Stefanie had the pleasure to give a presentation about JSON at the XDC in London.
If you want to learn how JSON and you can become best friends, please watch the video of the talk. The used examples with the single JSON functions in Xojo and the example of the weather station are available here: JSONFriendXojo.zip. Just put your own API key in the weather station example into the right property and get started. Have fun with it.
Please watch the video from XDC 2023 about our MBS Plugins:
We provide an overview what is new in the plugins for the last two years. Let us know if you have questions about one of the features.
The coupon code XDCSale stays valid until mid of May 2023.
For years people
asked about getting the Windows controls updated in Xojo. We still use Win32 API with various improvements over the years. But basically the same controls as they shipped with Windows 95 over 25 years ago. The style got updated, dark mode added as well as higher resolution support. In the past years Microsoft developed various ways to make controls and with announcements and deprecations, it was unclear for a long time which of the many ways would succeed.
For the future, there may be a Xojo version, that uses XAML based controls to implement all the standard controls: Labels, text fields, buttons, etc. You would open your project in the new version, build it and enjoy a fresh new look.
But what is XAML? It is a XML based declarative language to define controls and their attributes. You will not see the internal XAML code for the standard controls once they use it. But Xojo will generate it automatically from the properties set for the controls.
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Currently we enjoy the Xojo Developer Conference, which happens this week in London, UK. Geoff Perlman, the CEO of Xojo Inc. has his keynote speech and I like to highlight a few details. Then William follows on XAML and Travis on Android later.
Windows UI Modernization will be a new XAML container control. The Extensible Application Markup Language is a way to describe controls in XML and host them in Xojo. Eventually the XAML controls will replace the regular controls, so the container is a way to try a few of them earlier. William showed some nicer Windows control and how to add them with the new container control. An interesting approach to allow developers to use a few of these controls in their applications and e.g. show a map control there.
The Android target is finally coming to all Xojo developers to try in 2023r2 as public beta. After a long time in development and Android being in testing for some time, it is finally good enough to ship to a wider audience. This is a 1.0 and thus a lot of things are missing. But it may be enough for you to write a little Android client application for e.g. a web service. Load some data via URL Connection, put in a local SQLite database and show via tables and various layouts.
The Xojo libraries project makes progress. The idea is to package compiled code and share it in your projects or provide to others. But no other details coming.
The DatabaseConnection class is coming to make connecting to a database easier, but no details given on how this happens, expect that you can easily direct release, development and beta versions to different servers.
On the afternoon, we'll look into Android support.
See also
XDC London Announcements & News
New in this prerelease of the 23.2 plugins:
- Enabled web socket support for curl for Windows.
- Updated DynaPDF to version 4.0.73.213.
Download:
monkeybreadsoftware.de/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/ or
from DropBox.
Or ask us to be added to our shared DropBox folder.
Just one week until the
Xojo Developer Conference starts in London.
Tuesday evening, we will come to the hotel and meet everyone at the bar. I know already, that everyone of the usual suspects will not be there, but I look forward to see a few old friends and clients. For me this is like an extended family meeting once a year.
We are probably all curious to see what Xojo Inc. prepared. Geoff will make this keynote and talk about what is new in Xojo. The big elephant in the room is of course the progress on the new Android target. We look forward to learn what goes into the first release and when it may come out for the public. Once the public release happens (later this year?), a lot of more Xojo developers have the chance to try it and so we hope the on-boarding is done well to avoid a lot of support questions. Next we look forward to learn what they do next in Android. The first version will miss a lot of things, so a plan on what comes for a second or third update would be great.
Where we come to the roadmap things, we'd love to get an update on each of them. You probably remember Geoff talking about managing expectations. So providing details about each roadmap item would be good. Like what is the status, what work has been done the last months and what things can get finished and ship this year? Or next year? Well, at least giving some context to each roadmap item would be nice, so we learn the concept behind. Details, limits, features and maybe a quick look on the current work in-progress. And yes, we are developers and know that development isn't linear and things may get delayed.
A status update on the company and the community would be nice to have. How is the company doing? How are sales? The community? Are there any new initiatives coming to improve something? How are reactions on newer things like ARM 64-bit support for Windows and Linux?
When the conference comes to a close, we can evaluate how it went. What about a 2024 conference? It could be a bit different, e.g. how about doing more training, or more social interaction, maybe not a fancy hotel in a big city? You know, a small hotel up in the mountains may provide a better place to have a conference, do some coding together, learn new techniques and get to know other developers better.
See you next week!
Did you know our MBS Xojo ChartDirector Plugin can do more than charts and provide rendering of meters and gauges?
Meters and Gauges (1)
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Since we add Windows PDF functions to our plugins, we like to compare what's different between them compared to DynaPDF.
For FileMaker, please check DynaPDF, WinPDF and PDFKit functions in MBS FileMaker Plugin.
