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Category: Technology

THIS IS NOT A DRILL: Poor Interface Design and its Potentially Dangerous Impact

As most of you know, this past Saturday morning, the people of Hawaii got a shocking notification on their smartphones warning of a incoming ballistic missile and that this warning was not a drill. I can only imagine the fear that raced through the minds of more than a million people. This warning, as well all now know, turned out to be a false alarm accidentally set off by a state employee who was attempting to perform an internal test.

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Make Your Own Classes Iterables

In programming, iterators are the mechanisms that allow us to walk all the members of a collection without needing to know in advance how many of them compose such a collection; and for that we can find in Xojo the commands For Each… Next. What are the main differences in comparison to the conventional For… Next?

The first difference is that with For Each… Next we can’t assume that we are iterating the members of the collection in order, as it is the case when using the variable of the conventional For… Next as the Index in order to access a known member of the collection. The second difference is that the iterator will be invalid when the iterated elements are modified, or when we modify the amount of elements in the collection during the iteration process.

By default in Xojo, there are a couple of collections that are iterable: the already mentioned Arrays and also Dictionaries and FolderItem.Children. Wouldn’t it be great to extend this feature so we can add this behaviour to our own classes making them more flexible? The key to making this happen is using the two Class Interfaces already included in Xojo: Iterator and Iterable.

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Xojo and Community Growth in 2017

2017 has been a good year for Xojo! We hit some bumps but we’re ending the year with the much-awaited Xojo 64-bit IDE released in Xojo 2017r3.
Though we didn’t have a XDC in 2017, we’re gearing up for XDC 2018 in Denver in April. This is the longest between conferences in many years and we’re seeing an increase in early registrations. If you are planning on attending, please register soon. We have sold out before!
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Compilers 102 – Parser

At XDC 2016 there was a lot of interest in our Compiler session and LLVM. I’ve summarized a bit about LLVM in an earlier post, but to take things further, we put together this series of blog posts on compilers.

These will all be at a high-level. None of these posts are going to teach you how to write a compiler. The goal of these posts is for you to have a basic understanding of the components of a compiler and how they all work together to create a native app.

This is the second post in our ongoing series on compilers. I recommend that you first read Compilers 101 – Overview and Lexer before continuing.

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Compilers 101 – Overview and Lexer

At XDC 2016 there was a lot of interest in our Compiler session and LLVM. I’ve summarized a bit about LLVM in an earlier post, but to take things further, we put together this series of blog posts on compilers.

These will all be at a high-level. None of these posts are going to teach you how to write a compiler. The goal of these posts is for you to have a basic understanding of the components of a compiler and how they all work together to create a native app.

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The Last Mile: Why Net Neutrality is a Must

During the Obama administration, internet service providers (ISPs) were reclassified as Telecommunication Service Providers.  This meant that they would be treated like phone companies, as common carriers with all the regulation that implies. Prior to this they were classified as Information Providers which clearly made no sense since ISPs provide the network, not the actual content. Most importantly, Net Neutrality prevents ISPs from providing paid fast lanes which would allow companies to pay ISPs to make traffic to their site faster than traffic to other sites.

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8 Ways to Market Your App for Free

Though marketing may not be your forte, there are things you can do that are very effective in promoting your app and building your customer base. You can try some of the paid options and get varying results, but there are many free things you can do that can have a huge impact. We’ve already blogged about using Twitter to market your app for free.

Here’s a list of 8 additional ways your marketing team of 1 can promote your app at no cost:

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The Best Cross-Platform Secret Weapon You’ve Never Heard Of

In today’s world, the only way to be sure you are reaching all your potential customers is to target multiple platforms. But cross-platform development is crazy-hard, right? Perhaps, if you are using tools like Java, Qt, Delphi or Xamarin it certainly can be. But with Xojo, cross-platform apps are simple to create.

In fact, Xojo lets you easily cross-compile desktop apps for Windows, macOS, Linux and Raspberry Pi. Plus, you can use the same Xojo language to create web and iOS apps too (Android coming soon!).

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