Xojo Inc. is happy to host a
developer conference in Europe:
Mark your calendar for Xojo Developer Conference in London at the Hilton London Euston from April 26-28, 2023! We will be packing up the whole Xojo team for a 3-day conference - full of new sessions, new speakers and lots of opportunities to network and socialize. We hope to see you there!
Registering early guarantees you a spot, helps us with planning, and gives you the best pricing. From now through the end of this year you can register for $475! To get this special pricing, register now!
We look forward to see you in London. This will be the first official Xojo conference to come to Europe. London is a place easily reachable for both Americans and Europeans. Even from Asia and Australia you can have many direct flights. From Heathrow you can take Piccadilly line to Russell Square and walk to the hotel. Your NFC enabled credit card (wifi style symbol on it) will do fine as ticket to pay when you check-in and check-out. Same with mobile phones that do NFC, e.g.
Apple Pay.
Since the hotel is close to Euston train station, people from Glasgow, Edinburgh and Manchester can easily come by train. The nearby Pancras station has trains coming over from Paris, Brussel and Cologne. With just 4 hours from Cologne to London, it may be faster to take the train than to take the hassle of driving to the airport.
With this conference, we come back to the three day conferences from the past. Compared to the recent retreat event, this allows for many more sessions and more time to talk to all the fellow developers. We hope to see you there!
In this article I want to introduce you the new functionalities from the MBS Xojo Plugins in version 22.5.
Scan documents with iOS
Our new class VNDocumentCameraViewControllerMBS
provides the ability to scan documents for iOS.
The class shows a panel to allow the user to scan a document.
You can call this panel with the Present method.
If you have scanned the document successfully the event didFinishWithScan fires and gives us
the scan result as an object of the
class VNDocumentCameraScanMBS.
In this object we can then, for example,
query the number of pages, adjust the title of the document or handle the individual pages as a Picture. For example, you can generate a PDF from these pages.
If you like to scan an image or document with an application running on your Mac with an iOS device that has the same account and is logged in to the same network, the Continuity Camera topic is a good choice.
In this release, the ContinuityCameraMBS class has two new events.
The event Allow gives us the information whether to allow the control to receive data.
In addition the new event Received is called when data is returned.
This data is then available as a memory block from which it can be read.
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For this year's Thanksgiving in America, we offer again discounted licenses for our MBS Plugins for FileMaker and Xojo.
Sale ended. Any pending order arriving before 1st Dec will still be honored. And then the coupon code is invalid.
Today we had a discussion about the IsNumeric function. The developer expected it to take a string and return true or false depending on whether the value is a number. But let's take a deeper look on it as there may be some surprises.
First the
IsNumeric function is documented to take a value, but the help doesn't tell the data type of that parameter. The latest Xojo IDE shows you the parameter and it is variant. Passing a string value will create a new variant object for the function call.
The function returns false for nil or variants containing structures or arrays. Otherwise it seems to query string value and loops over the character. If the text is NaN or Inf, the function will just return true.
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Last year Xojo Inc. announced that they won't do any more Black Friday sales, so the sales staff can have a nice Thanksgiving holidays. But they still do sales and now we see, Xojo Inc. moved the sale a week earlier:
The sale is over.
If you downloaded the plugins in version 12.5 for FileMaker or 22.5 for Xojo in the last days, we may ask you to download them again.
The build from Friday, 10th November 2022 has the fixes for the JSON parsing functions.
This affects in Xojo the JSONMBS class, the FMAPI classes and the WebView2 control. For FileMaker it affects JSON functions, LDAP functions taking JSON and WebView functions for Windows.
The good thing with thousands of functions is, that the majority of plugin users may not be affected. But since this can be a surprise and people may want to enjoy our November release, we quickly uploaded a fixed plugin.
We are sorry about the problem introduced in pr4. In order to fix a problem with JSON parsing for a client, I accidentally changed code and that causes a NULL pointer in case of an error. Not always, but with one code path. As long as you pass valid JSON, it will work.
Everyone using 12.5/22.5 from build 4 to 8 is asked to move to build 9 from today.
You may have a little iOS app made with Xojo, that shows something interesting to customers. That may be a nice little puzzle game. You give it away for free, but play an ad between levels.
To start, you sign up for Google Ad service on developers.google.com/ad-manager/mobile-ads-sdk/ios/quick-start. Please read there. You skip the installation for the framework as we embed all the code within our plugin.
