New Feedback web app for Xojo

The last week Xojo Inc. did a very difficult, but brave decision: they throw the half finished web based version of the Feedback app and decided to move to use their own instance of the gitlab bug tracker.

Part of the reason was probably that they got a look into what features gitlab has. Implementing all those nice features themselves would delay that project for another year or two. And any time Ricardo (the new web developer) put into that project would be time not put into the web framework itself.

They wrote their own Xojo application to do the transition to copy most of the information over from the old database and into the gitlab server. That seems to have worked well and all the cases got moved, even all the old ones.

While we hoped a Web based Feedback would improve the Web framework, the move to gitlab will be an improvement. They free time from the project to work on the frameworks itself. And while the web version was in development a couple of issues got fixed in the web framework already.

Xojo Inc will have more web apps in development for their own use. One app is to manage the cloud servers and customers using Xojo Cloud may know it already.

The new website shows much more information than we had in Feedback including better search. You can now see milestones and know which cases are picked to be worked on towards the next release. No promise given of course.

You can review your cases by searching for yourself as author and for your reaction not being thumbs up. That way you can review them and add a thumbs up, which is the new way to measure popularity. Please also do that for other cases you like and turn on notifications via the side panel.

Your can go here: tracker.xojo.com. Login is using your Xojo account with single sign-on and is the same as the Xojo forum.

Xojo Stammtische in Berlin und Hamburg

On my next visits to Berlin and Hamburg, we plan Xojo developer meetings:

Wer hat Interesse an einem Xojo Entwicklertreffen in Hamburg oder Berlin für kommenden Mai/Juni?

Zeitlich ca. 18 bis 21 Uhr. Für Hamburg der 20. Juni und für Berlin der 30. Mai 2022.

Einfach gemütlich zusammen sitzen in einem Restaurant oder Biergarten und über Xojo plaudern.
Gerne zeige ich auch neue Pluginfunktionen oder helfe bei Problemen mit Xojo Projekten. Einfach Computer mitbringen und was zeigen.

Wer dabei sein möchte, bitte bei uns melden!

MonkeyBread Software Releases the MBS Xojo Plugins in version 22.2

Nickenich, Germany - (May 17th, 2022) -- MonkeyBread Software today is pleased to announce MBS Xojo Plugins 22.2 for macOS, Linux and Windows, the latest update to their product that is easily the most powerful plugin collection currently available for Xojo. MBS Xojo Plugins have been updated and now includes over 3000 classes and 79,000 documented features, and the versatile plugins have gained more new functions:

Our RegEx plugin now contains new PCRE2 based classes to do regular expressions. With full unicode support, just-in-time compiler and a lot of options, this provides much better performance for search and replace in Xojo.

For our SQL Plugin, we got new functions for SQLite to dump databases to string and file. We can query the internal connection handle for SQLite and use it for the dump. For SQLDatabaseMBS and SQLConnectionMBS we got options to decide about quoting of table and field names. You can now use DateTime for binding values to timestamp fields.

The WebView2ControlMBS control can now do Copy, Cut, Paste, SelectAll, ClearSelection and Print operations directly.

The Windows User Notifications classes got a rewrite and with that a few new properties and methods. We work on new Bluetooth classes for Windows and a few of them are included here.

For those interested in using ZStandard compression, we got a ZStdMBS class. The WordFileMBS class got a new Tags function to list all available tags.

On MacOS you can now render pictures of NSViewMBS class to get a screenshot, even if it is not visible directly. We added more properties for SUAppcastItemMBS class for Sparkle users.

The DynaPDF library has been updated and tested to work with ZUGFeRD 2.2 / Factur-X 1.0.06. We improved the character spacing for graphics class when used with PageGraphics in DynaPDFMBS class.

Finally we updated CURL library to version 7.83.1, DukTape to version 2.7, DynaPDF to 4.0.66.181, pcre2 to 10.40, openssl to 1.1.1n, SQLite to 3.38.5, and Xcode to 13.3.1.

See release notes for a complete list of changes.

