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Tag: Object-Oriented

Creating a Number Class

In this tutorial I will show you how to create a Number class that can tell you when its value has been actually set, along with other methods to manage how it is used while demonstrating some common object-oriented techniques and features such as operator overloading. You’ll be able to create a Number from an Integer, Double or String.

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Creating your own ComboBox Subclass with Sorted Menu Items

The Xojo ComboBox desktop control is a powerful one. It combines the capabilities of a TextField with the PopupMenu. That means that you can choose from the available options in the associated menu or you can type another value in the ComboBox text field. What about getting the ComboBox to do things not included in the class?

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14 Days: A Beginner’s Gateway to Coding

It’s always a good time to learn something new! And maybe you have some free time on your hands now? We know our screen time is up this year, so let’s put that extra screen time to good use and learn a new skill – programming. If you are going to add programming to your skillset, it’s logical to begin with a language that makes it simple to learn the basics of programming. Let me show you a learning path you can follow over 14 days that is aimed at giving you a confident and capable to start to programming.

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10 Reasons Why You Should Try Xojo

With so many programming languages and development environments around … why you should try Xojo? I could tell you more than 400,000 reasons to just jump-in right away; reasons I’ve heard for over 10 years now from Xojo users around the world that are building all kind of apps, products and solutions in all kinds of fields. Nevertheless, if I really think about, all of these reasons can be condensed into the following 10 main points. Continue reading and I’m pretty sure you will want to give Xojo a try too!

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Unlock the all in one, low-code, cross-platform solution

Like his father, my teenage son loves video games. The single player games where you take a character through some kind of adventure are the ones I like most. These usually have a fair number of AI-controlled enemies that must be defeated. My son, on the other hand, prefers to play against other human beings. When I asked him why, he said, “The AIs are so predictable.” To prove this to me, he took over when I was having trouble defeating a particularly difficult enemy and quickly dispatched him, narrating his strategy as he went and barely being scratched in the process. My son is an elite player compared to me partially because he puts a lot more time into it than I do but also because he loves video games far more than I do.

Just as people have varying levels of skill and interest in video games, the same is true of app development. There are those that are happy to devote enormous amounts of time to learning everything they possibly can. They don’t care how long it takes. They want to have control over everything and are willing to do whatever is necessary to make that happen. I’m so glad those people exist because there’s a lot of great software that might not otherwise have been created without them. I’m not one of those people. I really want to focus mostly on what makes my application unique, abstracted from the nitty-gritty of app development.

That’s why I have always been attracted to tools like Xojo. I am a citizen developer. Of all the job titles I have had over the years, all of them in tech,  none have ever included words like programmer or engineer. I do some software development but it’s just a part of my job. It’s something I do to help me in my work or to help my co-workers.

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Design Patterns in Xojo: Observer, Part II

In previous blog entries we saw how easy it is to implement the Design Pattern Singleton and how we can find the Observer Design Pattern already implemented on several Xojo features by default, greatly simplifying our code and interaction between the objects. Now, as promised, it is time to put it all in practice, creating our own Notification Center: a class that will allow us to share the same unique instance for the entire App (Singleton), and that can use any object in order to register itself for receiving notifications by the observed Control, for one or more message (the notifications themselves).

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Design Patterns in Xojo: Singleton

One of the best things that Xojo offers to programming newcomers is that they can simply jump-in and start to write code. In a matter of a few hours they’ll have a functional app! Nothing new here. (Or for not-so-newcomers, a fast way of creating a functional prototype from a idea).

CandyMachine.pngBut as these users advance in their Xojo skills, they probably will care about coding better and to embrace the OOP way of doing things. After all, Xojo is a modern programming language with Classes, Inheritance, Interfaces and a bunch of the usual OOP paradigms that have much to offer: reusability, better maintainability and a lot of flexibility.

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Methods Overloading: Computed Properties, Setters and Getters

Some years ago, Xojo introduced the ability to use Computed Properties, something that is present in other programming languages too and is based on the use of dedicated methods to assign and retrieve the property value itself. So, in other programming languages, the first of these dedicated methods (or functions), the Setter, is the one invoked every time we want to modify the value of the associated property, while the Getter method is the one used from our code to retrieve the associated value. The Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) concept found behind this feature is Method Overloading. Nevertheless, let’s make clear that Xojo Computed Properties are not methods. They aren’t! But they make our life as developers much easier compared with regular Properties.

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