Upgrade Windows Desktop Clients and Standalone Apps

The Digitise Apps software is generally supplied as a download from our web site. Therefore, before you can upgrade to the latest version, you will need to download it from the web site. You, or someone in your organisation, should have received an email, when the Software Licence was purchased or renewed, providing full details of how to download and unzip the software.

The Product Download can be used to upgrade an existing Windows Desktop Client. If your current Client is a Digitise Apps Client or an MX Client v7.0 or later, you can install the latest Digitise Apps Client over your current version. If you have an earlier version of the MX Client, you will need to uninstall it before you install the latest version.

For pre-configured Clients and Standalone Apps the configuration can be upgraded by first upgrading your development PC(s) and then generating the required Client and/or Standalone App configuration installation files from within the latest Digitise Apps App Studio.

For details of how to install the Windows Desktop Client and pre-configured Client and Standalone App configuration files refer to Install Windows Desktop Clients and Standalone Apps.

Existing Digitise apps and MX Windows Desktop apps, v7.1 or later, should continue to work with the latest Digitise Apps Windows Desktop Client and the latest App Server without requiring any changes. This means that after upgrading, you should be able to continue to run existing Windows versions of a Client, together with it's existing apps, and existing Standalone Apps in conjunction with the latest version of the App Server.

You may also be able to do the reverse, i.e. to run apps created with the latest version of Digitise Apps with earlier versions of the App Server, providing that the apps don't contain newer features, introduced since the version of the App Server you are using, that are incompatible with your version of App Server. In addition, if you have an app which was created using MX or Digitise Apps from v10 onwards, you may also be able to run that app using a different version of the Client than that supplied with the product version in which the app was created, e.g., to run a v10.9 Digitise app in a v10.4 MX Client, providing, once again, that the app doesn't include any features which are backwardly incompatible with the version of the Client you are using.

If you are upgrading an MX Windows Desktop Client from MX v7.0 or earlier, you should be aware of the following points:

• The latest Digitise Apps Client has slightly larger buttons than were found in MX v7.0 or earlier, making them easier to use on touch screen devices. However, this means that the space available to display the rest of a form is correspondingly reduced and may result in existing apps no longer fitting on the screen and displaying scroll bars after the upgrade. Consequently, you may want to check any existing apps and adjust the form size/layouts if required.

• If you have used images within Ink Picture Controls, these will now be displayed at their actual size whereas previously they were auto-sized to fit the size of the Control. If you have any apps using images displayed in Ink Picture Controls, you will need to check the display of the image after upgrading and adjust if necessary.

• The Windows Start group from which the Digitise Apps Software is launched has changed to NDL Software Digitise Apps from the previous NDL Software MX or ndl-metascybe MX.

Read the information under Edit Existing apps After Upgrading below for further details about compatibility issues which might arise after upgrading.

As always, when upgrading, we strongly advise you to test all apps in a test environment before you upgrade live systems and users, especially if you want to mix and match components from different versions of the product.

After upgrading your development PCs to the latest version of Digitise Apps, existing Digitise and MX apps can be edited in the latest App Studio as before. Simply open the app in App Studio in the usual way.

The latest Digitise Apps App Studio allows you to build pre-configured versions of both the Windows Desktop Client and the Windows Universal Client and both Windows Desktop and Windows Universal versions of Standalone Apps. You can install and run Clients and apps for both versions on the same device, if required. If you are upgrading from a version of MX which didn't support the Windows Universal Platform (MX v10.2 or earlier) and you have Windows versions of your apps, this now means you can convert your existing Windows apps and Windows Clients to Windows Universal versions instead, for example, to enable you to download Standalone apps from the Microsoft Store. If you wish to do this, see Upgrade Universal Clients and Standalone Apps for more information.