Happy new year 2015

We wish everyone a happy new year 2015.

See you in Las Vegas for the FileMaker Developer Conference, in Austin for the Xojo Developer Conference, the .fmp[x]Berlin 2015 and at probably a dozen local meetings!

For us it's year to celebrate our 15th year of business :-)

Upcoming change of VAT rules in European Union

From 2015 on some things change in VAT rules. The VAT collected is now the VAT of the country of client and no longer the VAT of the seller's country.

One of the good things is that companies like Apple now need to bill us with German VAT instead of Luxembourg or Ireland VAT. They have a different percentage so it was cheaper for Apple to sell from Luxembourg, but we had to do a lot of paper work to reclaim the VAT for our business.

Now from 2015 Apple and also MBS need to charge VAT for EU customers based on their country. But as our company wants to keep things simply and not report VAT for 28 countries, we simply delegate this to Share-it and Apple for our sales to private customers.

So if you are located in the European Union (but not in Germany) and you want to order something from us and you have no VAT ID, we will send you to Share-It. We will no longer process those orders ourself via bank transfer or Paypal.

One week till year's end

The year 2014 will end in about a week. Do you need some more licenses?
  • You can order licenses for 2015 and have delivery plus payment in 2014.
  • You can get ChartDirector and DynaPDF Starter license as part of OmegaBundle
  • And of course you can order updates for several years in advance for all your MBS products.
  • As all licenses are per developer, you should check if you got a new developer in your team this year and adjust licenses to match team size.
Especially if you run on a budget and you want to spend some money in 2014, you can buy updates for several years.

Merry Christmas

Frohe Weihnachten und ein gutes neues Jahr!

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année

Buon Natale e Felice Anno Nuovo


Sebastian, Michael, Monika & Christian Schmitz

Xojo and Valentina Hosting Added to Omegabundle for Xojo 2014

The association of Omegabundle vendors announce the expansion of Omegabundle for Xojo 2014, a collection of over $3567 of the best third party development tools for the Xojo cross-platform development environment. See a list of all products included with Omegabundle for Xojo 2014.

1701 Software, a software services company that specializes in Xojo web application hosting, is providing a three month free subscription to their services for participating customers who order Omegabundle for Xojo 2014.

In addition, 1701 Software will also provide Valentina Server hosting as a part of its service lineup.

Valentina Server is the ultra-fast database and business reports server from Paradigma Software. A license for Valentina Server Unlimited (a $1499 value) is included with Omegabundle for Xojo 2014. Using Valentina Studio Pro ($199, also included in Omegabundle for Xojo 2014), you can create business reports that are served from Valentina Server as web pages, graphics or PDF and can utilize most popular database servers, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server and more. Reports can incorporate charts, graphs, barcodes, data layouts and other elements. Valentina Server also functions as a complete, object-relational database server.

Omegabundle for Xojo 2014 is immediately available for purchase through the Omegabundle website for only $399.

For more information about the offer, visit the official Omegabundle website at http://www.omegabundle.com and also 1701 Software at http://www.1701software.com.

Improve errors for missing plugins?

Sometimes people see errors like this:


Now I can include special methods to give a little hint in the error:


But it will take a while to find all those cases and prepare...
Maybe someday it helps one of you plugin users.

MBS Xojo / Real Studio Plugins, version 14.5pr4

New in this prerelease of the 14.5 plugins:
  • Added TiffPictureMBS.SampleFormat property.
  • Added ConvertFromFloat16MBS and ConvertToFloat16MBS functions to support 16 bit floating point numbers.
  • Fixed Windows MouseClick functions in RemoteControlMBS module. Now moves mouse again in absolute coordinates mode.
  • Added NSFileWrapperMBS and NSTextAttachmentMBS classes.
  • Fixed bug in WindowsDirectoryChangeMBS class which did not notice folder creation.
  • Added code to detect Windows 8.1. Due to Windows 8.1 reporting itself as 8.0, we have to do special things to check for 8.1.
  • Added CLLocationManagerMBS.CheckEvents for Web/Console projects.
  • Added shared methods to AVAudioPlayerMBS class to create instances quickly.
  • Fixed bug with multi threaded functions where mutexes were not released properly.
  • Added WinIsWindowVisible, WinIsWindowMinimized and WinShowWindow to RemoteControlMBS module.
  • Disabled OpenSSL loading config files in CURL which can cause error message dialog on Windows.
  • Changed AVPlayerItemVideoOutputMBS.copyPixelBufferForItemTime so it now returns CVPixelBufferMBS. Existing method renamed to copyCIImageForItemTime.
  • Renamed DynapdfPDFAnnotationMBS to DynaPDFAnnotationMBS.
  • Fixed some typos in function names.
Download: macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease. Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.

