It looks like Apple removes EPS support for macOS Sonoma, so we deprecate the functionality around that in our plugins. Currently the features still works and can be used, but once you upgrade, the MBS functions will return an error or raise an exception.
For FileMaker:
For Xojo:
Not sure about the reason. From usage statistics showing that nobody uses it, to expired licenses with Adobe or the retirement of the relevant staff, all is possible.
If you need EPS conversion, you may check command line tools like Ghostscript to do the same.
Our plugins will carry on the functions until we move to newer Xcode and newer macOS next year, where we may have to remove them.
Xojo turns ten years old today.
On 4th June 2013, Xojo Inc. announced the name change from Real Studio to Xojo, the new IDE and the new license model.
Originally Xojo started over 25 years ago as CrossBasic, got rebranded as REALbasic and released in 1998 to the public. In 2010 the name was changed to Real Studio before in 2013 the company and its product were renamed to Xojo. See
Wikipedia for details.
Congratulations to the team and looking forward to the next 20 years!
See you at the next conference!
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New in this prerelease of the 23.3 plugins:
- Added ConvertImage method for WindowsPDFDocumentMBS class.
- Added Describe method to GMImageMBS class.
- Added evaluate method to XMLDocumentMBS class to do XPath queries.
- Added FilterObjectArray method in JSONMBS class.
- Added RegisterRGBAImage and MarkerDefineRGBAImage methods to ScintillaControlMBS class.
- Added tag property to CURLSMultiMBS and CURLSMBS classes.
- Added XMLXPathResultMBS class.
- Fixed CURLSMultiMBS class to set AutoPerform to true for shared instance.
- Improved ScintillaControlMBS to better recognize xojo comments.
- Our plugin now requires glibc 2.25 for openssl on Linux (from 2017)
- Removed PHP classes.
- Updated CURL library to version 8.1.2.
- Updated LibSSH to version 1.11.0.
- Updated MongoDB-c library to version 1.23.4.
- Updated openssl library to version 3.1.1.
- Updated RabbitMQ-c library to version 0.13.
- Updated SQLite to version 3.42.0.
Download:
monkeybreadsoftware.de/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/ or
from DropBox.
Or ask us to be added to our shared DropBox folder.
Since Xojo Inc. doesn't plan one, we step in and invite you to come to our home country. To keep it easy for us, we'll have the conference nearby here and we would enjoy, if you join us and visit the area here.
The MBS Xojo Conference will take place Thursday,
25th and Friday,
26th April 2024 in
Andernach in Germany, a town nearby here at the river Rhine. We look forward to host around 50 Xojo developers here, have various speakers for the sessions as well as several workshops and labs.
You can come by train or by car there and we encourage attendees to stay the weekend and explore the area. If you take a train, you find plenty of
direct train connections from Hamburg to Munich, Berlin and Luxembourg. If you fly, look for flights to Frankfurt or Cologne and take trains from there to Andernach station. From the station, you can about walk 1 km to the hotel.
For Wednesday,
24th April 2024 we plan a
Xojo training day, where we will develop various projects in Xojo. We include various things attendees like to see. For example we could write a desktop app to manage a database, then a web app to use the same database. For mobile users we could make a little web service providing the data to an iOS and/or Android application.
Attendees coming from abroad can stay a bit longer. We plan to have a sight seeing day for Tuesday to visit some nice places and show you a bit of the landscape, the history and the culture. Enjoy extra days here and plan to visit the world's highest cold-water
geyser, which erupts up to 60 meters high in the nature reserve Namedyer Werth.
The planning of the conference involves all the things we learnt from previous conferences. Skipping expensive hotels in big cities to make the conference more affordable. The key thing is to bring together developers from all over the world to exchange ideas, learn new techniques and have a great time.
More details will be announced once the paper work is finished.
Xojo Inc. announced a sale for the next few days:
If you waited to get a Xojo license or to renew your license or to upgrade to Xojo Pro, this is your chance.
As usual, if your Xojo license is up for renewal in May or June, you can update now and enjoy a discount. If your Xojo license expired already, just get a new one. With the discount it is cheaper than a regular update.
The add-ons are included in the sale. If you like to get one of the MBS articles there, you can use the sale price at Xojo Store or we match the price if you buy directly from us. Please contact us if you need a MBS Plugin license.
You can use MBS Plugin to earn some extra money in your Xojo application.
