Ideas wanted for surprise MBS feature for Xojo.Connect

Last year we presented our DynaPDF graphics class integration, a feature we worked on a few weeks before the conference in secret. Beside the normal support requests and preparing the session slides that was a bit of extra work each day. The presentation file, I submitted before the conference, did miss the new special slides and I added them just before the presentation to make sure I didn’t leak the news myself.

For Xojo.Connect 2020 in Nashville this year we look for a new idea on what to present as a surprise. Not sure if we find a compelling idea. It should be something which is useful to a large portion of the user base and not a feature for a you alone or a handful of people. And it should be plugin feature, so not a wish for iOS extension or some grid with containers as that is better written in Xojo directly.
Do you have ideas? Please email us.

I would also encourage the Xojo team to take a week before XDC, look through feedback cases and maybe let every Xojo engineer pick an annoying bug, a little feature request or something they’d like to see or have and spend some time onto this. Especially as a lot of feedback cases never come to the top 100 list and never get attention of the management. The in the keynote Geoff could present that list and maybe demonstrate those improvements. Those items would be first hand news shared with the crowd. Finally for the last session, if something got fixed at the conference, present it there. I did this before at a conference where I had a short lightning talk on the end and could show a new feature I programmed at the conference.

One of the feature I would do as a developer on the compiler is to make sure it annotates the nil object checks and out of bounds exceptions as far as possible with details like line numbers or name of variable. Not for all cases of course, but the functions to raise this exceptions could be overloaded and when the LLVM frontend for Xojo parses the lines and adds the checks, it could include the parameter with line number if it knows them.

A suprise would be; Xojo inc, accuires MonkeyBreadSoftware GmBh …
It’s not april 1st yet sorry.

You can watch my session video here: MBS Plugins @ XDC 2019

mbs have a simple camera class and barcodes/qrcode reader?
for photo documentation and warehouse management.
or voice recognition, voice to text is very useful.

(windows desktop and android)

Yes. See DirectShow classes for camera access on Windows. and zxing classes for recognition.

There is no Android support yet in Xojo and no plugin SDK for Android announced.

Read from the macOS Photo library and export Live Photos as GIF or movie

Conversion from html to pdf? I know that’s nasty.

That’s actually pretty easy Beatrix when targeting MacOS/iOS only. Windows and Linux don’t have built in features for that unfortunately.

I agree, but I’ve asked for that previously, hoping that Jens could incorporate the wkHTML2PDF source, but was told there were reasons it couldn’t be done.

It is pretty simple but a bit clunky. But as everything with Apple having an alternative would be good to have an alternative.

I imagine Jens didn’t want to touch it due to the LGPLv3 license.

wkHTML2PDF depends on QT, which is more or less a no-go for us.

So just use the command line tool in the shell and enjoy!

Can you remind us which library call this is? Or do you mean to use wkHTML2PDF in the command line?

Shell Class in Xojo can be used to run wkHTML2PDF command line tool.

Thanks for the clarification — this is what I currently do. I was hoping you had a new Chromium or HTMLViewer call to save as PDF!

I’m looking for a way to send a digitally S/MIME-signed/encrypted e-Mail. Doubt that I’m the only one. The ChillKat-plugin offers nice and handy features for that, the MBS afaics does not.

With CURL you can encrypt as you want. The problem is finding the correct certificate that you need for encryption.

have been using it for ages

is there a better thing to use instead of wkhtmltopdf for convert html to pdf???

We do have a few S/Mime functions in OpenSSLMBS module.