New feature 2: Native extension - technology preview!

That's a big request from our users. Basically answers to the use cas: you develop a nice app, requiring a fancy service from the platform (say, the accelerometer API). This fancy service is not yet supported in ELIPS Studio3 Flex Mobile fwk, but you do not wish to wait for its support.
This is not an issue anymore. With the native extension, you have the ability to extend the services implemented by our framework with your own requirements. This gives you much freedom.

How does it work? Simple:
- At development and compile time: you define an AS class representing the new service you want to implement. By putting a meta tag on this service, the compiler will generate skeletons of code in the platform language (here ObjC for the iPhone) for the functions that you need to implement in the platform. You can simply implement them and build them with the platform tools.
- At runtime: the runtime is capable of dynamically checking whether this class has a native implementation. If yes, it will use it, otherwise it will fallback to the AS implementation.

Some more detailed documentation, tutorials and samples will be posted soon.

Other new stuff

Here again we've made several steps to improve performances, so that your applications look more and more like if they were implemented natively.

Additionally, we're bringing a number of new things such as multiline text entry (mob:TextArea in openplug.elips.controls), support for flash.net.Socket, a new flag to enable / disable device implementation for UI Components. And we've fixed the User-Agent for HTTP request, which was hard coded and is now the one from the platform (important for some networks which are filtering data with this information).

And again: a number of bug fixes

Either requested by users, of internally found, we've fixed quite a lot of bugs, progressing towards a more stable version of ELIPS Studio3.

Beta 4: coming in a month - with Mac support!

Finally OS X!

That has to be, by far, the most demanded "feature" of our product: native support for Mac! Bye bye the Windows virtual machines, the complete development flow on your Mac.

Many of you have expressed some questions as to why we've been supporting Windows before OS X. The reason is quite simple: we've got quite some history from our other business, a software suites for mass-market mobile phones called ELIPS Suite, for which our tool set is integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio, addressing customers on Windows environment. This tool set is aimed at building the phone's firmware and user interface. More info on our corporate site.

We've been working for some time on this subject. It is not an easy one, considering our history on Windows, but we can now say that it is in track and on the good direction, and it targets our next beta release, beta 4, scheduled in around a month.

Again, until then VM is your friend...

A Windows toolchain to build an iPhone app?

Even though we've been working heavily on bringing Mac support, we do not forget our Windows users.
As you know, today, building an app for the iPhone requires a Mac, even with our tools. When you're primarily a Windows user, you can use ELIPS Studio3 on your PC, but you still need a Mac to build the final iPhone package.

We've started to work on a pure Windows toolchain, where you can finally build, test and deploy iPhone apps on your Windows PC, without needing to go through a Mac to build the package.

We'll provide this in the next beta release as well, probably without the app signature stage as a first step, as this signature stage is still under study today.