Try our classes for Windows Store, macOS Store, iOS Store or iOS Ads to monetarize your application.
Windows Store
Check out the Windows Store classes to perform in-app purchases. You can offer your application as a trial for free and then offer the user to purchase a license to a full or pro version of your application. If your application is sold upfront, you can query license information.
Blog:
Selling Xojo apps on Windows Store
Documentation:
WindowsStore classes
Example project:
/WinFrameworks/Windows Store
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Let's say you have a Xojo desktop app and you like to have an iOS app, which can connect to the desktop application. We like to avoid the user entering some kind of connection information and just automatically connect. Then once connected, the iOS app can do some things and talk to the desktop app for more. Let's say the desktop app manages the database and the iOS app can show data on the go, e.g. after scanning a barcode.
For this project we use Xojo with two projects, one for desktop and one for iOS.
Desktop Project
We use a ServerSocket to wait for incoming connections. We let the ServerSocket pick a random port instead of relaying on a fixed port number.
Public Sub StartServer()
ServerSocket = New MyServerSocket
ServerSocket.MinimumSocketsAvailable = 3
ServerSocket.Listen
System.DebugLog "Waiting on port "+ServerSocket.Port.ToString
End Sub
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In this article I want to introduce you the new functionalities from the MBS Xojo Plugins in version 23.2.
CURL
With the new method SharedInstance from the classes CURLMultiMBS, CURLNMultiMBS and CURLSMultiMBS we simplify the multi transfer for our Xojo CURL Plugin. If you want more information to that then read our blogpost Easier multi transfer for our Xojo CURL Plugin. For The CURLMultiMBS classes you need a timer that calls Perform regularly. If you want to run Perform automatically you can set true in the AutoPerform property.
MongoDB
Since a few releases we also have the possibility to connect to a MongoDB database and work with it. Also in this release we extend the functionalities of MongoDB. First of all we can now convert information as Binary JSON for Mongo DB. The information is first read in an encoding of your choice or by default with UTF-8, converts to base64 and embeds it in a $binary JSON for use in MongoDB. You can use the method DataToBinary from the class MongoClientMBS for this. The data is passed as a string or MemoryBlock.
Two other new methods of this class deal with time in MongoDB. With the method NowUTC we get the current UTC timestamp. This can look like this:
{ "$date" : "2023-03-09T11:39:34Z" }
Matching to this there is the method Time which gives us the matching UTC timestamp in a JSON with a time as seconds since 1970 specification.
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Thank you all for answering our survey about a potential conference in 2024.
We got 66 answers. From that 20 people answered that they would come, plus 27 with a maybe. We also got 10 people unlikely to show due to various concerns (time, location, money) and 9 straight nos.
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We are happy to
sponsor the
CURL project for a year now. And maybe your company could also find and support an open source project?
Join in and Sponsor!
Please consider sponsoring the project. Maintaining, bug tracking, hosting and supporting this project requires resources. You can help!
We do not consider single-shot donations as "sponsorships". Those are donations and while welcome, they will not be honored by a mention here. Sponsors mentioned here keep supporting the project long-term by covering some sort of notable cost to the benefit of the project and its users.
The best way to sponsor this project is to allow a paid engineer or two to spend work hours on curl. Responding to email and writing curl improvements. Alternatively, donate to curl on the opencollective page.
Pledge
We promise to use donated funds only for things and activities that we believe are beneficial for the project and its development. That includes but is not limiting us to bug-bounties, developer conferences, infrastructure, services and hardware.
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The MBS Plugin mail lists moved to a new server since our existing provider stops doing mailinglists. We'll move over everyone, but you have to confirm your email by replying the confirm message.
MBS FileMaker Plugin Mailing list
To post a message to all the list members, send email to
mbsfmplugin @ lists.monkeybreadsoftware.com.
You can subscribe to the list, or change your existing subscription here:
Mailinglist Website
MBS Xojo Plugins Mailing list
To post a message to all the list members, send email to
mbsxojoplugins @ lists.monkeybreadsoftware.com.
You can subscribe to the list, or change your existing subscription here:
Mailinglist Website
The old lists will end around 22nd May 2023 and we may send a reminder. Please check your spam folder for the confirmation email and/or for emails from the new list. You may need to adjust your mail sorting rules.
If you don't receive the email for next pre-release, you can sign up again manually.
