The making of the new 4D v19 logo
by Julien Banon, UX and Creative Designer at 4D SAS
4D v19 is just around the corner and while our teams are putting the finishing touches on one of the best LTS yet, I thought I’d tell you the story behind the 4D v19 logo design.
4D Data Explorer in Action
Even though the 4D Data Explorer is still in Preview version (there are certainly more features to come in the next versions), we thought we’d show you the product in action and let you discover its capabilities.
This is a web browser interface usable by the administrator as well as the developer, remotely (in a secure way with an HTTPS connection) or locally on the same machine as your opened database.
Need to check your data during development? Need to find data that could cause bugs? The Data Explorer, with its powerful query engine and intuitive web interface, is made for you!
Let’s watch the video:
Deprecated and Removed 4D features: Why and How?
For over 36 years, our main goal has been to enhance our product while ensuring the compatibility of your 4D applications. This, of course, brings change, and change can be frustrating. With this in mind, we always aim to minimize the impact on your businesses with timely announcements, and most importantly, an improved alternative to the deprecated or removed functionality to ensure a smooth transition.
3 Reasons Why We Release Early and Often
Recently we’ve been answering questions on the 4D forum about commands and functionalities that felt incomplete or were missing, such as the Mail feature.
In this blog post, we’ll go through the 4D strategy behind the decision to release versions that are not fully developed, which is summarized in the “release early, release often” paradigm.
The story behind 4D’s new Markdown-based documentation site
by Arnaud Schmitt, Head of Technical Documentation at 4D SAS
As many of you know, doc.4d.com has long been managed using an in-house 4D application. However, 4D’s documentation is currently in transition to a new architecture: a Markdown-based documentation site.
This was the topic a few weeks ago during a 4D Method meetup, where I shared our experience about creating and maintaining the new documentation site. You may find this information useful when you are browsing the 4D documentation site, or if you need to create your own documentation.
Apply naming conventions with Form macros
by guest author Michael Höhne, 4D developer (Munich, Germany)
There’s a feature in 4D v18 R5 that may have been overlooked, or at least hasn’t gotten much attention so far: Form macros. To be honest, I hadn’t spent much time on them either, until recently. In this blog post, I’ll show you a macro that saves a lot of time when applying naming conventions to list box columns, column headers, and footers. You can easily change it to fit your needs. A dedicated repo is also available on Github.
4D for iOS: Build mobile apps in less than 2 minutes
Are you new to 4D for iOS? New to our no-code native app builder that allows you to extend your existing 4D business applications to mobile devices? Or maybe you just need a jumpstart to see how far the product allows you to go?
If this is the case, check out what 4D for iOS can do thanks to its feature set, and watch this video to witness the building of a mobile app in less than two minutes:
Push notification with data synchronisation
As of 4D v18 R4, you can send notifications to your application users. Now with 4D v18 R6, you can start data synchronization with a push notification.
This could be useful, for example, in the case of delivery tracking applications. First, the delivery information is updated in the database, then a notification is sent to the customer. The notification contains a request to synchronize the data, so when the customer consults the record on their smartphone, the data is up to date.
4D View Pro: End of document loading
When you use 4D View Pro (especially in offscreen mode) with complex documents, calculating all formulas could take a while and it can be difficult to know when it’s finally finished (and it’s important to wait before you call commands such as export or print).
As a solution, we’ve introduced two new events. One of which is called for every single calculation/formula, which could be used to trigger a timer. If the time expires without another formula being finished, we can assume that the whole document is finished.
More features in the 4D Write Pro interface widget
The 4D Write Pro toolbar and sidebar continue to grow with more functionalities to help you create documents even faster and easier.
With 4D v18 R6, you can :
- increment or decrement text
- copy/paste the ruler
- change the background color of a paragraph
- change the style of a word (uppercase, lowercase, etc.)
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