From time to time we have the need to extract text from PDF. We can do that with our DynaPDF plugin functions for a long time now.
The next prerelease has a new function to extract text from only a part of the page. So like in example you can define an area (e.g. column) for text extraction.
In our example app above, we extract each quarter of the page on its own. If you have to extract text from multi column pages regularly, you could define the rectangles for left/right columns and get text.
(this feature requires DynaPDF Pro and is available for FileMaker, Xojo and Real Studio)

New in this prerelease of the 16.2 plugins:
- Fixed folderitem.AccessDateMBS setter.
- Fixed HexStringMBS function returning sometimes one line too much.
- Fixed a bug in DynaPDF Trace feature when not doing trace.
- Repaired ColorSync classes. Due to a little problem while moving plugins to 64-bit, we accidentally disabled them for 32-bit, too.
- Fixed bug with IsFullScreenMBS returning true for the wrong window.
- Most of our plugins no longer link to Carbon framework now.
- Updated BitExclMBS, BitInclMBS, BitIsSetMBS and BitValMBS to use 64-bit.
- Added Synchronous flag for BlockMBS class.
Download:
macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease . Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.

BKS Shorts got updated and you can use it with our
DynaPDF Plugin:
BKeeney Software is proud to announce Version 1.6.1 of BKS Shorts with Report Designer, our reporting classes and tool for Xojo. Shorts allows you to integrate a report designer into your own Xojo desktop application. Desktop and Web applications can generate reports. Both versions can export to PDF if they have the MonkeyBread DynaPDF plugin.
This is a free update to all existing users. This version is mostly a bug fix release and is recommended for all users.
for details see
blog entry or the
website.
You can get DynaPDF Starter from us directly or as part of
OmegaBundle.
We had a nice meeting in Zürich with a few Xojo developers from the area:
Topics included web projects, desktop apps, the new 2016r1 release, upcoming conferences in Germany and USA.
Thanks everyone for coming.
The participating vendors of Omegabundle for Xojo 2016 announce a final extension to the annual special bundle of the best add-on tools for Xojo development, plus an addition.
Omegabundle for Xojo 2016 is a collection of 16 of the most useful tools, add-ons and components for use with Xojo Inc's Xojo development environment. If purchased separately and not including any additional offers, the total cost would be over $3800. Omegabundle for Xojo 2016 costs $399, representing over a 90% savings. Read about the many components included in this bundle on the Omegabundle website.
Xojo is an award-winning, cross-platform development tool for the Desktop (OS X, Windows, Linux), Web, iOS (iPad/iPhone) and Raspberry Pi. With Xojo, you can create native applications by using drag-and-drop to build your user interface and then one straight-forward programming language to enable the functionality. Xojo is powerful and modern, yet easy to use and learn. Download Xojo today and see for yourself.
Omegabundle for Xojo 2016 was to originally end April 1, 2016, however given the response to the recent announcement of Raspberry Pi support for Valentina DB ADK for Xojo (Linux), Valentina Reports ADK for Xojo (Linux) and Valentina Server (Linux), a final extension of the bundle to May 15, 2016 was approved by the participating vendors.
Mirye Software also announces the inclusion of the Valerian Pro Icon Set (80 application icon designs), regularly $179 and Valerian Pro DB Icon Set (45 database oriented icons), regularly $99, are added to the bundle at no extra cost. Customers who already purchased will receive an email with download instructions.
We meet with Xojo developers on Monday, 25th April 2016 in Zurich in Switzerland.
Time is from around 6pm to 10pm and if you like to join, please email me soon. Location will be announced soon to all people on the attendees list.
Topics include of course the latest Xojo 2016r1 release, upcoming conference and new plugins. If you have projects to show or questions to ask, please don't hesitate to bring your computer and projects.

New in this prerelease of the 16.2 plugins:
- Updated SQLite to 3.12.2.
- Updated DynaPDF to version 3.0.51.155.
Download:
macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease . Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.

