The complete Windows 64-bit product line is now Altura-free

We are pleased to announce that 4D v16 R4 is the very first version where the whole 4D Windows 64-bit product line is no longer relying on the Mac2Win library from Altura! As announced in last April, in this strategy announcement post, we have done the work on 4D Server Windows 64-bit, which was the last step to reach.

Our Windows 64-bit product line can now fully take advantage of some modern technologies and make you benefit from it, such as support of Single Document Interface (SDI) windows for instance, also delivered with 4D v16 R4!

What is Altura? Similar to Carbon for macOS, 4D used a legacy library named Mac2Win from Altura on Windows. Many years ago, this library was very important for migrating 4D and 3rd party plug-in code from Mac to Windows.

As a reminder, the Altura-free version of 4D Developer Edition and 4D Volume Desktop Windows 64-bit had been delivered with 4D v16 R2.

What does it change?

Features using deprecated technology will not work anymore – and some older plugins needs to be updated.

Some old technology based features, such as QuickDraw images or Mac resources were deprecated a long time ago. See Deprecated and Removed Features manual for the complete list.

Plugins using asintppc.dll or built with an old plug-in SDK (prior to v14) will no longer be supported by 4D Server. If you are using third party legacy plugins, we recommend that you check with your provider whether your plugin will remain compatible.

Regarding 4D plugins, only 4D Write and 4D View still rely on the Altura library and therefore can no longer be executed on 4D Server Windows 64-bit v16 R4. Note however that these two plugins can still be served by 4D Server to be executed on 32-bit clients.

What are the replacement solutions?

4D Write Pro is now ready to replace 4D Write, 4D v16 R2 brought the horizontal ruler that was highly requested to complete the feature set. Real table support is now available with 4D v16 R4. This feature drastically enhances the functional set provided by the old 4D Write.

Display of records in lists 4D View feature has been available in 4D View Pro as part of special listbox features since 4D v15, improved with the variable row height feature in 4D v16.

4D View Pro spreadsheet feature is coming as a preview with 4D v16 R4. Actually our implementation is based on a ready-to-use third-party product embedded in 4D that will be totally transparent for the developer and the end-user. The first set of spreadsheet functionalities is available now, read this post for more details.

If you really do not have any other choice but to use 4D Write and 4D View as you need more time to rewrite your application, as a last workaround, you may reroute your routines previously executed on 4D Server to a 32-bit Client running on the server machine or any other machine.