SQLite just turned 16 years old.
The first check-in of SQLite code occurred 16 years ago.
see
sqlite.org/src/timeline?c=2000-05-29
Version 1 just had a few commands. Open database, close database, execute a statement. Code for recordsets didn't exist at that time and came later.
Congratulations to Richard Hipp and his team!
Yesterday DynaForms GmbH released DynaPDF 4.0.
PDF/A conversion
The focus of development in DynaPDF 4.0 was the development of a new PDF/A 2b and PDF/A 3b converter. The new converter should be able to completely rebuild PDF files.
This requirement has lead to the development of a new content parser that is able to completely regenerate and optimize content streams. This makes it possible to apply much more extensive repairs. Since all content streams will be rebuild, also references of the .notdef character can be removed (in PDF/A 1 it was allowed to reference the .notdef character directly but this is no longer allowed in PDF/A 2 and 3).
This increases the conversion rate drastically and completely error free and optimized PDF files will be created which render and print faster. This is not only interesting for PDF/A conversion, PDF files can also be normalized or just optimized.
Not anything that is possible with the new content parser is already available in corresponding functions. For example, the parser is also the new base for the rendering engine. Since it can read and write page contents, the development of a PDF editor is no problem anymore. Especially images and vector graphics can be edited in addition to text, which was not possible before. In the coming months the new parser will replace the old code more and more.
Annotations
The icons of text and file attachment annotations, as well as the pre-defined stamps can now dynamically created in German, French, and English. This is especially important when viewing PDF files since nothing could be shown if the icons or stamps are not embedded.
FileMaker, Xojo and Real Studio
The new plugin for DynaPDF 4.0 will be available in the next days. We include new options there for optimizer to reduce image sizes.
Our Xojo conference is done and everyone left the hotel. This was a great conference. We had 50 people signed up for it, but only 44 showed up on the conference as 2 did training only and 4 had to cancel. The highlight of this conference was certainly to have four xojo engineers there including our special guest Norman Palardy from Canada. I think everyone appreciated having Trisha and Norman here and thanks to Xojo Inc. for paying part of the airfare.
For next conference a few things may change. For example the pricing will be much more aligned to give you an incentive for signing up early. Depending on the exact hotel contract we have a deadline 2 or 3 months before where we can cancel the conference in case we have not enough people or we can at least reduce to the numbers we need. Luckily we reduced to 40 a months before, so we hit the numbers quite well. It is always easier to add a few people than to reduce. For the evening program we may switch to make it opt-in so we only reserve space for people who want to join. It's a pity if you throw away a lot of food because people stay in the hotel.
Our free tickets for young people offer was well received and we had two students to join us for the conference. Getting young people to join the community will be a thing we have to do better in the future. On our conference a few people looked for young talents and senior developers to hire. If you look for a job, going to a conference is a good possibility to find employers and employees or for self employed to find clients or contractors.
Finding the best week for a conference is difficult. Some people couldn't join this year due to school holidays in that week and already booked family vacation. For others this week was perfect. If you are a teacher, you can only join conferences in school holidays. For the next time we have to see which week fits best and what days we use.
Scaling the conference is a thing to keep in mind. For the next conference we probably look for a place to hold 80 people and an option to reduce to maybe 40. Depending on the final numbers we may take some options or not. Like with 50 people we could get speakers and microphones, with 60 we could add invitation for a second Xojo engineer.
Later this year we will run a survey to find interest for conference next year. Currently we check options. Moving to another location is a possibility, but for the convenience of a bigger city with subway and airport nearby may result in a higher ticket price. A quick check reveals that Berlin as location with a nice hotel would approximately cost 100 Euro more per ticket.
See you soon in Houston, Texas for the
XDC 2016.
A few times I visited Austin, Texas already. Mostly because Xojo Inc. is there and I visit their conferences if possible.
Now I just learnt that Koblenz has a partner city in Texas and it's Austin.
And there is a whole community around visiting each other's city:
partnerschaft.koblenz-austin.de
Now we have to see if we do another conference in Koblenz and get someone from Austin to come. As far as I know 4 employers of Xojo Inc. near in or near Austin.
