More iPhone Features: URLs and Sound
Our newest update for revMobile adds the ability to launch urls and play sounds in time for your competition entry

by Ben Beaumont

Our development team continue to provide new features for you to play with and add to your competition entry. If you are interested in winning an iPad, the latest update to iPhone adds quite a few much requested items to your toolkit.

Top of the list is launch url. Use this in your app to place voice calls, open map locations, or any other of a multitude of uses. Here is how you would call someone using this feature:

on mouseUp
       launch url "tel:" && field "number"
       put the result into field "number"
end mouseUp 

You can see a step by step lesson on this here.

You can also now play sounds in your app, using a variant of the play command. A single sound can be played once or as a loop, for example you could do:

play soundFile [ looping ]

We have also added beep and the beepSound so that you can sound customised alerts for your user:

on mouseUp
   set the beepsound to specialFolderPath("engine") & \
          "/sound.aiff"
   beep
end mouseUp  

You can work through a step by step lesson on adding sounds to your iPhone app here.

Some other very useful building blocks that have been added include support for the system date and time. Rev has a number of different formats for dates, you can specify which form you want the date returned in.

put the long date into field "long"
put the abbreviated date into field "abbreviated"
put the short date into field "short"
put the english date into field "english"
put the system date into field "system"
put the internet date into field "internet"

There is a lesson on using the date and time in Rev here.

revMobile also now has the ability to convert between different text encodings with uniEncode and uniDecode. You should now be able to implement this in the same way as for desktop Rev, and you can view a lesson on this topic here.

While the development team have been hard at work on the revMobile engine, our web team have not been idle. We have created more lessons for you, as well as begun a new video series with detailed step by step instructions on using specific revMobile features. The revMobile landing site has received a revamp, with all the latest information for you on the progress of this initiative.

We've also added a competition entry form for you. We'd appreciate if you could go and sign up here if you are intending to enter our competition for your chance to win your iPad. Competition entries must be received by April 21st.

About the Author Ben Beaumont is Product Manager for RunRev Ltd.