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Tips & Tricks for your 4D Apps – June Edition

by Add Komoncharoensiri, Director of Technical Services at 4D Inc

 

Here we go with another set of tips and tricks.

As you know, 4D Knowledge Base is a library of information about the 4D technology where weekly tech tips and monthly technotes are actively published. If you missed the last tips on the KB, that’s fine; here is a compilation from the past few weeks.

This blog post covers 16 tips:

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4D v19 performance on Apple M1

by guest author Roland Mulder, CEO Micro Consulting SA, Switzerland

 
My company develops Office Maker and BiblioMaker, a business and library management software mainly used in Switzerland by thousands of users. The first lines of code were written in 1986 on a Macintosh Plus with 4D version 1 (“4e Dimension” back then).
 
I remember my astonishment in 1989 when I first launched our software on a Macintosh SE30. Everything was suddenly so fast! I simply could not believe my eyes.
 
These fond memories came back when I first launched our applications on a new iMac M1 after compiling natively with 4D v19. As you can imagine, after 35 years of constant development, they have become much larger and sophisticated beasts. My eyes opened wide as soon as I double-clicked on the first one. Such a fast launch! And my jaw fell to the floor when I opened elaborate multipage entry layouts with plenty of filled list boxes. Absolutely instantaneous!

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4D v19 is Silicon Native!

Apple’s groundbreaking release of the new Silicon Macs pushed us to release 4D v19 six months earlier to provide you with a Silicon native version of 4D as soon as possible. We reviewed all our code, ensuring its compatibility with Silicon, performed extensive testing on this new platform, and we’re finally ready to provide you with the first Silicon native version of 4D. Let me guide you through this revolution!

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macOS Big Sur and Apple Silicon Compatibility Information

In order to help you anticipate testing and running the new operating system with your 4D applications, we want to clarify the support of the different Apple Big Sur configurations on our 4D product lines (including products already delivered and future releases). Please see macOS Big Sur and Apple silicon compatibility status for each release below:

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Latest news about 4D on Silicon

Since Apple’s first announcement about Silicon, we’ve been keeping you informed through a series of blog posts and this post is no different!

So what’s going on? Well, the first Silicon Macs equipped with the brand new M1 chip are now available on the market. Here are two important pieces of information we need to share with you:

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A brand new 4D compiler for Apple Silicon

In a previous blog post, we introduced you to the new Silicon Macs that Apple is launching at the end of this year, as well as our plans to smoothly transition your 4D applications to them.

These new Macs use a new type of processor: ARM processors from the same family Apple uses in iPhones and iPads. A new processor family means a new instruction set and, for us here at 4D, a new compiler.