Job Offer: Xojo Developer to work with Light Blue Software

Mr. Tom Catchesides from Light Blue Software is looking for a Xojo developer:

We're looking for a talented Xojo developer to help us continue to improve Light Blue, our business management product for professional photographers and winner of the 2016 Xojo design awards 'best business app' prize.

The initial requirement is for help with completing a specific project, but this has the potential to turn into an ongoing relationship.

Essential skills:
  • Building desktop apps with Xojo.
  • SQLite.
  • Good written and spoken English.
We would also prefer:
  • Experience of PHP and MySQL.
  • Working from a timezone that overlaps office hours with the UK.
The company is based in northern London in case you prefer to work in their office. Else you would probably work from home. Tom has been visiting conference for a couple of years and uses MBS Plugins a lot.

Xojo Conference planning 2018

You all have time 6th/7th September 2018 for a Xojo conference?

We have a proposal for a hotel conference room in Munich. The Maritim Hotel near the main station can offer us 50+ rooms as well as one or two conference rooms. If we have a lot of speakers and attendees, we could go two track!

We can block 100 rooms and offer an 122 Euro rate for the nights from 5th to 8th September including pool, breakfast and Wifi.
Nearby other hotels in the area offer rooms for less, down to 60 Euro/night.

Walking distance to center of city is just a few hundred meters. So you can walk to Hofbräuhaus, city hall and the famous historic buildings like palace Nymphenburg. And if you like to take a drive in the countryside, you are quickly down to the alps. e.g. take the train up on Wendelstein for a great view.

So anyone has comments? Would this week be a bad choice for some reason?
Most weeks in fall are blocked by expositions, school holidays and Oktoberfest where hotels are quite full. The week early September seems to be great to get hotel room and the chances are good for nice weather.

PS: If someone has a better idea for a location, let me know.

Xojo Versions used

As you may know, we collect some statistics about plugin usage and today I’d like to show the versions of Xojo used with MBS Plugins:



While over half of the users are on Xojo 2017, there is still a big group of people using 2015/2016 versions. The group with REAL Studio 2012 is still active, but shrunk a lot over time. Over time, it will be a question whether we should continue to support Real Studio with newer plugins.

Enable Web Inspector for WebViewer

In both FileMaker and Xojo we can use WebKit 2 for showing web content and enable the inspector:


For FileMaker 16, you can use WebView.SetPreferences function and set developerExtrasEnabled property to 1. Than you can open inspector via contextual menus.
For Xojo you can use WKWebViewControlMBS control for WebKit 2. There we will have a new property developerExtrasEnabled to enable the inspector in the contextual menu.

Show progress in task bar on Windows

With both FileMaker and Xojo plugins from Monkeybread Software, you can show progress in the task bar:



For Xojo we have the WindowsTaskbarListMBS class to control various things in the task bar. You can show progress and manage tabs there.

For FileMaker we add the Window.SetProgress function. Just call it when you make progress to update the task bar icon.

DynaPDF Manual online

DynaPDF has it's own documentation, which you can find included with our plugin: dynapdf_help.pdf.

In order to read it in a browser and for search engines to soon index it, I put the manual online as a webpage version:

monkeybreadsoftware.com/DynaPDF-Manual/

Maybe it helps people. From time to time I can update it with current PDF file.

Update: We got links from documentation to the DynaPDF manual pages.

Xojo Stammtisch in Berlin

On my next visit to Berlin, I'd love to make another Xojo developer meeting:

Wer hat Interesse an einem Xojo Entwicklertreffen am 30. Mai 2017 in Berlin?
Nach aktuellem Wetterausblick vermutlich im Biergarten. Zeitlich 18 bis 22 Uhr, beim Biergarten eventuell etwas früher.

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

Bei Interesse bitte bei mir melden. Dann bekommen Sie die Email zum Treffpunkt.

Xojo on sale

We just got notice that Xojo runs a sale for the new website look:

We are celebrating our new look - come celebrate with us! Get a new Xojo license or renew an existing license for 20% off now through Thursday, May 25 (11:59PM CT). Shop now!


So if you need a copy or you need an update within the next two months, get it now!

Xojo Developer Meeting in Nuremberg

On my next visit to Nuremberg, I'd love to make another Xojo developer meeting:

Wer hat Interesse an einem Xojo Entwicklertreffen im Juni in Nürnberg?

Einfach gemütlich zusammen sitzen und über Xojo Neuigkeiten, Konferenzen und die täglichen Probleme bei der Softwareentwicklung unterhalten.
Gerne zeige ich auch neue Pluginfunktionen oder helfe bei Problemen mit Xojo Projekten. Einfach Computer mitbringen und was zeigen.

Bitte an der Umfrage teilnehmen und helfen einen optimalen Termin zu finden: 16. Juni
Bei Interesse bitte bei mir melden.

PS: Berliner Stammtisch am 30. Mai.

OmegaBundle 2017 ends soon

The OmegaBundle for Xojo including MBS Plugins is ending 30th May 2017:



If you plan to buy the bundle, please do it soon.

