Crosslight 2.3 Adds Cross Platform Localization Service and Major Stability Improvements

We are truly excited to announce that the ultimate cross-platform development toolset now sports even more features and stability updates. This new service pack update includes a new localizable business template, over 50+ item templates for Visual Studio, dynamic localization service, new template definitions for iOS, major stability updates for Android, support for application-wide single sign-on, and much more.

The Crosslight Project Wizard now includes an additional and noteworthy template, which is the localizable business template. The new localizable business template allows you to change the language of the application dynamically at runtime, thanks to the dynamic localization service. If automatic language is set, when the device’s language is set to the one supported by the application, then the language changes automatically. However, you can also force an application to use a specific language of your choice, regardless of the language setting used by the device. The following screenshots show the improved Crosslight Project Wizard and the running app respectively.

We have also shipped more than 50 templates for Visual Studio, ranging for variety of projects, this includes, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and shared Core project. The templates itself is clear and concise, with instructions inside each template on how to use it. Your development process will be significantly accelerated since you can now quickly add common Crosslight items to your project. Say goodbye to the tedious, error-prone copy and paste.

In addition, Crosslight for Android platform has received major stability improvements, including the support of Xamarin.Android.Support.v4 library, revamped overall lifecycle, elegant rotation handling to ensure that view state is restored without performance degradation, improved tab caching, and reliability of the Android services, such as camera service, location service, social services, and more.

So far, we’ve only touched the surface of what’s revamped in this SP1 release. For a complete list of the updates, make sure you check out the Crosslight 2.3 release notes in our Developer Center page.

All the installers on our site have also been updated to reflect the new bits. Of course, this update is free of charge for customers with existing subscription for Mobile Studio or Premier Studio. Click here to sign in and access your downloads. If you haven’t tried Crosslight today, request a trial now and see how Crosslight transform the way you build cross-platform apps entirely.

Last but not last, we hope you enjoy Crosslight as much as we love building it! Stay tuned for our upcoming video tutorials and hands-on guide to apply these exciting features in your apps!

Cheers,
Nicholas Lie

Webinar: Building Gorgeous Mobile Apps with Advanced Crosslight UI and Services

We’re very happy to introduce the release of our flagship development toolset for Silverlight and WPF, ClientUI 10. ClientUI 10 has now equipped with powerful enterprise reporting services that allows you to author any kind of reports quickly and easily. What’s also great about the enterprise reporting services is also that the reports are completely viewable in Crosslight applications.

Not only that, push notification services introduced in Crosslight 2 takes away developers’ pain of having to tediously configure the necessary configurations to allow push notifications on their apps. Crosslight 2 has streamlined this process into a single unified entry point, starting from registering the device token to the platform service, receiving the device token back and saving them to the WebAPI database, and much more.

The social networking services also allows developers to perform various social network operations such as authenticating with social networks, getting the user profile info, getting list of friends, sharing content, and much more. What’s great about the social networking services, is that services are completely UI-agnostic. You can design any kind of views to use with our social network services and have them in your application, just the way you want it to be.

Watch as Nicholas introduces you to the integrated enterprise reporting services, how to view the reports on Crosslight apps, push notification services for Crosslight and how to send them across multiple devices. Last but not least, the social network services that allows you to perform various Facebook authentication completely with custom UI.

You can also find the recordings to the first and second day of the webinar, in case you’ve missed them. Also, visit our Developer Center to learn more about Crosslight. It contains hundreds of documentation topics, illustrations, walkthroughs, video tutorials, and more. If you have any questions regarding Crosslight, feel free to open up a new thread at Crosslight community forum.

Cheers,
Nicholas Lie

Webinar: Building Data-Aware Apps with Crosslight Enterprise Framework

Building enterprise apps will almost certainly involves data access. Crosslight aims to be the holistic solution you need to build enterprise mobile apps quickly and easily. Therefore, in this release, Crosslight 2 ships with powerful data access that supports the latest Microsoft techonlogies such as WebAPI 2 and MVC 5. To accelerate your development even further, Crosslight 2 took the extra step of creating entity designer extensions for VIsual Studio 2012 and 2013.  The entity designer extensions allow you to create reusable entity models, entity context, entity controllers, and entity services.

Watch as our Chief Technology Officer, Andry Handoko Soesilo, introduces you to the plethora of data access services such as using the entity designer extensions, explaining the concepts of data synchronization and RESTClient for streamlined data retrieval, creating a simple mobile CRM app complete with incremental loading and pull to refresh, and much more.

Also, visit our Developer Center to learn more about Crosslight. It contains hundreds of documentation topics, illustrations, walkthroughs, video tutorials, and more. If you have any questions regarding Crosslight, feel free to open up a new thread at Crosslight community forum.

Cheers,
Nicholas Lie

Webinar: Crosslight 2 Highlights

Crosslight 1 marks a great start for developers jumping into cross-platform mobile development. Built solid grounds, the MVVM pattern, Crosslight paves the way for extensible, maintainable, scalable, testable, and making your code highly reusable to use on four platforms: iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8.

Crosslight 2 introduces an even more comprehensive additions to the powerful toolset to easily create enterprise mobile apps in just a very short time. This includes versatile data access services, beautiful UI components such as the navigation drawer, advanced master detail view, two new templates: business app template and the navigation drawer template. Watch the webinar recording to see how you can leverage Crosslight 2 and take advantage of its powerful features and start developing your own mobile apps today.

