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Completion, iOS 7 Update And The 20M Mark

Completion, iOS 7 Update And The 20M Mark

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Exciting news this week, Chen FINALLY did what we procrastinated on for so long and wrote an auto-complete text field!


This is really easy to incorporate

into your code, just replace your usage of TextField with AutoCompleteTextField and define the data that the auto complete should work from. There is a default implementation that accepts a String array or a ListModel for completion strings, this can work well for a “small” set of thousands (or tens of thousands) of entries.





However, if you wish to query a database or a web service you will need to derive the class and perform more advanced filtering by overriding the

filter method and the getSuggestionModel method. You might also need to invoke updateFilterList() if your filter algorithm is asynchronous.


Here is a sample of a simple auto-complete that doesn’t use the advanced features:


As part of that feature Chen also added something very interesting to Form… Up until now the best way to draw on top of a Form was to create a glass pane create your own layered layout for the internal content pane.


Chen added a cool new method to form:

getLayeredPane().


Essentially a layered pane sits on top of your content pane and you can just place any component you want there just like you would in the content pane. Only difference is that it will be drawn on top of the content pane. Unlike the glasspane which is a drawing API and lacks interactivity the layered pane allows you to place pretty much any component there.



iOS 7 Update


According to the latest rumors Apple is about to release iOS 7 by September 10th, so here is a quick update on where we stand and what you need to know moving forward.


Just so we are 100% clear, all current builds work on iOS 7 devices. We have already migrated our devices to the latest beta’s and have verified that builds keep working!


However, iOS 7 is a major departure in terms of design and some application behaviors. The biggest change is the move to

flat design

, Tope has a great blog post

detailing some of the migration efforts

from a designers perspective.


You can already update your user interface and theme to be more flat and modern (as well as your icon design etc.).



We would ideally update some of our themes to match those expectations.


As people start migrating to OS 7 you might want to make your app OS 7 only and thus take advantage of the taller title area (the title area in OS 7 stretches behind the battery/time/network indicator) as well as some minor OS 7 tweaks and the default OS 7 look. To do that you will need to have your application compiled with XCode 5 which is currently in beta. We already tested this process and we will allow a build argument to use XCode 5 once the tools are released from beta. Naturally, our recommendation is that you do not use these tools until most users migrate (which I assume will be slow given how some people feel about iOS 7).







Traction, Testimonials & Trips





You might have noticed the big counter of installed devices we added to the home page, we are pretty thrilled having crossed the 20M device install base. Now lets work on adding a couple of zeros there…


We also added a testimonials popup to the home page (commented out due to an issue in Firefox), if you have a testimonial you would like to contribute to appear on our home page and an impressive public linked in profile we would really appreciate it

if you take the time to

write something about us

(please include the linked in public profile link).


I will be speaking at both JavaZone and JavaOne (NetBeans day) this year. So I will be in both Oslo and San Francisco, if any of you are coming to these conference or live in the area I’d love to meet, just contact us via the

contact form

.

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