Apply fonts to font PopupMenu

Just got some example code for you on how to apply fonts in a Mac Cocoa app made with Xojo to a PopupMenu control's menu.
So each item in the menu item is rendered using the font it represents.
Sub ApplyFontsToItems(xp as PopupMenu) // Apply font to menu items in a popupmenu #if TargetCocoa then // graphics for measurement of height dim g as new NSGraphicsMBS dim si as new NSSizeMBS(1000, 1000) // the Cocoa popup control and it's menu dim p as NSPopUpButtonMBS = xp.NSPopUpButtonMBS dim m as NSMenuMBS = p.menu // font size to use? dim fontSize as Double = xp.TextSize if fontsize <= 8 then fontsize = NSFontMBS.systemFontSize end if // walk over all items dim mu as integer = m.numberOfItems-1 for mi as integer = 0 to mu dim item as NSMenuItemMBS = m.Item(mi) // get the title and use it to make font dim name as string = item.Title dim f as NSFontMBS = NSFontMBS.fontWithName(name, fontSize) // now build attributed string with that font dim a as new NSMutableAttributedStringMBS if a.initWithString(name) then dim r as new NSRangeMBS(0, a.length) a.addAttribute(a.NSFontAttributeName, f, r) // calculate bounding Rectangle dim re as NSRectMBS = g.boundingRectWithSize(a, si, 0) if re.Height <= 22 then // only apply font if height is not too much item.attributedTitle = a end if end if next #endif End Sub

Tip of day: Make variables in app shared

Today a quick tip. If you have properties on the app class, simply turn them into shared properties.
The change has as far as I see no influence on your project, but the access is at least 5 times faster!

This is due to the app function calls internally GetAppObject function in framework which will of course lock the object and return it. Now that extra call is completely optimized away if you switch to a shared property.

Three weeks till year's end

The year 2014 will end in three weeks. Do you need some more licenses?
  • You can order licenses for 2015 and have delivery plus payment in 2014.
  • You can get ChartDirector and DynaPDF Starter license as part of OmegaBundle
  • And of course you can order updates for several years in advance for all your MBS products.
  • As all licenses are per developer, you should check if you got a new developer in your team this year and adjust licenses to match team size.
Especially if you run on a budget and you want to spend some money in 2014, you can buy updates for several years.

Xojo 2014r3

The new release is there before Christmas and it includes iOS support. I hope everyone is happy now. It took a long time, but finally arrived.

If you like to see a review, you can check Bob Keeney's article here:
bkeeneybriefs.com/2014/12/xojo-2014-release-3/

For the prices changes, see the Xojo blog article:
xojo.com/blog/en/2014/12/license-and-pricing-changes-for-2014r3.php

There is some news on 64-bit progress:
xojo.com/blog/en/2014/12/an-update-on-64-bit.php

On the Plugin side nothing changed. Plugins still run the same. There is not yet an updated plugin SDK with new things like access to text data type or the new auto data type. While we can use the UInteger type, I prefer to use UInt64 instead for backwards compatibility.

Sorry, but there are no plugins for iOS. There is no plugin SDK yet and no timeframe given. I'd hope we could soon find a way with one of the next releases to link in static libs, so we could provide features like DynaPDF, ChartDirector and SQL to iOS.

And if you use our MBS Plugins with the new Xojo release, please upgrade to current plugins. At least you should have version 14.3. Of course 14.4 or 14.5 betas may be better.

