Appeon Mobile - GEMS

** Hot News **

Appeon Mobile - New Features for GA

  Having been through the full Appeon Mobile beta program, I was pleasantly surprised last week while testing my new "Integrated Version" of the STD Foundation Classes when I came across some new iOS features that made it into the final release (GA) of the new Appeon Mobile v1.0 product. These newest features have some great application usages - so I thought I would bring them to the attention of the PowerBuilder developers who might be considering using the Appeon Mobile product for their first Apple tablet or smartphone application.

Spell Checker

  The first hidden gem I came across was the new Spell Checker functions that allow the Appeon Mobile developer to have a block of text parsed for spelling consistency. This can be easily accomplished by using the new "of_getmisspelledword" method to have your Appeon Mobile application interact with the iOS spelling feature. This method can be located in the "WorkArounds" library within the new eon_mobile_textcheckerex object. This object class allows the developer to load a block of text, the start of search location, end of search location and the language of the user. After the method call, the start and end location will be set to the first word in the block of text that cannot be validated by the iOS spell checker.

  If a misspelled word is located the mobile developer also has the ability to use the "of_guessesforword" method to have a list of suggested word replacements returned to the Appeon Mobile application that can be then presented to the mobile user as a suggested replacement. There are also other methods that can add a valid word to the iOS dictionary for inclusion in the next spell checking cycle or add words that should be ignored.

Sending Mail

   In the arsenal of iOS low-level control features, Appeon Mobile GA introduced the "of_sendmail" method to allow the Appeon Mobile application to send email messages via the on-board iOS mail application on your tablet or smartphone device. The method is very straight forward but does require a new "eon_mobile_str_mailcontent" structure to be passed along with TO, CC and BCC information in the form of string arrays to enable the mail message to be sent.

   The new "of_sendmail" method is located in the  "eon_mobile_awsex" object that was originally supplied in Appeon Mobile beta1 - however this method is new for the GA release. When activated from your Appeon Mobile application, the iOS email software is engaged and the standard iOS email send dialog appears. At that time, the iOS tablet / smartphone user can amend the email text to the TO/CC/BCC list to their final requirements before completing the actual send operation.

 The screen capture on the left shows how the of_sendmail method can also supply the Subject and Message text as well into the body of the out going email.

Geo Location 

  One of the key requirements in many mobile applications is to allow the application to know where it is geographically speaking. This can be an important feature for not only tracking where the device is but where it wants to go and then saving that information into a database for further processing. The new "eon_mobile_geolocationex" object class was added to Appeon Mobile GA for just this purpose. The easy to use "of_getcurrentposition" method allows the application to query the iOS GPS sub-system and return the Longitude, Latitude and Altitude of the handheld device. This information can be used for tracking or computing the distance to the next navigation point. The matching "of_open" and "of_close" methods control whether the GPS sub-system is active for your Appeon Mobile application. It should be noted that the first use of the "of_open" command may cause the application user to be prompted to have the iOS system communicate to the GPS by asking if the application may have access to the devices current location.

   The three new features added to the GA release of Appeon Mobile not only round out the Appeon Mobile product's interaction with the tablet or smartphone device - they enable the developer to add some pretty sophisticated iOS features to your mobile application!

   For more information on the Appeon Mobile product, please visit Appeon Corporation's official website. For an example application that demonstrates all the Appeon Mobile device features, please visit the STD Foundation Classes and Example Applications website on SourceForge and download the "Appeon_Mobile_V1.0_DeviceTest_PB12.1_2013-07-02" file.

Regards ...Chris