The latest release of Altova’s mobile app development framework introduces over 18 features with highlights including support for NFC messages, text-to-speech, the ability to read device contacts, flexible options for dynamic tables, and more.

Read more below or check out our quick MobileTogether 3.2 video.

Near Field Communication (NFC)

NFC protocols allow enabled devices to exchange messages when they’re close together – think about mobile payment systems or using your phone as a security key card. MobileTogether developers can now build apps that support sending and receiving NFC messages including text, URIs, MIME media, application records, and more.

Android Beam uses NFC and is now also supported by MobileTogether.

New Actions

Building sophisticated, data-centric apps in MobileTogether is easier than ever with a growing list of actions developers can utilize to power their apps. Adding a new action is as easy as dragging it to an Action Tree and defining any necessary parameters.

In this latest release, we’ve made it possible for your apps to access device contacts, for instance to easily send an SMS or email from your app, as well as read text aloud to users via text-to-speech functionality.

New actions in MobileTogether 3.2 include:

• Ability to access mobile device contacts
• Text to speech
• Wait cursor and optional message
• Actions for date and time pickers: when space makes it impractical to show the default date picker control
• Get file info: date modified, file size, etc.
• View an image full-screen

Enhancements to Existing Actions

In addition to the new actions above, some of the existing actions have been enhanced with more options and flexibility. Updates include:

• 16 pre-defined sounds for common scenarios
• Support for reply-to in emails sent automatically by Server
• Significantly extended scroll-to action: to top/bottom of page or table, specific table row, specific control
• Goto page/subpage via XPath

The ability to specify a reply-to email for emails automatically sent from your MobileTogether Server has been requested by several customers.  This way, if the recipient of the email replies to the message, the reply can be directed somewhere other than to the server that sent it. An example is shown below in the definition of the Send Email action.

New features for tables

• Dynamic columns for dynamic table growth: left to right
• On-demand loading of tables: speeds up loading of large tables significantly

Data centric apps often require the use of tables to represent various types of data. New features add even more power and flexibility to table creation by allowing developers to specify tables with dynamic columns. This way, a table can grow dynamically from left to right depending on the number of instances of an element in the data.

Shown below is the definition of a table with a dynamic Person column, and the resulting scrollable table:

On-demand loading of tables lets you load large scrollable tables in a fraction of the time. You simply specify the number of table rows – known as a chunk – that can be loaded at a time. As the user scrolls to the bottom of the first chunk, the next chunk is loaded. This is seamless to the user but greatly increases performance.

 Additional new features

• Numerous chart enhancements
• Additional predefined button looks: Import, Export, Calendar, Time
• JSON5 support (adds to JSON support)
• Improvements in Browser execution
• Single-thread execution option for MobileTogether Server

Additional features include multiple new options for generating charts and mobile dashboards, support for JSON5 adding to existing JSON support, and more.

Learn more and update

Learn more about these features on our what’s new page and video.

Existing customers can update to MobileTogether 3.2 for free. If you haven’t tried MobileTogether, you can start by downloading the free MobileTogether Designer.