MBS Xojo / Real Studio Plugins, version 14.5pr3

New in this prerelease of the 14.5 plugins:
  • Updated DynaPDF to version 3.0.37.106.
  • Fixed potential problem with destructors of AVVideoCompositionInstructionMBS and AVVideoCompositingMBS classes.
  • Added NSToolbarItemGroupMBS class.
  • Fixed bug with formatting date in CURLEmailMBS class.
  • Added NSColorMBS.colorWithColorSpace function.
  • Fixed a problem with internal NSDictionary to Dictionary conversion and handling booleans.
  • Improved BCC handling in CURLEmailMBS class.
Download: macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease. Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.

Xojo iOS support around the corner

It's december and Xojo Inc. announced a few things this year. One of them is that 2014r3 will include iOS target. Another promise is that iOS target may cost some extra money for existing users. Especially I think they mentioned something like $200 extra for existing Pro users as an add-on.

This gives some possibilities for future pricing. One of them is that old Pro license will not cover iOS, so there may be a new iOS including Pro license?
But if existing Pro users pay an extra to upgrade, there is the chance for a new higher price for Pro license with iOS.

But what happens with people who don't want to pay extra for iOS. e.g. because they don't own a Mac?
Well, we have some cases for them:
  • Pro is a new target and sold separately. Fine, you can update your license now or later, it doesn't matter. And if you need iOS, you can buy it.
  • Pro is getting more expensive as it includes iOS in future. In that case you may want to extend your license now before iOS target ships.
  • Xojo sells Pro and Pro+iOS with different prices. In that case you can also wait and see which pack you want.
Anyway, if you are not interested in iOS, you should update now before something changes.

If you like to program with Xojo for iOS target, be happy as we all bet Xojo 2014r3 ships before Christmas (engineers want holidays, too).

MonkeyBread Software Releases the MBS SQLite Extension in version 1.3

NICKENICH, Germany (December 3rd, 2014) -- Monkeybread Software releases version 1.3 of the MBS SQLite Extension. The MBS SQLite Extension is a multifunctional extension to any SQLite powered application. You can use it as:
  • a plug-in for Cube SQL 4.0 from SQLabs or newer.
  • a plug-in for Studio Stable Database Server 2.0 or newer.
  • an extension to SQLiteDatabase class in Xojo
  • an extension to REALSQLDatabase class in Real Studio
  • a plug-in for the REAL Server from REALsoftware
  • an extension for SQLite which you can use in all SQLite based database applications like SQLiteManager application (from SQLabs).
New in Version 1.3:
  • Updated Xojo examples to set LoadExtensions property.
  • Added Windows 64bit version.
  • Added GeoDistanceMBS function.
  • Updated to Xcode 6.1
Our SQLite Extension supports Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. Example projects for Xojo and Real Studio are included for SQLiteDatabase, REALSQLDatabase, REALSQLServerDatabase and CubeSQLDatabase classes. You can test the extension for free up to 10 minutes per launch in a demo mode. Licenses are available for 99 Euro per developer with one year of free updates. If you have feature requests for additional functions, please send us an email.

Xojo Developer group for Dallas, Texas

Maybe someone from the area in wants to join this group?
see forum posting

MBS Xojo / Real Studio Plugins, version 14.5pr2

New in this prerelease of the 14.5 plugins:
  • Updated DynaPDF to version 3.0.37.105.
  • Added CALayerMBS.contents, CGImageMBS.CreateImageWithFile, AVMutableVideoCompositionMBS.renderSize for new AVFoundation example to show how to overlay video with image.
  • Fixed a possible crash with PDFPageMBS object being destroyed too early.
  • Fixed bug in NSObject to Variant conversion to handle NSColor, too.
  • Changed UDPSocketMBS to use 255.255.255.255 as valid IP for sending to.
  • Fixed a problem with AVFoundation object releasing if run on Xojo thread.
  • Upgraded Xcode to version 6.1
  • Fixed CURL sftp which broke in pr1.
  • Deprecated SQLAnywhereDatabaseMBS in favor of SQLDatabaseMBS
  • Improved CMSampleBufferMBS class.
Download: macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease. Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.
The biggest plugin in space...

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