MBS Xojo Plugins, version 22.2pr7

New in this prerelease of the 22.2 plugins: Download: monkeybreadsoftware.com/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/ or from DropBox.
Or ask us to be added to our shared DropBox folder.

XDC Developer Retreat 2022

Since the last Xojo conference in London had to be postponed and then cancelled, we are happy to see that there will be a conference in Nashville later this year:



Xojo Developer Retreat 2022, 19th and 20th September 2022.

Since a few people are still cautious to travel (although restrictions got lifted a lot), the event will be a bit smaller with only 2¼ days and less planned attendees.
Please reserve the days from 18th to 21st September in your calendar. You may want to use the weekend to come to Nashville earlier to enjoy the city and then join the get-together on Sunday evening. Two days of conference follows with a special developer adventure on the second day. Yes, instead of lots of sessions in a ballroom, Dana organized something different this time. I bet you'll enjoy it! Be sure sure to stay the night on Tuesday, so you can enjoy the dinner and travel home a day later.

You can either stay in the conference hotel ($269 USD/night) or maybe better get a cheaper hotel outside and drive daily to downtown for the conference. Or maybe you like to share a room when traveling with your colleague?
Since the conference hotel allows you to cancel, it may be good to reserve a room and later rebook it or cancel, when you find a lower rate.

Students, please contact Dana to get a discount. And if you have an interesting topic to present on, please also don't hesitate to contact Xojo.
Sign-up until 15th May, so you can benefit from the lower $499 USD rate for the conference.

MBS Xojo Plugins, version 22.2pr6

New in this prerelease of the 22.2 plugins: Download: monkeybreadsoftware.com/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/ or from DropBox.
Or ask us to be added to our shared DropBox folder.

MBS Xojo ChartDirector Plugin Birthday

Just 15 years ago we added the ChartDirector Plugin to our MBS Xojo Plugin collection.
Thanks to Mr. Jason J. Campbell for asking me to add a charts plugin and thanks to Peter Kwan from Advanced Software Engineering Limited for his support over the years and the excellent co-operation.



PS: ChartDirector is also the engine used by FileMaker Pro internally for the chart generation as you can see on the included DLLs.

xDev Magazine 20.3

The May/June (20.3) issue of xDev Magazine is now available. Here's a quick preview of what's inside:

XDC Anywhere 2022 by Marc Zeedar
In April Xojo held their first virtual conference. What happened? Did you miss it? It's not too late as everything is up on YouTube for you to watch at your convenience.

Xojo 2022 Release 1 by Marc Zeedar
The latest Xojo update has some major new features. Marc gives an overview and shows how to create some cool new Code Assistant scripts.

Easy Money Entry by Tom Baumgartner
Tom wanted to write his own accounting app and learned that creating a proper currency field is harder than it seems.

Making a Fontbook by Marc Zeedar
When Xojo added support for using uninstalled fonts, Marc thought it would be a great way to make PDFs of his font collections. Unfortunately, the process was a lot more complicated. In the end, he had to learn how to parse font files to get the project to work.

Plus: Debugging basics, JSON, using Continuity Camera, subqueries, and more!

Iterate with PCRE2

For our new PCRE2CodeMBS class, we add a new Matches method. It returns an iterator, so you can use it with a for-each loop in Xojo:

Sub test() Dim rx As New PCRE2CompilerMBS rx.CaseLess = True rx.DotAll = False rx.Ungreedy = False rx.NewLine = rx.kNewLineAnyCRLF rx.Multiline = True rx.Pattern = kMarkerPattern Dim code As PCRE2CodeMBS = rx.Compile If UseJIT Then code.JITCompile(code.kJITComplete) End If for each MatchData as PCRE2MatchDataMBS in code.Matches(TestString, 0) foundCount = foundCount + 1 next End Sub
(more)

MBS Xojo Plugins, version 22.2pr5

New in this prerelease of the 22.2 plugins:
  • Updated RemoveAccentsMBS function to recognize more characters like ½.
  • Updated DynaPDF to version 4.0.66.181.
  • Updated DukTape library for JavaScriptEngineMBS class to version 2.7.
  • Small fixes for PCRE2 classes and performance upgrades.
Download: monkeybreadsoftware.com/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/ or from DropBox.
Or ask us to be added to our shared DropBox folder.