Good news for XojoLibrary.com:
April 18, 2016 -- xDev Magazine is pleased to announce the purchase of RBLibrary.com from owner Norman Palardy.
"We are proud of providing expert articles about REALbasic and Xojo to the community, and are excited that xDev Magazine will continue this tradition," said Mr. Palardy. "xDev has been providing REALbasic users with learning resources for nearly 14 years and we're pleased to see them continue their commitment to the Xojo community by acquiring RBLibrary."
Marc Zeedar, the publisher of xDev Magazine, feels that RBLibrary is a great complement to the resources already offered his publication. "By acquiring RBLibrary, Xojo and REALbasic users will continue to have well-known, trusted, and dependable sources of information about Xojo."
Marc is excited about the future. "I look forward to expanding the offerings of RBLibrary and enhancing the relationship already established with authors and readers."
It is expected that RBLibrary.com will temporarily be non-operational during the transition. More information on the schedule of the relaunch will be forthcoming.
About xDev Magazine
Formerly Real Studio Developer, xDev Magazine has been publishing since 2002. xDev is an independent bimonthly publication focused on instructing users of the Xojo development environment. Each issue features over 70 pages of quality articles from top Xojo programmers and authors. xDev is renown around the world as the premiere publication of Xojo instruction, tutorials, and programming advice.
About RBLibrary
RBLibrary.com is the definitive source for articles about Xojo from community leaders and experts. Established in 2005 it has a large library of high quality articles about a wide variety of topics for beginner to expert users of Xojo.
About Xojo
Xojo, Inc. was founded with the idea that software development should be accessible to anyone. With traditional tools, creating software applications can be a very complicated process, but using Xojo anyone can learn to create high quality, native apps for the desktop, web, mobile, and Raspberry Pi. With users all over the world, Xojo apps can be found in every conceivable category - from commercial software applications to use in governments, universities, businesses, and the Fortune 500. For more information, visit www.xojo.com.
Thanks to Marc for buying it. So I didn't need to

Online backup is important. We use Arq a lot for this as we are in control of our backup destination. If you have some webspace available or you have an amazon S3 account, you can route your backup there. You are in control and you have the account with storage provider, not some middle man.
Of course in addition to time machine or some other software. You never have enough backups!
Also good is to have an external disk where you clone internal disk to, so after a disaster you can boot from external disk and restore newer files.
See
Arq Backup and
Carbon Copy Cloner

New in this prerelease of the 16.2 plugins:
- Fixed bug with creating dataMatrix barcodes.
- Added ATSFontFindFromContainerMBS function.
- Updated DynaPDF to version 3.0.51.154.
- Rewrote the DynaPDF Trace feature to trace calls much more accurate.
- Updated SQLite to 3.12.1.
- The mouse click events in OverlayMBS now react on right clicks on Mac, too.
- Added Scale parameter for DynaPDFMBS.ShowDifferences.
- Improved DynaPDFMBS.ShowDifference to better handle transparent areas.
- Added more NSAppleEventDescriptorMBS methods and properties.
- Changed OpenSSLMBS.GeneratePrivateKey to yield time if called on Xojo thread.
- Added functions to encrypt/decrypt with RSA public/private keys.
- Added WordFileMBS.Parts function and Part options to WordFile functions. Now can replace placeholders in footer/header, too.
Download:
macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease . Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.

Our conference is coming closer. Next month we meet in historic Koblenz. We got another session about using Xojo with Git by Thomas Tempelmann. Be sure to also ask him about Arbed, his alternative Xojo editor and his Find Any File tool.
This is your chance to meet four Xojo engineers and talk about all the problems you have about Xojo and what you like to see in the future. You can chat with Jens Boschulte, the DynaPDF engineer and talk with Jérémie Leroy about custom controls.
Sign up to be part of the biggest Xojo developer meeting in Europe and get in touch with the Xojo community.
Our announcement for the
MBS Xojo Conference:
Monkeybread Software is pleased to announce the 5th MBS Xojo Conference in beautiful Koblenz, Germany. Once again we meet in the lovely Contel hotel on the banks of the river Moselle. Beside our two conference days we have accompanying social programme with our dinner event and optional two training days. For the evenings we have casual get-together in the hotel bar or beer garden.
We are happy to have Xojo engineers join our conference. Norman Palardy from Canada and Stéphane Pinel from France will be there to talk about Xojo. Jens Boschulte, our PDF specialist and creator of the DynaPDF library will be available for questions. And of course we have a few other well known Xojo developers coming.
The schedule:
May 17th: Xojo Training in English
May 18th: Xojo Training in German
May 19th: Conference, first day with dinner event
May 20th: Conference, second day
Registration is open. Attending the conference costs regularly 299 Euro plus VAT, including food and beverage in the Contel Hotel on the banks of the river Moselle as well as an accompanying social programme.
The early bird offer available till 19th March 249 Euro plus VAT.
Sessions are to be held in English. Our conference is 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. If you like to hold a presentation, please contact us as soon as possible. Speaker receive discounted tickets.
Registration and more Information. Training days in German and English. For any questions, please contact me directly.