For Xojo, please check DynaPDF classes in MBS Xojo DynaPDF Plugin, Windows PDF classes in MBS Xojo WinFrameworks Plugin and PDFKit classes in MBS Xojo MacControls Plugin.
Below you find the table of DynaPDF features and the checkboxes we got for PDFKit and Windows PDF:
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For next plugin version we simplify the use of CURLSMultiMBS class. You can use it as before or skip making your own instance and just call the new sharedInstance method. This will create an instance if needed and returns you one. If you create an instance yourself, sharedInstance will return that one.
For CURLSMultiMBS to work, you need a timer which calls Perform regularly. We add an AutoPerform property to enable automatic mode, where the plugin runs a timer to call Perform regularly. The AutoPerform will be true on the automatic created instance from sharedInstance method.
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New in this prerelease of the 23.2 plugins:
- Updated Xcode to version 14.3.
- Changed default for OptionConnectionTimeout in CURLSMBS class to 10 seconds (unless you change it) to avoid long stalls in your application of 2 minutes when server is not reachable.
- Updated SQLAPI to version 5.2.4b3.
- Added new methods to CURLSMultiMBS to make asynchronous transfers easier.
Download:
monkeybreadsoftware.de/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/ or
from DropBox.
Or ask us to be added to our shared DropBox folder.
Since Microsoft added some PDF functions to their frameworks in Windows 10, we can now implement a plugin for it. That got possible since we dropped Windows 7 and require newer functions for component management in Windows 8. For MBS Xojo Plugins 23.2, we add the new classes for you to try out:
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We got this sample code for a client combining an example for MS SQL Server with SQLDatabaseMBS class and some sample code for rendering a picture via DynaPDFMBS class from PDF data. Please note that we use ImportPDFPage to only import the page we like to render.
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Once again we have April and thus we celebrate the 23rd anniversary of our company this weekend.
Time flies and it wasn't long ago, where we had to cancel the 20th anniversary party. Looks like it may be time to start planning the 25th birthday!
Thanks everyone for supporting us over the years and see you at the next conference!
If you need a new license this week, you can use coupon code Birthday for a little discount.
If you have a wish for a new plugin function, feel free to
send us a message.
New in this prerelease of the 23.2 plugins:
- Added AudioChannels, AudioSamplesPerSecond, VideoFrameRate, and AudioBitsPerSample to MFPMediaItemMBS class.
- Added DataToBinary function to MongoClientMBS class.
- Added NowUTC and Time functions to MongoClientMBS class.
- Added PopOverWidth, PopOverHeight, and popover properties to PHPickerViewControllerMBS class.
- Added printing and preview to ScintillaControlMBS with new FormatRange method.
- Added ScintillaRangeToFormatMBS class.
- Added ShowKeyboardMBS and HideKeyboardMBS functions.
- Added support for WebP pictures to GraphicsMagick functions.
- Added WebPVersion function to GMImageMBS class.
- Added Windows PDF classes.
- Enabled lz4 and zstd for Archive functions.
- Enabled zstd for curl library.
- Fixed a bug in libTiff compilation for Windows 64-bit, which broke TiffPictureMBS reading of tiff.
- Fixed a memory leak in VNTargetedImageRequestMBS, VNSequenceRequestHandlerMBS and VNImageRequestHandlerMBS when passing in a Xojo picture.
- Fixed a problem in ScintillaControlMBS where TextChanged event would sometimes pass extra bytes in the text parameter.
- Fixed a problem which prevents JavaVMMBS to initialize on macOS and Linux with current JDK 19.
- Fixed bug in setStatusText method when passing empty text for ScintillaControlMBS control.
- Fixed code to automatically find libjvm.dylib on macOS to work with JDK 19.
- Fixed DefaultBackgroundColor property in WebView2ControlMBS control, so you can set it in Open event.
- Fixed HeightDPI and WidthDPI in WindowsDisplayMBS class to be zero if unknown instead of a big negative number.
- Fixed LostFocus event for NSTextFieldControlMBS control.
- Fixed LostFocus event in NSSearchFieldControlMBS control to not fire too early.
- Merged a few plugin parts to reduce number of dylibs.
- Moved WordFileMBS class to Tools plugin.
- Removed CallHASPMBS function and HASPHLMBS class. Please use HASPHLDMBS class.
- Removed EncryptMBS and OldAESMBS classes.
- Removed RockeyMBS, Rockey2MBS, MatrixDongleMBS and SecureDongleXMBS classes.
- Updated CanvasGesturesMBS to work with desktop controls.
- Updated curl to version 8.0.1.
- Updated LibArchive to version 3.6.2.
- Updated libwebp to version 1.3.0.
- Updated PHPickerConfigurationMBS class and related onces to work on macOS, too.
- Updated SQLAPI to version 5.2.4b2.
- Updated SQLite to version 3.41.2.
Download:
monkeybreadsoftware.de/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/ or
from DropBox.
Or ask us to be added to our shared DropBox folder.
