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Month: February 2015

Deploying iOS Apps Inside Your Company

While the iOS App Store is a great solution for commercial software, not all iOS apps are for public use. If you are building an app just for use inside your company, you won’t want to go through Apple’s app review process (which can take weeks) nor make your app available to the general public. How do you quickly and easily deploy an iOS app just for use by others in your organization?

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Guest Post: Solving Sandboxing Issues and Improving Xojo Apps With Ohanaware’s Sandbox Kit

Sam Rowlands has been developing Xojo apps since 1997. He and his wife, Joy Sha, make up Ohanaware and they have been building award winning apps since 2008, notably Funtastic Photos, HDRtist and Shine. Sam is an active Xojo developer and he also offers App Wrapper, which simplifies the process of preparing applications for submission to the Mac App Store and deploying on web sites, in the Xojo Third Party Store.

What is the App Sandbox and why is it a chore?

The App Sandbox is a great end user security concept. The Sandbox governs what an application can and cannot do. This means that a virally infected word processor, cannot go on to infect other applications nor rampantly damage files on the users disk. It can however affect files which the user has created or opened within the word processor.

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Extending Control Features on Windows

Recently an issue with our Windows MoviePlayer was brought to my attention. Specifically, it was a problem with our Looping feature when using the native player. The bug was unfortunate, but luckily there was a workaround. However, it required a less often used feature of the MoviePlayer control, the MovieController.

When we design a control, whether it’s a PushButton or MoviePlayer, we try to anticipate the most often used features and add them into our product. However, we understand that there are occasions when a certain feature is needed that we may not have exposed. For this purpose we’ve added Handle properties on almost every control. You can use this Handle property, with the right Declare, to access additional features of that control. In some cases though, at least on Windows, a bare bones Handle wouldn’t be enough. In the Windows world our Handle refers to the HWND of the control. In most cases this would be enough, however, we do have a few controls which are ActiveX based. Currently, the native HTMLViewer and MoviePlayer are one of these few ActiveX based controls.

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HP Stream 7 and Xojo

Lately we’ve been talking a lot about our newly added iOS support for Xojo. Considering the popularity of iOS devices, it is understandable why we would be so excited. But iOS devices are not inexpensive.

On a lark, I purchased an HP Stream 7 (Signature Edition, which means no extra “bloatware” was installed) last week from the Microsoft Store. It was on sale for just $80! So what is an HP Stream 7 and how does it relate to Xojo?

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Iterators

One feature that was added in Xojo 2014r3 that I haven’t seen much discussion about yet is iterators. In short, iterators are a way to make classes useable with the existing For Each loop feature.

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