mPainter Gets HTML5 Support

May 22, 2012 Alex Woodie

mPainter, the GUI customization tool that’s part of mrc‘s mPower suite, has been overhauled to support the Web’s latest HTML5 standard. Along with HTML5 support, mPainter gains a host of other new features designed to make it easier to spruce up the look of the automatically generated, Java-based mPower programs.

mPainter plays an important role in the mPower suite. The Web-based product is used to tweak and alter the Java servlet-based GUIs that are automatically generated by mPower, such as by adding graphics, company logos, maps, drop-down boxes, popups, hover boxes, lists, or other visual elements that the customer wants to see on his finished Web app. And while mPainter employs AJAX technology, users don’t need to know any HTML, JavaScript, or CSS; all they need to know is how to drag and drop items on a page.

With the latest release of mPainter, mrc is now supporting HTML5. This should help simplify the process of supporting mPower apps running in multiple browsers. HTML5 support also gives developers access to some smartphone features that typically require a native development effort, such as access to the phone’s acceleratormeter and GPS functions. However, some features, such as integration with the phone’s camera, still require native apps.

Another time-saving feature in mPower is the new history function that allows users to save their previous presentation layers, and protect them from being overwritten. By being able to move back and forth between various snapshots of his screens, the website developer is free to be more creative with his Web page customization effort, without worrying about accidentally overwriting a previous screen. A preview function is also new.

Developers who like to get up close and personal with their HTML will find several new features to their liking in the new mPainter. For starters, this release supports color-coded source code, which will speed up the identification of specific code elements. There’s also a new “revert” feature that prevents syntax errors from being saved upon closing the source code editing session.

And while some things are more quickly done at the source code level, no serious coder is going to complain about the new manual cell-editing feature in mPainter. This function allows developers to alter individual cells by right clicking on the table from the WYSIWYG graphical mode, instead of sorting through thousands of lines of underlying source in text mode.

Chicago-based mrc unveiled the new mPower release last week at the COMMON conference at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California. The software is available now. For more information, see www.mrc-productivity.com.