In the Forum

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4D 2004 Interface Improvements

Along with a lot of new major features in 4D 2004, such as the new Form Editor, there are a lot of minor interface improvements you might not have noticed. Since Foundation is based on 4D 2003, it doesn't automatically take advantage of these new features. But you can quickly improve your product's interface with just a few mouse clicks.

4D 2004 now allows the a Preferences menu to be displayed in the application menu on Mac OS X. To move Foundation's Preferences menu from the Edit menu to the application menu, use the Menu Editor to set the Preferences menu item's Associated Standard Action to "Preferences." Now 4D will automatically move this menu to the application menu on Mac OS X.

Also, for an instant face lift, open each of your output forms and subforms and select the System Highlight Color checkbox in the Property List. Instead of using black to highlight selected rows in output lists and included lists, 4D will use the system's highlight color (usually blue) to show the selected records.

Foundation 4.1.1 Update

Although there's nothing major to report this month, there have been a lot of minor improvements. The Date and Time component has received the most attention. A new pop-up calendar, based on code developed by Tom Dillon, lets the user easily select a date. It's easily displayed and navigated using the mouse or just the keyboard. We've also added three new routines for working with date-time strings. These routines allow you to convert 4D date and time strings from and to ISO 8601 date-time strings (YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss).

The Foundation Text component now has the ability to generate an MD5 message digest. This can be handy for many security related applications. For example rather than storing the user's password in the data file, simply store an MD5 digest, then compare it to an MD5 generated on-the-fly when the user logs in. This way it's not possible to compromise the user's password, since it isn't stored in the database.

The Find dialog now adjusts its size before it opens, rather than afterwards. So you'll no longer see the window resize when it opens. This also fixes the size problem it's having with 4D 2004.

Additional minor changes have been made to improve the look and behavior of forms when using 4D 2004.x.

Under Construction

If you look in the Foundation Source Code (FCS) you'll see that there's a new component in the works. The new Registration component allows you to easily create a demo version of your software that can be unlocked by entering an activation code. It works just like Foundation's activation code feature, but with public forms so you can completely customize the look of the dialogs. The final component should be completed next month.