New PCRE2 Plugin for Xojo

As you may know we have Regular Expression classes for many years in our Xojo plugins. See RegExMBS class for the old interface using the older PCRE library. Those classes will stay available for the future, but we mark them as deprecated. The library is no longer in development and only gets security related fixes.

For PCRE2 we made new plugins classes:

The PCRE2CompilerMBS parses a pattern and creates the PCRE2CodeMBS object with the compiled version of that pattern. Unless configured otherwise this includes running the Just-In-Time compiler to convert your pattern to a little native piece of program code.



Once you have the code, you can create a PCRE2MatchDataMBS object to hold the results of a search. You can now loop over text to find all positions where your pattern matches. The data object is reused. We have convenience functions to perform the search and return you a new data object or an array with match data objects for all the found positions.

The PCRE2MatchContextMBS class can be used to configure limits in matching like the amount of memory allowed to be used. All error handling is translated to exceptions with the PCRE2ExceptionMBS class. Please check results of functions since not finding something doesn't cause an exception, but returns a negative number for the number of matched captures.

If you like you can check the various flags to configure the search. This may include multi line, case sensitively, whole word and other useful flags. The library is unicode aware, so you can find unicode characters. If you like, you can also check the compiled pattern for what parameters it contains and enumerate all the callouts. Compiled patterns can be stored serialized for later reuse. This further reduces the CPU time to prepare them for reuse.

Finally we have a Substitute() function to replace a found pattern with a replacement pattern. This new pattern can then reference captured values from the search pattern. If you set the SubstituteGlobal flag, we perform a ReplaceAll for a whole text.

Our new RegEx plugin is already compiled for all 15 platforms: macOS 32 and 64-bit Intel, macOS Apple Silicon, iOS for Device and Simulator, Windows 32 and 64-bit for Intel and 64-bit ARM, Linux in 32/64 for Intel and ARM. But as you know 64-bit ARM is not currently included in the downloads for Windows and Linux since Xojo is not yet ready for that.

Please try the new plugin part with 22.2pr4 and play with the classes. Please don't hesitate to contact us with your questions or bug reports, so we can fix any issue before the final version ships later this month.

Upcoming changes for MBS Plugins

We have a few pending things to do.

OCR

We added support for Tesseract 4 last year. Later this summer (blog article for Xojo and FileMaker), we will also check Tesseract 5.1 to make sure it works correct and provide you newer libraries. Of course you could try it yourself and we would expect it to work already.

Once version 5 is official supported by MBS Plugins, we will remove the version 3 code from our plugin. Please adjust your projects later this year.

Pricing

For the last two years, we thought about how to change our pricing. It has been the same for over 10 years. But we see issues, where we like to make adjustments. Our plugins grew a lot over 10 years and in that time the currency values changed quite a lot. And there are cases where were our plugin could be more affordable to be used in more situations. The new pricing is not final and will come later this year.

All customers have the chance to order licenses and updates in advantage for the old pricing. Just use the web shop as needed. We can provide you an update link. For special requests with bundles or multi year discounts, we can generate a custom invoice.

Swift

New frameworks from Apple are now Swift only. We get requests for newer technologies to be supported in the plugin where we need Swift. Our plugin may in future support that, but it may raise the required macOS version for the Intel version and we may need to provide two versions, one for older and one for newer macOS versions.

Barcode Detection

We deprecate the zxing classes for Xojo and will remove them eventually. For FileMaker, that's the Barcode.Detect function. Please move to newer zbar class (or Barcode.Scan function). The old zxing code is heavily outdated and doesn't recognize as good as before.

To make the transition easier, we may do a new implementation of Barcode.Detect to use zbar internally, but you'd still need to put the zbar dll somewhere.
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