Register now for the 2018 Xojo Developer Conference

Xojo Inc. just announced the start of early bird registration for XDC 2018:

Early registration for the 2018 Xojo Developer Conference is now open! XDC will take place in Denver, CO April 25 - 27, 2018. Featuring sessions on best practices, special interests and other technical topics, XDC will have content for every level of Xojo developer, so you don't want to miss it!

Want to know what XDC is like? Watch our highlights video from the last conference!

Register now!

XDC Pricing:
$799 Early Bird Registration: Now through October 1, 2017
$899 Advanced Registration: October 2, 2016 - February 15, 2017
$999 Late Registration: February 16, 2017 - Conference

XDC will take place at the lovely Magnolia Hotel in Denver, Colorado. We have negotiated a hotel room rate of $172 a night. If you have any questions about XDC, feel free to Dana Brown, Xojo Director of Marketing.

We are looking forward to the conference. Feel free to suggest what I could present at XDC :-)

Convert WMF and EMF files to PDF with DynaPDF

Did you know you can use DynaPDF to convert Windows metafile to PDF as vector graphics?

When running on Windows, you can load EMF (enhanced metafile) or WMF and query their size. Than you can decide where to insert them and place them on a PDF page. Of course you can create a PDF page with the size of the WMF bounding box and place your graphic at full size.

If you like to create regularly documents with company logos, you can ask for example to provide them as PDF or WMF and just place them on the document as needed. As your designers when using something like CorelDraw can just export vector graphic as WMF, this is a convenient way to store them on Windows, except directly PDF. Be aware that some applications just embed a bitmap picture in the WMF, which lead to worse quality compared to pure vector graphics.

This requires a DynaPDF Lite license or better. If needed you can use a DynaPDF Pro license to render the PDF to JPEG, PNG or TIFF files.

With GraphicsMagick functions you can convert WMF files to bitmaps, but quality in DynaPDF may be better.

Zurich, Switzerland

My office view this morning:

For a few minutes, before the boat left Zurich. Today I am in Meilen for the FileMaker 16 Event.
Tomorrow night is the Xojo meeting. If anyone here in Zurich area is interested in joining me, drop me a line.

MBS Xojo Plugins 17.2

Nickenich, Germany (May 15th, 2017) -- Monkeybread Software releases version 17.2 of the MBS plug-in for Xojo and Real Studio.

The MBS plug-in comprises a collection of several plug-in parts which extend the Xojo (Real Studio) development environment with 2,400 classes featuring over 62,000 documented functions. Our plugins support all three platforms Mac OS X, Windows and Linux with all project types desktop, web and console including 64-bit and ARM targets.

Some of the highlights on the 17.2 update:

For our Windows users we added new WinUserNotificationMBS classes to show user notifications on Windows 8 and newer. A notification can show a picture and several text lines to notify user about an event when your app runs in background. For macOS we provide similar features using NSUserNotificationMBS class.

For CURL we have new methods to setup queries to Amazon Webservices and we provide an example for AWS S3 download and upload. Our plugin provides the authentication based on AWS4-HMAC-SHA256 for the queries, so you can easily integrate several amazon services. With new socket type functions, you can now let CURL connect to an IP and use the connection like any other socket with reading and writing data. CURL encapsulates all the IP protocols (IPv4 and IPv6), proxies and SSL options for you. Finally we allow you to use the system root certificates on macOS and Windows for SSL verification.

For DynaPDF we got new examples for PDF/A conversion and normalization. This includes new functions to replace missing fonts. New functions for printing allow you to specify more print options and let the plugin show print dialog to print directly to a printer.

The new JPEGMovieMBS class can create movies cross platform using JPEG image files. The resulting files can be played in QuickTime player and VLC.

Finally we updated libarchive to version 3.3.1, LibXL to 3.8.0, OpenSSL to 1.1.0e and 1.0.2k, PostgreSQL to 9.6.2 and SQLAPI to 4.1.11, SQLite to 3.18.0, libtidy to 5.4, DynaPDF to 4.0.11.27 and Xcode to 8.3.2.

See release notes for a complete list of changes.
Currently you can buy this plugin collection as part of the 2017 Omegabundle.

The winners @ MBS Xojo Conference

Tradition at every MBS Conference has been to raffle a few things:



This year we had a record of 17 things to raffle including T-Shirts, XDevMagazine year books, British chocolate and Xojo bottles.

PS: Source code of the raffle app is included with MBS Plugins, so you can check yourself how fair or unfair the raffle is.

Xojo Stammtisch in Berlin

On my next visit to Berlin, I'd love to make another Xojo developer meeting:

Wer hat Interesse an einem Xojo Entwicklertreffen am 30. Mai 2017 in Berlin?

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

Bei Interesse bitte bei mir melden.

MBS Xojo Plugins, version 17.2pr6

New in this prerelease of the 17.2 plugins:
  • Fixed a bug with SignalMBS. Maximum index is 31.
  • Added point functions to zxingResultMBS class.
  • Fixed an issue with using OS debugger with Xojo app and MBS registration.
  • Added DynaPDFMBS.GetSysFontInfo and GetSysFontInfos with name option.
  • Fixed a bug in resolution switching in DisplayMBS to better find best resolution.
Download: monkeybreadsoftware.de/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/.
Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.