Also, visit our Developer Center to learn more about Crosslight. It contains hundreds of documentation topics, illustrations, walkthroughs, video tutorials, and more. If you have any questions regarding Crosslight, feel free to open up a new thread at Crosslight community forum.

Cheers,
Nicholas Lie

Welcoming 2014 With Exciting Product Roadmap

Happy new year to you from all of us at Intersoft! Thank you for being part of the Intersoft community in 2013. Your success means everything to us. Looking ahead, the new year is ripe with possibility. At Intersoft, we resolute to serve you better with improved products and new product category that will truly save development time and cost, as well as providing you with even better, responsive support.

We’re very excited to welcome 2014 with some great product plans and roadmap that we think you will really love. However, before we get into the new year’s roadmap, let’s take a quick recap on the achievements we’ve made during the past year.

2013 Year In Review

2013 was absolutely an incredible year for us! Considered our busiest and most productive year ever, we managed to ship over 400 high quality components across 7 platforms. And for the first time ever, we expanded our product portfolio to 4 new platforms and deliver them at once in a single release. At a glance, all 2013 product plans were successfully delivered, and exceeded much more than the plans.

Here are the list of our top 8 achievements that I would like to share.

• Shipped Crosslight — the industry’s first advanced toolset for cross-platform native mobile apps development supporting iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8
• Delivered 400+ UI components across 7 platforms, covering desktop, RIA, web, and mobile apps development — all packed with comprehensive documentation and tons of samples
• All 40+ ASP.NET components revamped to support latest web standards, HTML5 and CSS3
• Released Reporting lineup for Silverlight, the industry’s first reporting tool offering end-to-end, comprehensive business reporting capabilities.
• Redesigned websites, streamlined account and license management with single sign-on, yielding more compelling and engaging user experiences
• Modernized Intersoft experiences leveraging balanced design aspects that takes account minimalism, content exposure, layout, identity and typography.
• Major product rebranding with the introduction of Premier Studio, the first time in our history as we’re expanding our products portfolio into new market segments such as the cross-platform mobile development industry
• Joined Visual Studio 2013 Launch Partner, releasing a major service pack that updates all components to support Visual Studio 2013, Internet Explorer 11 and Windows 8.1 in timely fashion

2014 Focus — Enterprise Mobile Development Made Easy

In 2014, we will be laser-focused on the cross-platform mobile development tools. Our works in 2013 is just the beginning of our holistic mobile roadmap. Building on the foundations laid in the initial Crosslight release, we’re striving to make cross-platform enterprise apps development even easier and simpler with a multitude of new features, components and services that work reliably across multiple platforms such as iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, and Windows 8.

Our team is currently hard at work creating the next iteration of Crosslight which will make available many functionalities common to line-of-business apps development. Announcing “Crosslight 2”, we will be adding over 200 new features and dozens of new, highly reusable services to the already powerful mobile toolset.

The new Crosslight will be the industry’s first, one of its kind, that lets you create the most demanding business apps that leverage advanced capabilities such as offline data storage, pending changes management, automatic synchronization to cloud, push notifications, user authentication, social network integration and much more. And better yet, all these services can be programmed in a single codebase — not each codebase per platform. So imagine how many months you can shave off from your development time table!

Building fully functional, usable data-driven apps is really time-consuming as there are a lot of things to consider. For examples, your apps need to be “timezone aware” if you have users located in different regions and time zone. Your apps need to handle two-way time zone conversion between the local device’s timezone with the server. Adding to the complexity — data synchronization, offline storage, and data editing — all need to be thoughtfully considered and integrated for them to work in harmony, ultimately producing great apps that are beautiful inside and out. Sounds too much hassles? Fear not — we’ve got it covered!

The new data services in the upcoming release will be built with “timezone aware” enabled by default. Furthermore, it will take account the best practices of building highly scalable enterprise-class apps, and consider every little detail that you might not aware of. All you need is simply consuming the services and customize the settings with a few lines of code, and Crosslight will handle the rest behind the scene.

To summarize the Crosslight roadmap, please take a look at the following diagram which lets you easily overview and compare the existing state of Crosslight with the expanded offering in the upcoming release.

As seen in the diagram above, the upcoming release will be strongly focused on enterprise data services and core mobile services such as discussed above which include entity services, authentication, social network integration and push notifications. In the second release later this year, you can expect more data visualization and user interface components optimized for the mobile apps scenarios.

An important announcement with regards to our release cycle, we will be adjusting the first iteration of the release to the beginning of the year while the second one is planned for the mid of the year. We believe this schedule changes are beneficial to us, our partners and our valued customers as the releases will occur in more appropriate timing for project planning, and more ideal time to market.

This blog post only provides a high level overview of the planned mobile tools roadmap. In the near future, we will post the complete details of the mobile features as well as the roadmap for other platforms such as ASP.NET and Silverlight in our public community forum. Stay tuned for the next announcement.

Last but not least, I hope you liked our upcoming product plans and roadmap. Please feel free to drop your comments or feedback related to the roadmap, or if you wish to see something in our next milestone.

All the best,
Jimmy