Monthly Archives: September 2014

Digging deeper into Touch

Clarion developers don’t need to add any code to support touch input. The C9 Templates generate all the code needed to respond to touch gestures, so existing Apps just need a regenerate with C9 to become touch-enabled. But its easy for Clarion devs to add more specialized responses and touch “features” to their apps by working with these new additions to the RTL –

  • new event; EVENT:Pointer
  • new built-in function; POINTERDATA()
  • new SYSTEM property; PROP:PointerInterface

For more details on what the RTL exposes to your apps I refer you to this previous post.  If you don’t have the time to read it right now then I’d just like to point out this one excerpt:

They (Gartner) predict that Windows will grab 39 percent of the tablet market in 2016. You can be sure that you’ll have many users wanting to run your Clarion apps on their (Win8 Pro – x86 based) tablet. 

So roughly speaking they are predicting there will be about 5 million users on Windows tablets.  Even if they are off by a million or so, its inevitable that touch and tablets are in your future, and its a good bet that some of those tablet users will be your end users.

If those numbers catch your interest then you probably should download and build this example

The example shows how to use the interfaces contained in the touch.* source files (located in your .\libsrc folder).  It provides a nice look at some of the new features your apps can now support for an optimal “touch” experience (above and beyond the support the RTL provides automatically).

touchMode

 

Clarion 9.1 updated

An update to 9.1 is being released today, there are a few important fixes;

FIX: A random “missing pure virtual” exception could be thrown by the evaluator
FIX: Possible lockup if Listbox height is enough to show only one record but the row is multiple lines
FIX: SETDROPID could work incorrectly on dragging between 2 Clarion applications
FIX: The application generator could not open an app after you edited its dct and deleted a file that had aliases.

The complete list is here.

Clarion 9.1 update is out today

An update to 9.1 is being released today, here are a few of the more important fixes;
FIX: OLE Automation could be treated as side-by-side instead of an OLE server in a separate process

This fixes OLE server automation, such as automating MS Office components, and came about as a result of the support added for registration-free COM.  Surprisingly even after months of beta testing this wasn’t found until after the 9.1 gold release.

And these two, related to problems with either unusually large amounts of Procedure data, or .APPs where templates have been unregistered without removing the associated embed code:

FIX: Possible IDE lockup when there is very large number (hundreds) of local/global variables/tables in the Procedure and the IDE is processing the closing of an embed.
FIX: Possible failure on closing APP if embed tree with orphan embeds has been touched.

There are many other fixes and changes, you can see the full list here.

And of note for those using SQL backends;
FEATURE: The Clarion to SQL converter now converts the following operators for the specific drivers –
% (Modulo) All drivers
^ (Power) Pervasive SQL, Oracle
& (Concatenate) All drivers. *Note that ODBC uses the ANSI standard ||
XOR (Exclusive OR) SQLAnywhere, MSSQL