PS: Also discovered years ago on a trip to Atlanta that Marietta, Georgia had a German partner city nearby my home town: Linz. So in both cities I saw signs about that partnership.
NICKENICH, Germany (May 24th, 2016) -- Monkeybread Software releases version 16.2 of the
MBS plug-in for Xojo and Real Studio.
The MBS plug-in comprises a collection of several plug-in parts which extend the Xojo (Real Studio) development environment with 2,300 classes featuring over 58,000 documented functions. Our plugins support all three platforms Mac OS X, Windows and Linux with all project types desktop, web and console including 64-bit and ARM targets.
Some of the highlights on the 16.2 update:
Our latest plugins have been updated for latest plugin SDK with support to Xojo 2016r1 and future releases. We reduced linkage to Carbon framework. Only 10% of the plugin parts still link to Carbon as they need functions from this framework. And once again our plugins support OS X 10.4 to 10.11.
The new plugin package comes with a new set of
archive classes. Those allow you to read and write various archives including zip, tar, pax and others. The archive library supports unicode names and file permissions, so you can now properly handle those in archives.
For Mac we got new
midi player class for AVFoundation to play midi notes.
For Windows we have a new
task dialog class to show dialogs. You can customize them with adding buttons, links, radio buttons and a checkbox. Events allow you to react on clicks and disable invalid options. And we put a lot of work into getting a nice icon of your choice into the dialog if needed.
Our
DynaPDF users can now extract text of only a rectangle part of the page. If you look for a bug, you may want to try our trace feature. If enabled, we write all the function calls for DynaPDF with return values to a text file. Our difference showing feature for PDF pages now handles transparent areas and recognizes smaller changes.
For
ChartDirector we added a scale factor. This way you can request your charts in a higher resolution, e.g. for display in your Retina/HiDPI aware application. The
multi chart class now keeps references to child charts in order to make sure they are not released too early.
The
encryption plugin now can do RSA encryption & decryption with public & private keys. Generating keys can now yield time to other threads.
The
SQL Plugin now includes an internal PostgreSQL library for Mac and Linux. Windows users can still point to the DLLs. The MT methods now do parsing of SQL statement in background thread for improved performance.
The
overlay class now handles right clicks and works with CGImages for better performance.
Barcode functions can now generate SVG as string,
WordFile functions handle different parts and we can watch for Notifications on Xojo windows. ColorSync classes work now on 64-bit again,
NSAlert has now a timeout and
BlockMBS class can run synchronously.
Finally we updated SQLAPI++ to version 4.1.9, DynaPDF to version 3.0.52.156, libJPEG to 9b, LibSSH2 to 1.7.0, OpenSSL to version 1.0.2f, SQLite to 3.13.0 and CURL to 7.47.1.
See
release notes for a complete list of changes.
We got new classes for handling
archives using
libarchive. The new
ArchiveReaderMBS class can read an archive and you can easily extract file information and content. The
ArchiveWriterMBS class can write archives. Both classes read/write in chunks and process archives serially. Compression is supported with zip (deflate) and bzip2 compression. Here an example for going over any supported archive format and read the file names:
dim a as new ArchiveReaderMBS
a.SupportFilterAll
a.SupportFormatAll
// open file
dim f as FolderItem = SpecialFolder.Desktop.Child("test.zip")
if not a.OpenFile(f) then
Break // path invalid?
end if
dim e as ArchiveEntryMBS = a.NextHeader
while e <> nil
print e.PathName
e = a.NextHeader
wend
We organize Xojo and FileMaker developer meetings for Kopenhagen, Denmark and Stockholm, Sweden:
If you like to join, please contact me soon:
29th May 2016, Stockholm
We meet with a couple of Xojo developers in a nice restaurant on the Alviks beach.
Topics will include current Xojo release, MBS Plugins and Xojo conferences.
30th May 2016, Stockholm
We meet with a couple of FileMaker developers in a nice restaurant on the Alviks beach.
Topics will include recent FileMaker 15 release, MBS Plugins and the upcoming conferences.