For the info.plist, you need the entries for a few things. First you get the application identifier for your application. You may use our info.plist sample file and change it. Please keep the SKAdNetworkItems entries there (maybe update them to newer list?). You may want to keep the NSUserTrackingUsageDescription if you like to allow the framework to ask for tracking and you get higher ad prices. Since iOS applications need to declare via info.plist what they load, we use NSAppTransportSecurity entry to just inform iOS, that the ads may be loaded from anywhere.
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Nickenich, Germany - (November 8th, 2022) -- MonkeyBread Software today is pleased to announce MBS Xojo Plugins 22.5 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 80,000 documented features, and the versatile plugins have gained more new functions:
This release contains a few great enhancement for iOS development for our iOS Plugin:
First, we start with classes for using Google Ads inside your Xojo applications, e.g. GADMobileAdsMBS class. Beside doing in-app purchases with our StoreKit classes, this is a second way for you to monetize your applications.
Second, we got a new set of classes around PHPickerViewControllerMBS class to use the photo picker dialog on iOS. Your users can import photos, live photos or videos from their Photos library. No permissions dialog will come into the way as the user explicitly grants your application access to the selected items.
Third, we got the VNDocumentCameraViewControllerMBS class to scan documents on the iOS device. The user can point with the camera on a document and the picture is taken, the page recognized and rectified. The pages are then transferred to your application.
Forth, we got a new ProgressHUDMBS class to show progress to the user. This can either be an indeterminate circle of dots to show something is going on. Or it can either be a circle or a bar to show progress for a determinate process.
Fifth, if you write a CallKit extension, you can use CXCallDirectoryManagerMBS class to manage it. This may include querying the status of the extension or to reload the data after an update.
After all the classes for iOS, we got enhancements for our MongoDB plugin: use the new MongoSessionMBS class to start a transaction, do a few changes to the database and commit them all together. When you are not in a transaction, all changes are automatically committed.
The Windows Bluetooth classes got an upgrade with new events for WindowsBluetoothLEDeviceMBS class and new GetGattServicesAsync and GetGattServicesForUuidAsync methods.
For macOS we added hasDestructiveAction property to NSButtonMBS class, added new events for ContinuityCameraMBS class, added shouldRefetchContacts property to CNSaveRequestMBS class and new methods for NSCalendarMBS class. The OverlayMBS class can now work with a dialog on macOS and properties like AddedToDirectoryDateMBS and AddedToDirectoryDateTimeMBS for folderitems are now settable.
The FileListMBS class can now query directory content in a thread friendly way and thus can be cancelled if needed. The JSONMBS class got a AddOrReplaceItemToObject method. The XMLDocumentMBS class can now load XML thread friendly. JPEG handling got optimized with setjmp optimization,
Finally we updated CURL to version 7.86.0, DynaPDF to 4.0.70.200, LCMS to 2.14, openssl to 1.1.1s, SQLAPI to 5.2.2, SQLite to 3.39.4 and Xcode to 14.0.1.
See release notes for a complete list of changes.
New in this prerelease of the 22.5 plugins:
Download:
monkeybreadsoftware.de/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/ or
from DropBox.
Or ask us to be added to our shared DropBox folder.
New in this prerelease of the 22.5 plugins:
- Fixed problem with CIImageMBS not return a CGImageMBS object.
- Improved memory management for ProgressHUDMBS class.
- Updated LCMS library to version 2.14.
- Updated openssl to version 1.1.1s.
Download:
monkeybreadsoftware.de/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/ or
from DropBox.
Or ask us to be added to our shared DropBox folder.
The November/December (20.6) issue of
xDev Magazine is now available. Here's a quick preview of what's inside:
Exploring Steganography, Part 3 by Eugene Dakin
Steganography -- the processing of hiding data inside a picture -- is a fun science with practical applications. In this series, Eugene explores doing this with Xojo. In part 3, he shows how to compare the original picture with the one with the hidden data and explore their subtle differences.
Xojo Retreat Keynote by Marc Zeedar
It's been almost four years since the last proper Xojo Conference Keynote from Geoff Perlman. If you missed this one, here's a recap along with a look at Xojo's roadmap for the exciting future of the development environment.
Nashville 2022 by Marc Zeedar
If you couldn't make it to Nashville this past September, don't worry -- Marc has an exhaustive recap of his trip, the sessions, the food, and the fun. For those who don't like to read, there are plenty of photographs!
Plus: Topics such as Xojo 2022R3, RegEx, a Clippings app, BASIC recipes, Limit and Offset, and more!
PS: xDev is looking for fresh voices, especially in writers who can cover Android, iOS, and other topics we may have neglected. Have an idea? Send Marc an email.