If you need help finding bugs in your Xojo project using DynaPDF you can soon try our improved tracing. With pr4 we'll have a much improved tracing feature in our DynaPDF Plugin.
As current you set the TraceFile property to a folderitem in your DynapdfMBS object. Now all calls to this dynapdf object will write parameters and result to this text file. You can see if the values you pass are the right ones.
For example if you pass an integer instead of a double you may here see the missing digits. Or if you pass INF, NAN or other invalid double values, you would see them in the log.
We hope this helps in future to track down issues when creating bugs.
Especially when you report a problem in DynaPDF we can now easier tell you to send the trace. Not your project or some source code, but the trace as there we see which calls are made.
In May I'll be in Sweden and after that also in Copenhagen. As you know I don't mind having party for evening, so how about doing a local meeting with developers?
Pick location and development tool and help us find the perfect date:
Of course you can attend several meetings if you like.
The meeting will probably take place in a nice restaurant in or nearby those cities. You are welcome to join and chat with me and others about your favorite development tools, the latest versions and ask me all the plugin questions you like.
Joining is free of cost except for your own traveling, food and beverages.
Please try this really cool extension for Spotlight on Mac:
On April 5th, 2016, Thomas Tempelmann has released a new version of the Spotlight importer for Xojo.
The latest Xojo 2016r1 IDE has changed the UTI names for the old project extensions once again, making the previous version of the Spotlight Importer not import files ending in .rbp any more. The new version 3.5 fixes that:
tempel.org/RB/SpotlightImporter
If you're using a Mac for development, I recommend installing this importer as it makes it easy to use Spotlight to find anything in your projects.
See also Thomas' article on various ways to search your projects (all platforms): blog.tempel.org/2015/10/SearchingMultipleXojoProjects.html
As you see you can now use RB Class in the search criteria popup and look explicit for projects using a given class name:
And of course you have full text search in your Xojo and Real Studio projects.

New in this prerelease of the 16.2 plugins:
- The CDMultiChartMBS class now keeps references to it's sub charts.
- Added CDBaseChartMBS ScaleFactor. Can scale most ChartDirector charts without modifications for Retina/HiDPI.
- Changed Picture to CGImage/NSImage functions to use newer Xojo functions when available.
- Updated DynaPDF to version 3.0.51.153.
- Added SetVariantArrayValueMBS method.
- Added DynaPDFMBS.RasterShowText.
- Updated Plugin SDK.
- Added DynaPDFMBS RasterShowText event.
- Switched back to OS X 10.4 as minimum target for Carbon.
- Fixed bug in NSShadowMBS class for the shadowOffset property.
Download:
macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease . Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.

Xojo 2016 Release 1 is now available for
download!
This release features:
- Retina support for OS X built applications
- HiDPI support for Windows built applications (Beta feature)
- Retina IDE on OS X
- Completely new, faster local language reference
- 96 improvements
To view the full list of features and improvements check out the
release notes.
While we still wait for a full featured
ChartDirector with retina support, we got an interim solution:
I added a property
CDBaseChartMBS.ScaleFactor which you can set to 1, 2 or higher to scale charts.
All values passed to the plugin are multiplied/divided by scale factor, so the resulting chart is bigger and looks sharper on Retina displays.
Especially as Xojo 2016r1 comes soon with
retina support.
Please test soon with next prerelease and tell me if I forgot to scale a property.

New to MBS Plugins? Want to get all MBS Plugins?
For April we have a special offer:
MBS Xojo DynaPDF Pro Plugin
MBS Xojo SQL Plugin
MBS Xojo Complete Plugin
MBS Xojo ChartDirector Plugin
For $1299 USD instead of $1946 USD. (save $647)
Same licenses valid for our Real Studio plugins. You can use the DynaPDF License from us for the Xojo, Real Studio and FileMaker plugin. The license is valid for C/C++, Delphi, PHP and Visual Basic.
Interested? Please contact us.
(VAT may apply. Euro price is 1139 €)