[Announcement] Basic4android v1.1 is released

[Erel]

Version 1.1 was released today.
All licensed users should receive an email with upgrade instructions. It can take up to 24 hours.

The new version contains many bug fixes and many new features.
Since the release of version 1.0 there were many new libraries. This version includes all the new and updated official libraries.

Major new features (not including new features added previously with the new libraries):
- Select Case block.
- New views: WebView and ProgressBar. WebView is a really powerful view. It uses the internal browser engine to display html. You can use it to display online pages or offline pages.
- Internal support for handling results from external activities (onActivityResult).
- Using the above feature, two new objects: VoiceRecognition and ContentChooser. Both are included in the Phone library.
- Designer color dialog changed and it now includes a text description.
- Support for installing applications to the SD card. This is available in Projects - Can Install To External Storage. This feature is only relevant for Android 2.2 and above. It will be ignored when installing to other versions.
- Button_Down and Button_Up events added.
- Option to override AndroidManifest.xml created by Basic4android. This is done by changing the file located under Objects folder to read-only.

Edit: Users who previously updated any official library by putting it in the "additional libraries path" should do one of the following:
- Delete all the official libraries from the additional libraries path.
- Copy all files from the internal libraries folder to the additional libraries folder. The internal folder is usually located in: C:\Program Files\Anywhere Software\Basic4android\Libraries

Otherwise the old libraries will be used.

 

[Erel]

Will the Select/Case block accept nesting then in the future ?

Yes.

Do the coloc characters ":" , in the help file at the end of the Case lines , have a signification ?

No. These will be removed from the help file.

 

[bluedude]

Yeah, my intention was to use the zxing barcode scanner. However, just saw somebody release a special library for that. Not sure what is best to use.

I think we can catch result from the scanner by using ActivityResult?

 

[blong]

Manual

Erel

Thanks for the new release ... great work !

Is there a plan to release the documentation as a PDF file rather than just online. I would find this more convenient when doing development.

Realise this is probably not a high priority at this stage ...

 

[Erel]

I think we can catch result from the scanner by using ActivityResult?

The onActivityResult feature is only available internally. It can be exposed but from my experience with intents it is better to wrap the functionality with a higher level API.

Is there a plan to release the documentation as a PDF file rather than just online. I would find this more convenient when doing development.

I actually checked several tools that convert pdf to html. Converting the tutorial is pretty problematic. Maybe the reference html pages will be converted in the future.

Did you check agraham's offline help application: http://www.b4x.com/forum/basic4android-getting-started-tutorials/7229-where-documentation.html

 

[TOB]

Why not maintain a CHM file (HTML Help) for the purpose?

It's by far the most flexible way to store different types of information in a structured way. It's portable, it can be free-text searched, can include images and have Internet links if needed.

As pages are indexed internally - it can be called from the IDE and open specific help of a given topic or highlighted phrase.

 

[Erel]

The help in Basic4android is generated automatically by a tool similar to Java JavaDocs.
This has many benefits and is the reason that we have documentation for all libraries including libraries written by other developers, and also it makes updating the documentation very easy.
Maintaining the CHM files in Basic4ppc was a very difficult task.
I agree that we need to have the ability to easily search the available help.

 

[Kernowquack]

PDF Documentation

I actually checked several tools that convert pdf to html. Converting the tutorial is pretty problematic. Maybe the reference html pages will be converted in the future.

I have done quite a bit of work with PDF creation and have various apps to help, I am happy to create some PDF documentation if you want.

 

[Erel]

Thank you for your suggestion. Can you recommend me a good (multiple) Html to PDF converter?

 

[Kernowquack]

HTML to PDF

One I use alot is wkhtmltopdf[
URL="http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/"]http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/[/URL]

Its based on the webkit engine which is the engine used by Safari browser. I have attached the basic output from wkhtmltopdf of the listview tutorial with no additional options specified.

As I said before I am happy to convert the documentation and tutorials to pdf and "prettyfiy" them if thats OK with you.

 

[Erel]

You are more then welcome to give it a try. You can send me the files and I'll upload them to the server (attached files are limited in size).