Survey about European MBS Xojo Conferences 2018

We are checking options for another Xojo related conference in 2018.

Again we look for a place in Germany, but this time we consider whether we go to Munich instead of Koblenz. Munich could be a city where people may go for additional days for some sight seeing and entertainment. Munich will definitive be more expensive as the hotels have higher rates, unless we stay far outside. But if we go there, we need to make that decision soon to reserve the space in advance to get good rates.

Date could be somewhere in September/October/November 2018 as spring is taken by Xojo Inc. for their Xojo Developer Conference in April 2018.

If you have time, please fill this survey with just 10 questions. Please leave name/email for further questions. For additional comments, please email us or comment here. Please don't do the survey twice. Thanks.

After the conference is before the conference

We had a great Xojo conference in Berlin last week. Thanks everyone helping.
  • Record attendees with over 80 people signed up.
  • Great hotel right in the center of West Berlin
  • Next to a big train station, so easy to reach.
  • Great sessions with great speakers!
  • Over 100 beers and 25 wine bottles were consumed on the Thursday evening.
  • Had 6 ladies at the conference, a new record.
  • 20% of attendees have been visiting XDC in USA before.
  • Had a lot of young people at this conference. Including two students who won free tickets.
  • The brewery is a great place to visit although next time I need to order bus for later time.
  • Hotel bill arrived and everything is fine.
  • I am collecting slides and we will put them up on the website soon. You’ll receive a download link than.
  • Videos will follow later.
Planning for next conference has already begun. I will make a survey again as I need to approximate on the head count to plan for. Munich with same number of people seems to be doable with the same ticket prices. With less people a bit higher. Now I have to find out which weeks would be available in the hotels. Oktoberfest, school holidays and some expositions play into that. Let me know if you know a specific week wouldn’t work for you (and others).

On the long run we may continue with two conferences, one in spring in USA and one in fall in Germany, so attendees from both continents can fly over Atlantic and stay extra days for vacation and sight seeing.

MBS Xojo Plugins, version 17.2pr5

New in this prerelease of the 17.2 plugins:
  • Updated Tidy plugin to use libtidy 5.4.
  • Added valueForKey methods to CNContactMBS and CNGroupMBS classes.
  • Changed NSUserUnixTaskMBS properties for file handles to be writable.
  • Improved DynaPDF examples for PDF/A conversion and added one for Normalization.
  • Added DynaPDFMBS.ReplaceFont functions.
  • Changed license check for DynaPDF to allow text extraction in Lite version.
  • Added constants for CURL for TLSv1.3 and HTTP/2.
  • Added XLBookMBS.MoveSheet and data validation methods for XLSheetMBS class.
  • Updated LibXL to version 3.8.0.
Download: monkeybreadsoftware.de/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/.
Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.

Xojo Stammtisch in Zürich

On my next visit to Zurich, I'd love to make another Xojo developer meeting:

Wer hat Interesse an einem Xojo Entwicklertreffen am 17. Mai 2017 in Zürich?

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

Bei Interesse bitte bei mir melden.

Woman at the MBS Xojo conference

Our conference not just got a record number of attendees, we also got a new record on the number of ladies to joining us in Berlin:



Thank you for attending and see you again next year!

MBS Xojo Conference group photo

The conference is going great and we are close to the end. Here a picture of attendees:


Even as approximately 10 missing as it's always difficult to keep the crowd together, it's great assembling of Xojo developers.

MBS Xojo Conference started

The conference just started and Geoff Perlman holds his keynote about what is new in Xojo world:



If you are in Berlin right now, email me and join us for dinner on Friday :-)

MBS Xojo Conference about to start

The room is prepared and the conference can start soon:

So see you later today at the bar and tomorrow morning in Senator room for the keynote!

xDev Magazine Issue 15.3

The May/Junel (15.3) issue of xDev Magazine is now available. Here's a quick preview of what's inside:
  • Binary Serialization by Sam Rowlands
    How to convert data objects into binary files and back again.
  • To Proxy or Not To Proxy... by Mark Strickland
    Mark shares how he used the NGINX web server to solve his Xojo web app problem.
  • Beginner's Guide to Xojo by Marc Zeedar
    New to Xojo? Here's the ultimate guide, a broad overview with the critical details you need to know to start using Xojo like a pro.
  • Sharing Data for Health, Part 1 by JC Cruz
    Once you've got a health app created, you may need to share that data with other applications and services. Here's how you do that.
  • The Problem With Abandonware by Marc Zeedar
    iOS is becoming a field of abandoned apps and Apple's forced move to 64-bit is only going to make the situation worse.
Plus: Xojo 2017 Release 1, Best Backup Practices, InnoSetup, and more.

Meet Marc Zeedar at the MBS Xojo Conference in Berlin, 4th/5th May 2017.
The biggest plugin in space...

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