13rd June 2016, Kopenhagen
We meet with a couple developers in downtown Kopenhagen.
Topics will include the WWDC keynote from Apple, recent plugin changes and what's new in Xojo/FileMaker world.
Of course you can attend all the meetings if you like. We meet normally at 18 o'clock, but of course you can come later.
Joining is free of cost except for your own traveling, food and beverages.
New in this prerelease of the 16.2 plugins:
- Updated SQLite to 3.13.0.
- Updated libJPEG to version 9b.
- Fixed a bug in picture handling which made VMirrorMBS to fail.
- Added Archive classes to read/write archives like tar, zip and others.
- Added BarcodeGeneratorMBS.SVG function.
Download:
macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease. Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.
We had a lovely evening in the Vulkanbrauerei in Mendig with guided tour, big buffet and a magic show:
This was a great evening with over 40 people, lots of beer and excellent food.
Thanks everyone for coming to our conference and see you again at the next conference!
We started this morning and the room got quite full. Thanks everyone for coming.
Tonight we go to the
Vulkan brewery in Mendig. The bus leaves at 17:30 o'clock, so be there in time, please.
This week we have our
MBS Xojo conference and on the evenings we have casual meetings for dinner.
So if you like, you can join us for 17th, 18th or 20th May in the evening. We gather at the hotel bar (or beer garden) and later move to the restaurant.
For 20th May we have our evening event with a bus tour to a brewery with guided tour and buffet. If you like to join this tour, you need to be at the hotel at 17:30 o'clock and additional tickets are 59 Euro per person.
In any case, this will be a great conference with 50 guests from 10 countries
Look for the sign on the left. We sit on the hotel bar or in the restaurant.
Interesting podcast about SQLite history:
#201: SQLite with Richard Hipp
This week we talked with Richard Hipp, the creator of SQLite, about its history, where it came from, why it succeeded as a database, how it's development is sustainably funded, and how it's the most widely deployed database engine in the world.
see
changelog.com/201/
Some orders may still be in processing and the
website will soon shutdown.
Thanks everyone for ordering OmegaBundle 2016 for Xojo.
New in this prerelease of the 16.2 plugins:
- Fixed a bug in DynaPDF with TranslateRawString function.
- Changes for future Xojo version.
- Updated DynaPDF to version 3.0.52.156.
- Updated for future Xojo version.
Download:
macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease. Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.
The 2016 OmegaBundle is ending on Sunday, 15th May 2016. If you like to get a copy, please order soon.
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.
You can order Omegabundle for Xojo 2016 from the
Omegabundle website.
Today we look into a CURL log and explain the messages. The following log is from sending an email, so let's check it:
Rebuilt URL to: smtp://sslout.df.eu/
This shows the URL we really connect to. This URL may be rewritten/fixed by CURL from what you passed.
Trying 134.119.18.24...
We got an IP for the domain and now try to connect. Depending if your OS prefers IPv4 or IPv6, it may be the preferred IP type.
Connected to sslout.df.eu (134.119.18.24) port 587 (#0)
We are connected. Here you see the IP and port we did connect to.
220 smtprelay01.ispgateway.de ESMTP dfex
The server is greeting us, shows the name it's configured with.
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The weather forecast shows a sunny week, so if you are thinking about joining the
Xojo conference and doing some extra sight seeing, you are welcome to join us!
For example the Geierlay bridge in Mörsdorf is worth a trip. It's the longest suspension bridge in Germany with 360m length over a 100m deep canyon and just 50 kilometers south west of Koblenz. You can go for a hiking trip and walk though the valley with the bridge over you before walking over the bridge. The way is not that difficult and a 3 year old can do the 6 km round walk in 2 hours including breaks. We tested it.
Don't forget to visit Koblenz too including the older city parts. Use the cable car to go up fortress Ehrenbreitstein and take a look over Koblenz from the top of the mountain. For the last conference we visited Ehrenbreitstein with a guided tour through the fortress. Or drive south along the Rhine or west along Moselle. For example the city of Oberwesel is very beautiful. They have a castle on the mountain and the city wall is quite nice.
