Recently, a customer asked us if we could convert an existing Visual Basic project to App Studio, so he could run it on iOS and Android devices. We had a look, saw it was a good candidate and went ahead with the conversion. It’s pretty much complete now and working fine.
Let’s have a look at the steps to do this:
Continue reading “Converting a VB project to App Studio”
The whole idea of App Studio is to make complex things for mobile devices easy. When someone asked us if App Studio could interface with SAP, we knew it would be interesting.
SAP is one of the top business automation vendors. With more than 180,000 companies using their software (and 55,000 employees of their own), they’re a giant. They have created some of the most advanced and comprehensive software for corporations.
So far, however, it’s been difficult to integrate mobile applications with their software. Hopefully, after this blog post, the world will be a bit easier.
Here’s how we did it:
Continue reading “How to access SAP from App Studio”
We have just uploaded 2.5.0.5 to the servers. It has a number of minor enhancements as well as bug fixes.
The download URL is the same as for 2.5.
2.5.0.5
Recently, one of our users turned on onto the jqWidgets Controls. They’re a set of powerful, good looking controls – and they work well with App Studio. The controls are free for non commercial use, $99 otherwise.
In Release 2.5, we added support for some of these controls:
We have included samples for these. Before you try them, however, you need to download the jqWidgets library. Download it from http://www.jqwidgets.com/download/, unzip it and copy its ‘jqwidgets’ folder into your project folder.
There are many additional controls we have not made definition files for yet. See one you like? Let us know!
Here’s how the new controls look…
Continue reading “jqWidgets: A collection of powerful new controls”
When you deploy your project, App Studio sends an extra file to the server called the manifest. It contains a list of files which are part of your project and should be downloaded to the device, so it can run offline.
When we released App Studio in 2010, the ending for this file was .manifest. Someone noticed that Microsoft was already using .manifest for another purpose. A few months ago, the standard was changed to .appcache (though .manifest is also fine.)
In App Studio 2.5, the default for new projects is .appcache. Existing projects will continue to use .manifest and work fine. You can control the ending of the manifest file in the new ‘manifestfile’ Project Property.
If you want to use .appcache in your project, you will need to a few things:
text/cache-manifest for .appcache files. More info is here.
One of the benefits of using .appcache is that some servers are already configured with the right MIME type. An interesting one is DropBox: if you deploy your project to the Public folder of your DropBox, people can run it from there.
We have just uploaded 2.5.0.4 to the servers. It has a number of minor enhancements as well as bug fixes.
The download URL is the same as for 2.5.
2.5.0.4
We have just uploaded 2.5.0.3 to the servers. It has a number of minor enhancements as well as bug fixes.
The download URL is the same as for 2.5.
2.5.0.3
The quick answer is that we cannot say, due to nondisclosures. iOS 6 is just available in a closed beta for now. However, I probably can make comments on what I have read on the web.
Here are some of the rumored improvements:
Remote Debugging: It looks like there will be a way to have a desktop debug session hooked up to a device. This will make it much easier to debug on iOS devices.
<input type=”file”>: This will allow interaction with local files on the device. I’m not sure whether this will be more than just photos. It should get rid of the need to use PhoneGap for some apps.
Improved Audio: This would be great, if true. The current audio on iOS is not great.
App Cache increased from 5 to 25 megs. Lets you do much larger apps!
We will continue to watch for more new stuff in iOS 6. We will try to make sure that as many of the new features as possible will be available to App Studio users when OS6 is actually release.
While SQLite databases work very nicely on mobile devices, there is no easy way to get them there. You can’t just add the name of your database to the manifest and be able to use it when your app is deployed.
Until App Studio 2.5, that is. When you add the name of an SQlite database to the manifest field in Project Properties, App Studio will automatically convert the database to a format which can be transferred, then convert it back into a database on the device.
Let’s see how this is done. We’ll use the famous Northwind database which comes with many Microsoft products. I went online and found it in SQLite format.
Continue reading “Including Databases with your App”
App Studio 2.5 brings a new dialog box: NSB.ShowProgress. Here’s how it looks:
It floats above your current screen. You can put any message into it that fits. It can be dismissed by your app or by the user.
Here is how to put up a message:
NSB.ShowProgress("Please wait...")
and how to dismiss the message:
NSB.ShowProgress(false)
You could also issue multiple NSB.ShowMessage calls, each time updating the text in the box. This is useful for length operations. You can keep your user advised as to what is going on: the perceived waiting time will be reduced.