Let's review what happened in the year 2024. In total I visited seven of the thirteen FileMaker conferences this year. We run our own Xojo conference in Andernach. And we released six updates to our plugins for FileMaker and Xojo.
January started with the development of new 14.0 and 24.0 plugins, a lot of blog posts advertising for the conferences.
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Frohe Weihnachten und ein gutes neues Jahr!
New in this prerelease of the 24.6 plugins:
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Since macOS 15.2 we can use Image Playground in our applications. The users love to generate an image with Apple Intelligence. Whether you need a cool image to add to a social post, a placeholder image for some operation, the AI can just generate something based on a few keywords.
Our ImagePlaygroundMBS class provides a few methods to handle this. You make an instance, configure it with maybe a few concept phrases, a source image and then show it. We recommend to show it from a button somewhere in the user interface. You implement the events and the CreatedImage event will provide the folderitem to the image file. Just load and display like our example project.
(more)You may have heard that newer Macs get some Apple Intelligence features this year. As a developer, we may want to have our users enjoy these features. But in some cases we like to opt-out of the new features. Or provide hints to the system what is appropriate for our applications, so let's check a few of the new properties to configure.
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New in this prerelease of the 24.6 plugins:
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We got the question how to add a hover effect to a control in Xojo for a web application. For a CSS file to the application, you can of course just use the :hover pseudo class to add whatever effects you like. But here we like to add the effect on the fly in code to a label as needed.
Here is a code snippet showing how we add three mouse event handlers in JavaScript to change the color:
As you see we use ControlID to know what random six digit code is used internally to reference this control. With document.getElementById() we can find the control. Once we grabbed the control, we can use addEventListener to add the event and put in a function to do the style change.
Please try and let me know if this works for you.
New in this prerelease of the 24.6 plugins:
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Today Xojo Inc. released the new version of Xojo, their forth release for this year. Let's check what is new.
New is support for Windows ARM 64-bit for XojoScript. We waited years for this feature, because it enables Xojo Inc. to make an ARM version of the IDE for Window in the future. That would be great since developers like me use a Macbook with Apple Silicon and use Windows 11 in a VM. Running the Intel version on an ARM chip slows the IDE down a bit. There may be in the future the possibility to also do a Linux ARM IDE version. Then Xojo Inc. may do an universal installer which brings both variants and installs the right one.
Apple asked many years ago to sign applications. Later added notarization to make sure applications are not modified between the developer packaging them and users installing them. While it sometimes causes a bit of hassle for developers, I think this is a great enhancements to prevent a lot of malware. For the last 12 years could get everything done properly with the AppWrapper application or do similar things with a script in Terminal. Xojo 2024r4 has its own settings to do similar things for macOS. While we appreciate to have something finally, I expect a lot of people will still use App Wrapper for more options. And since you also need to sign applications on Windows, you may need to look for something similar for the Windows side.
The new preemptive thread feature in 2024r3 was great, but not perfect. Real world usage of this feature showed a few bottlenecks and Xojo Inc. improved the locking mechanisms to make things run faster.
If you use the IDE for coding you probably enabled things like applying standard case and standardize format options. New in this release is the option to highlight the current row and display matching selections. Basically if you select one variable name, the IDE will highlight other places where these appear. In the background the IDE does a word search for the same text.
If you use SSLSocket, you may like to see the upgrade to TLS v1.3, which helps with newer servers, that require the newer version. And the URLConnection class can now follow redirects, which is convenient as you don't need to code this yourself.
For MBS Xojo Plugins, please use version 24.x with Xojo 2024r2. They work fine together as far as we see.
You find more details in the Xojo 2024r4 Release Notes.
The year 2024 will end in less than three weeks. Do you need some more licenses?
Especially if you run on a budget and you want to spend some money in the old year, you can buy updates for several years in advance.
If you need help to decide what Xojo, FileMaker or plugin license you need, we may be able to assist you.
New in this prerelease of the 24.6 plugins:
You can subscribe to our Xojo mailing list to get notified for new pre-release and release versions.
The last weeks, I have been looking for where some crashes in some code happen. You know, somewhere in a big app you have a crash, but not stack trace to figure it out.
So we have the CallDelegateCrashSafeMBS method, which is great to handle this. If you know something may crash, just call it through CallDelegateCrashSafeMBS like this:
CallDelegateCrashSafeMBS AddressOf test
This function takes extra care to catch crashes on a low level and raise a Xojo exception, so you may have a chance to see something in the debugger. I write may as the application crashed and we have no idea in which condition the application is. But we can try to show you the location with the exception.
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Many customers in Germany are currently interested in the topic of electronic invoices. With the MBS FileMaker Plugin and the DynaPDF functions, we can help you to implement this in FileMaker solutions.
If you are looking into the topic of e-invoicing, then you should read on the website of the Forum elektronische Rechnung Deutschland what ZUGFeRD, what XRechnung and what Factur-XX is.
Then download the current standard: ZUGFeRD 2.3.2. In the download you will find the specification for ZUGFeRD (and Factur-X). There are also various code lists, schema files and many sample invoices.
(more)New in this prerelease of the 24.6 plugins:
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This is the German version. See the English version here.
Viele Kunden interessieren sich im Moment für das Thema elektronische Rechnungen. Mit dem MBS Plugin und den DynaPDF Funktionen können wir Ihnen helfen dies in FileMaker Lösungen und Xojo Anwendungen zu implementieren.
Wenn Sie in das Thema e-Rechnung rein schauen, dann sollten Sie auf der Webeite vom Forum elektronische Rechnung Deutschland einmal lesen, was ZUGFeRD, was XRechnung und was Factur-X ist.
Dann laden Sie sich den aktuellen Standard mal runter: ZUGFeRD 2.3.2. In dem Download finden Sie dann die Spezifikation für ZUGFeRD (und Factur-X). Dazu kommen noch diverse Code Listen, Schema Dateien und viele Musterrechnungen.
(more)New in this prerelease of the 24.6 plugins:
You can subscribe to our Xojo mailing list to get notified for new pre-release and release versions.