We would like to take this opportunity to wish all our customers a Happy Holiday & New Year and we hope that you will have a peaceful and restful festive holiday. We also hope that you have had a successful year in your application development with Omnis, and that the coming year will be ever more prosperous for you and your customers!
This year has been momentous for Omnis Software as we continue to execute our plans for the Omnis business. We would like to look back over some of the great achievements in 2017, and we hope that you have found our offerings exciting and useful in your application development and your business.
- Omnis Developer Portal – launched in February, the dev portal provides a forum for Omnis developers to discuss technical issues with other Omnis developers. The portal also hosts videos, libraries, and a jobs page: developer.omnis.net
- Omnis Software – also in February 2017, the company was officially renamed to Omnis Software, including our UK, German and French subsidiaries. This completes the transition of the old business from Tigerlogic who transferred the whole Omnis business to the current management, OLS Holdings Limited, in October 2016. More details about the purchase: www.omnis.net/news/announcement.jsp, and the name change press release: www.omnis.net/news/pressreleases.jsp
- Omnis Academy – the Academy provides 3 days free training in using Omnis Studio, and since starting in Germany has spread to other regions including France, Italy, the UK and USA. We hope that more of you will take advantage of this unique offer in the coming year: www.omnis.net/academy
- Omnis Regional Conference – this took place in Bad Vilbel near Frankfurt, Germany and was very well attended by developers from across Northern Europe. We also celebrated Omnis Studio’s 20th birthday, with lots of cake! Here are some photos from the event: www.facebook.com
- Omnis Studio 8.1 – was released in August 2017 and included the new third-party VCS support (via the ability to export/import libraries as JSON), responsive design for JavaScript forms, JSON defined JavaScript controls, Property & Class search, and Push Notifications for mobile apps. For a full list of features in Studio 8.1 and subsequent updates see: www.omnis.net/products/studio/whatsnew.jsp
- Windows 10 JavaScript Wrapper – the Windows 10 wrapper was released to allow you to create standalone “Universal Windows Platform” (UWP) applications, based on your Omnis JavaScript Client apps, that will run on Windows 10 desktops or mobiles. Download the wrapper, as well as the Android or iOS version, from here: www.omnis.net/download/jswrapper.jsp
- Omnis on GitHub – we created a new account on the popular code sharing site and have placed over 100 open source components and libraries for you to reuse or share. The libraries are exported to JSON using Studio 8.1.1, and among the featured repos are a JSON defined Signature Component, a JSON defined Star rating component, RESTful Web services, a JS File Control, a JS Rich Text Editor, and a Serverless Client example: github.com/OmnisStudio
- EurOmnis Conference – in October the annual Omnis developer conference returned to the Hotel Klein Zwitserland in Arnhem, in The Netherlands, and was very well attended and received by developers. Here are some photos from the event: www.facebook.com
What’s coming in 2018?
At the EurOmnis conference in October we unveiled a few pointers for Omnis Studio version 8.2, which is likely to be released in the first half of 2018. In this version we anticipate the following enhancements:
- Accessibility – to support the WCAG 2 directive to allow computer users with disability or impairment, and keyboard control of JS components.
- Remote Objects – A new class type, analogous to the object class, that can be instantiated and executed on the client.
- JavaScript Editor – Method editor popup to allow consecutive JavaScript: command lines to be edited.
- Omnis DML Emulation – with a new OMNISSQLite DAM, Omnis data files will be converted to SQLite, and DML commands will be mapped ‘invisibly’ to equivalent SQL commands.