Description

Canvas Plugin is a plugin for the 4th Dimension programming language that provides a rich toolbox for drawing objects inside a plugin area and adding interactivity to those objects. Its focus is on being a versatile developer tool, that allows you to create custom user interface controls such as custom buttons, animated menu’s, gantt charts, taskbars etc. It offers a rich set of high-level events with complete programmatic control on the behavior.

When you start working with the plugin, you start with a blank canvas. By calling various drawing commands, you can draw shapes such as lines, rectangles, pictures, text objects etc. You can programmatically retrieve and change all the various properties of each object, such as the colors, line width, font, style and size.

By adding layers, you can group related objects. Layers are like transparency sheets where you can have multiple drawings on top of each other. You can show and hide layers, change their origin and change the way how they are affected by scrolling. For example some layers should not scroll at all or only in the horizontal or vertical direction.

The plugin supports various user events such as mouse-down, mouse-up, double-click, long-click, mouse-enter, mouse-move, mouse-leave, drag & drop, resize, keyboard and timer events. Each object in the plugin area can have its own event handler. This allows you to specify to which events an object should respond and how it should act upon the event. Because everything is under programmatic control, you can make it behave exactly the way you like.

To help you keep track of “what-is-what”, you can assign custom properties to each object. Custom properties can be seen as key/value pairs. You can use them for example to store a primary key, so you can lookup the associated record when a user clicks an object.

Besides working with the plugin area on a form, the plugin also offers an offscreen area which is well-suited for dynamically creating images. It can be used for example to dynamically create graphics for a web-based system, like rollover menu’s. In fact, this is the task the plugin was originally designed for.

In short Canvas Plugin is a toolbox for drawing objects inside a plugin area and adding interactive features to those objects. Its power is that it gives you complete control over the way your plugin area looks and feels.

Features

Here is a short list of the available features:

• Completely customizable plugin area.
• On-screen and off-screen plugin areas.
• Fast, vector oriented drawing.
• Drawing primitives such as lines, rectangles, polygons, texts and pictures.
• Support for native image formats: JPEG, PNG, PDF, SVG etc.
• Support for transparent colors and images (PNG, GIF), shadows, gradients, rotation.
• Object grouping for creating compound objects.
• Support for layers to group related objects and show/hide optional content.
• Fractional scaling (zoom in/zoom out).
• Automatic moving and resizing objects.
• Custom properties assignable to any object.
• Support for 21 high-level events such as mouse-down, mouse-up, double-click, long-click, mouse-enter, mouse-move, mouse-leave, drag & drop, resize etc.
• Complete programmatic control on event handling.
• Drag & drop between plugin area and 4D form objects and vice versa.
• Show/hide scrollbars, proportional scrollbars, adjust scroll speed and scroll position.
• Mouse wheel support.
• Adjustable cursors depending on mouse position.
• Tooltips per object.
• Cascading stylesheets.
• Support for 4D style sheets.
• Support for 4D picture library.
• Basic animation capabilities.
• Export to several graphic formats such as PNG JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PDF (Mac only) and EMF (Windows only).
• A built-in profiler for measuring code execution.
• Support for 64-bits mode on Mac & Windows
• Apple Silicon support
• Compatible with 4D version 18, 19, 20 or higher.

System requirements

Canvas plugin is available for Mac OS X and Windows. It works with the following 4D and OS versions:

• 4D version 18, 19, 20 or higher
• Windows 10 or 11
• Mac OS X 10.13 or higher

Licensing & Pricing

Development license:

• € 150 per platform (Mac or Windows)
• € 250 for both platforms (Mac and Windows)

Deployment (single-user applications):

• € 100 for a single runtime license (Mac or Windows)
  Works with 4D and 4D Volume Desktop.
• € 400 for unlimited single-user deployment (Mac and Windows, annual fee)
  Works with 4D and 4D Volume Desktop.

Deployment (multi-user applications):

• € 250 for 1 to 10 users (Mac and Windows)
  Works with 4D and 4D Server.
• € 400 for 11 to 20 users (Mac and Windows)
  Works with 4D and 4D Server.
• € 550 for 21 users or more (Mac and Windows)
  Works with 4D and 4D Server.
• € 1250 for unlimited multi- and single-user deployment (Mac and Windows, annual fee)
  Works with all 4D variants: 4D, 4D Server, 4D Volume Desktop etc.

Update pricing

Updates from version 2.0 are available according to the following prices.

Development license:

• € 100 per platform (Mac or Windows)
• € 150 for both platforms (Mac and Windows)

Deployment license:

• € 150 for 1 to 10 users (Mac and Windows)
  Works with 4D and 4D Server.
• € 250 for 11 to 20 users (Mac and Windows)
  Works with 4D and 4D Server.
• € 350 for 21 users or more (Mac and Windows)
  Works with 4D and 4D Server.

Customers that have an unlimited license with an annual fee, will receive a free update to version 3.0 as part of their support contract.

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