Nickenich, Germany - (May 9th, 2023) -- MonkeyBread Software today is pleased to announce
MBS Xojo Plugins 23.2 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 80,000 documented features, and the versatile plugins have gained more new functions:
For Windows we add
classes to use the built-in PDF functionality from Microsoft. You can open PDF documents, query page count and sizes and render preview pictures of pages.
The
GraphicsMagick functions got improved to now include WebP support. This includes reading and writing WebP files, so you can directly upload WebP functions from your CMS solution to your web server.
For
MongoDB we have new functions to convert strings or MemoryBlocks to binary data for passing to the MongoDB database with DataToBinary function for efficient storage (without Base64 overhead). The NowUTC function in the
MongoClientMBS class returns the current date in the format needed for MongoDB in JSON and Time can convert time stamps if needed.
We added new delegate based functionality to
CURLSMultiMBS class to make it easier to do asynchronous transfers in the background. For this you can now use our shared instance and the AutoPerform property.
The
ScintillaControlMBS control can now print and show print preview with the new FormatRange method. You can use it to render text into a picture and set various options with the new
ScintillaRangeToFormatMBS class.
The
CanvasGesturesMBS class is updated to work with DesktopCanvas control. The
PHPickerViewControllerMBS class is updated to work on macOS and not just on iOS. We updated our Java classes for Java versions 19 and 20. The
MFPMediaItemMBS class can now return details on the audio channels, frame rate, bits and samples. The archive classes can now handle lz4 and zstd compression methods. For Windows you can now control the printing for WebView2 with the new
WebView2PrintSettingsMBS class.
Finally we updated curl to version 8.0.1, LibArchive to 3.6.2, libwebp to 1.3.0, SQLAPI to 5.2.4b3, SQLite to 3.41.2, libXL to 4.1.2, and Xcode to version 14.3.
See
release notes for a complete list of changes.
We enjoyed past Xojo conferences and we were a bit of disappointed, that Xojo Inc. didn't announce their 2024 conference plans.
So we may go and do our best to have a conference ourselves. In past years we run 10 conferences ourselves: Several in Koblenz and London, one each in Scheveningen, Berlin, Munich and Cologne. We regularly got over 50 attendees for the last conferences. For Berlin we even had about 80 people joining, which was our best result so far.
But we don't know how much interest is there for a conference in 2024, so we start with a survey to ask past attendees and interested Xojo developers to let us know their answers to a few questions:
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The May/June (21.3) issue of xDev Magazine is now available. Here's a quick preview of what's inside:
The Last XDC? by Marc Zeedar
As in-person conferences fade in popularity, we're hoping London 2023 isn't the final XDC. Meanwhile, Xojo CEO Geoff Perlman announces Android support is coming in the next release of Xojo!
Marc Goes Across the Pond by Marc Zeedar
After years of postponements and cancelations, the London Xojo Developer Conference final happens. Marc reports on his trip with tons of photos of his adventures in London and from XDC 2023.
Windows OCR by Stefanie Juchmes
The Windows operating system has built-in support for optical character recognition. Stefanie explains how to use it via the Monkeybread Plugins for Xojo.
Raspberry Pi Electronic Fun, Part 1 by Eugene Dakin
Eugene begins a new series on how to use the LibGPIOD interface for Raspberry Pi. In this installment, he explains what LibGPIOD is and why you'd want to use it in your next Pi project with Xojo.
Plus: Topics such as Xojo preferences and using Big Numbers with MBS, and more!
New in this prerelease of the 23.2 plugins:
- Updated LibXL to version 4.1.2.
- Added HyperlinkIndex function to XLSheetMBS class.
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 23.2 plugins:
Download:
monkeybreadsoftware.de/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/ or
from DropBox.
Or ask us to be added to our shared DropBox folder.
After the pandemic we come back to in-person conferences. But things are a bit different. People prefer to watch educational content on a website from home instead of sitting in a school class setup at a conference. Both Xojo and Monkeybread Software don't time development to the conference, so we don't have shiny new things to show off. If a new feature would be ready to go into a beta version, you would have seen it already.
The social get-together is a great part of the conferences. You meet people from the community, who you may not have seen in years. You talk with everyone to learn what they do and you discuss various aspects of the Xojo development with your peers. Once you know people in person, you later react different to them on the forums.
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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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