If you like castles, please visit the famous
Marksburg,
Schloss Bürresheim,
Burg Elz or the
Ehrenburg. On Ehrenburg we had our evening dinner three years ago. And those castles have been featured in a couple of movies. For example Indiana Jones was kept on the castle Bürresheim, although in the movie they put it on the map for Austrian border.
Sign up now for the biggest Xojo conference in Europe this year.
New in this prerelease of the 16.2 plugins:
- Fixed an issue with ODBC and SQL Plugin read CLOB fields.
- Fixed an issue in WordFile functions to handle more special cases.
- Changed OverlayMBS class to also work with CGImage objects.
- Fixed rotate and other picture functions to work better for retina/HiDPI.
- Updated SQLAPI++ 4.1.9.
- Added DynaPDFMBS.ExtractPageTextRect.
Download:
macsw.de/plugin/Prerelease . Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.
A new sponsor for Omegabundle for Xojo 2016, OneRender, adds 3D render service as a bonus for purchasing the Omegabundle.
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.
Last week,
Mirye Software also announced 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. This week, Mirye Software's affiliate partner OneRender, a powerful 3d scene generation and cloud rendering service has announced that each purchaser of Omegabundle for Xojo 2016 would also receive a promotional code worth 800 render points towards their cloud rendering service.
OneRender, a start up that will soon be available to the public (currently free in open beta), offers a two part service that includes a powerful 3D layout engine that works in a browser. Creators can import 3d models, lay out scenes and assign native shaders to objects. It can also be used for creation of high definition full 360 degree seamless video that is compatible with Google Cardboard, Facebook's 360 degree video and VR headsets. Projects can be created and then set to render on virtual GPUs in the cloud.
Omegabundle for Xojo 2016 licensees will receive a promotional code that they can use to redeem 800 render points that can be used for still renders or animation. The promotional code must be redeemed by August 1, 2016. The final day to purchase Omegabundle for Xojo 2016 is May 15, 2016.
You can order Omegabundle for Xojo 2016 from the
Omegabundle website.
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The May/June 2016 (14.3) issue of
xDev Magazine is now available. Here's a quick preview of what's inside:
- The Sunroom Project * by Mark Strickland
Mark uses Xojo and multiple systems to control the temperature in his sunroom, but he's really demonstrating the advantages of reusing code to solve problems. - App Integrity * by Sam Rowlands
There have been reports recently of popular applications being hacked into malware. Sam offers some tips on how to ensure that your users don't use a modified app. - Multicore Processing * Part 3 Bby Markus Winter
In this segment, Markus explores multiprocessing on Windows. - HiDPI Is Here * by Marc Zeedar
The latest edition of Xojo supports Retina ("HiDPI"). Learn how to use it in your applications. - Tracking Health Disorders * by JC Cruz
Jose begins a new health tracking project.
There are also columns on obfuscation, Raspberry Pi 3, Role Party Model, Calendar/Time Picker, and much more.
Get
XDev Magazine with all back issues and one printed year book as part of
Omega Bundle.
Later in May we have Xojo and FileMaker developer meetings in Stockholm, Sweden. Maybe you want to join me for a dinner event?
Xojo Meeting, Sunday 29th May 2016
FileMaker Meeting, Monday 30th May 2016
Location is not yet decided and will be emailed to the registered people on my lists before the event. If you want to join, please contact me soon.
The meetings are planned for time range 18 to 22 o'clock. Of course you can come later or leave earlier.
If you are interested in private time for consulting, training or discussion MBS or Xojo topics, we can of course schedule a meeting. Please contact me if interested.
See you there!
PS: we probably have some price to raffle
Yesterday DynaForms GmbH released DynaPDF 4.0. 
A few times I visited Austin, Texas already. Mostly because Xojo Inc. is there and I visit their conferences if possible.
We organize Xojo and FileMaker developer meetings for Kopenhagen, Denmark and Stockholm, Sweden:
The 2016 OmegaBundle is ending on Sunday, 15th May 2016. If you like to get a copy, please order soon.
