Perlman)
- Advanced Xojo Code Language Features (Christian Schmitz)
And if we have time left, I can always talk about latest additions to MBS plugins.
More details and registration:
event website
We had a nice meeting with local Xojo developers in Scheveningen, near Den Haag.
From 12 people actually 8 came and we had dinner in the hotel restaurant.
Would be nice to have more local meetings in various locations
Bob Keeney may do a training day at the
Xojo Developer Conference 2015:
Two years ago we did a day of training before XDC began in Orlando at the same hotel that conference was held at. We had about 20 people attend and the recording is available to our video training subscribers. Last year we had to cancel the training day in Las Vegas due of lack of interest.
It's a lot of work to organize and get prepared. To get a feel for how many people are interested we’ve created a short 3 question survey regarding the potential training day at XDC 2015.
surveymonkey.com/s/YDKJ8F9
Let me know if you have any questions!
If you have a google mail account and you enabled IMAP, POP3 and SMTP on it, you can use it with our MBS Plugin to send and receive emails.
To send, please use server "smtp.gmail.com" and pass true for UseSSL parameter. And that's all you need for sending, because the normal SSL will be good enough.
For IMAP to receive, use URL with "imaps://imap.gmail.com" (s for SSL). And with that little change the imap example from us also works fine.
Next plugin will have an example for that.
Just a reminder for the Xojo meeting:
8th October, Den Haag (Scheveningen)
13rd October, Winterthur 1
18th October, Winterthur 2
21st October, Toulouse
If you want to join, please contact me. Meetings are about 7pm in a restaurant. No cost except your own drinks and meal.
New in this prerelease of the 14.4 plugins:
- Changed GMImageMBS to use Windows ANSI encoding for strings on Windows.
- Improved DynaPDFRawImageMBS class.
- Added webview property for MKMapViewMBS class.
- Changed XLBookMBS.SetKeyGlobal to raise exception if called after first XLBookMBS instance was created.
- Fixed OverlayMBS.Update(Show) for Cocoa to draw window when you call it and not later.
- Upgraded Xcode to version 6.
Download:
macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease. Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.
Just a quick note:
Using MBS Plugin and SQL functions you can connect to a Visual Fox Pro database. Simply use ODBC driver and right connection string.
e.g.this connection string:
"Driver={Microsoft Visual FoxPro Driver};SourceType=DBC;SourceDB=c:\test database.dbc;Exclusive=No;NULL=NO;Collate=Machine;BACKGROUNDFETCH=NO;DELETED=NO;"
As all details are included in connection string, you don't need to setup an ODBC data source.
And client is happy as they now can query data from the Visual Fox Pro database and import to Xojo or FileMaker.
New in this prerelease of the 14.4 plugins:
- Updated DynaPDF to version 3.0.35.102.
- Added QTMovieModernizerMBS class.
- Added WinOpenFolderAndSelectItemsMBS function.
- Added EnablePeakLocking and Overlap properties to AUPlayerMBS class.
- Improved CatSearchMBS class to use UInt64 for file sizes.
- Improved SendMail functions for better handling with Mime Alternatives.
- Added NSTextViewMBS.UsesInspectorBar.
- Added ProcessFinish function to ZLibCompressMBS, required for the case when input data is very compressible and additional output is produced to finish.
- Fixed crash when calling BlowFishMBS.SetKey with empty key. Still not recommended.
Download:
macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease. Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.
