Objective-Gideros - extending to include native iOS functionality

Unhappy because developers did not add functionality in the frameworks fast enough? Tired of looking at the out of space pictures as teasers on things that should have been there last year? Feeling you have wasted your money on license/subscription which gave you nothing spectacular, well the list can go on, it is the time for merry not despair. This article shall show you a couple of things that you can expect in the coming year in terms of articles, however they are available with Gideros as of yesterday. So you get to see a demo video not pictures of empty space above earth

Preview Excel Files

One of the issues is how to display files in a lua based framework application, with some the only way you can think of doing it is after you shell out in excess of $2,000 annually and even then you cannot do much. However with Gideros, it is less than 20 lines of Lua code including declaring the callback functions. It adds super-duper functionality including emailing, sharing and printing the document. Think wider in scope, your Gideros App can now display PDF files that can be printed right from the application itself.


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Accessing the Clipboard

While developing for iOS even when using Objective-C a lot of developers leave out some good features because either they are not relevant or it is too difficult to integrate them. Thereby, one of the easiest - the Clipboard is often overlooked sometimes because it is available to the developers for free with the controls (i.e. without doing anything) Here is another proof of concept video of using the Clipboard via a Gideros application. It makes available the clipboard to the application when started

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Passing the URL schema to communicate

If you follow several frameworks, you would have noticed an article on how to use the url schema with standard stock apps and the new google maps. While other frameworks are still on and about using this functionality introduced way back in May/June 2011, if you develop with Gideros, you could be using it in your apps as of yesterday.

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in Summary

While the limit of what you can do is entirely bound by your imagination and iOS 6.0 API. While most of the features can be used from Gideros without the need of a plug-in or whatever and then some functionalities require a generic plug-in that opens most of iOS APIs to your app and then there are specific plug-ins that can do a specific task and do it well.

It is strange and funny that the frameworks that are open for extensibility are FREE and the closed frameworks have to be paid for. So, if you want to use these functionalities, you can and with just "Gideros Community Edition" which is FREE, however it would make sense to buy a $149 PRO license if you are creating commercial apps and have a custom splash screen.You do not have to pay the $2000-$3000 "Enterprise" license subscriptions and you can build offline and extend your application the way you want, all for an add-on cost of FREE.

When you think over the holidays on the coming year, consider a framework that will extend in base functionality, offers you all of the features that you might need NOW if you can add them while charging you nothing. How much better can it get? There's only one way to find out... Happy Holidays (Look out in the coming year for how much better it can get)