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Month: July 2017

A Better Alternative to PHP

Are you tired of the hassles of creating web apps using PHP? Why not develop faster and smarter with Xojo?

Like PHP, Xojo is object-oriented. Unlike PHP, Xojo has a coherent framework design that is easy to work with; plus the Xojo language is simple and focused.

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First Impressions Matter: 8 Surefire User Interface Design Tips

Your app’s user interface makes the first impression with your user and is vitally important to its success. With today’s modern development tools, it’s easy to create great user interfaces for your app.

Here are 8 proven tips to help ensure you create a user interface that your users will love.

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Big Transitions, Little Effort: One App’s Update to 64-bit

Our goal has always been to let you focus your energy on what makes your app unique. One of the ways we do that is by handling the nitty-gritty details of the various platforms Xojo supports. For example, you don’t have to worry about the differences in how files are accessed on Windows, Linux, macOS or iOS. We take care of that for you.

Saying all this is one thing, however, and delivering it is quite another. We’ve been through some significant technological hurdles over the years. Over the past 12 months we’ve had two big transitions. The first was support for HiDPI (called Retina on macOS and iOS) which made it possible for apps created with Xojo to support high definition screens. For Xojo users, adding HiDPI support was mostly a matter of recompiling their app. If they had pictures or icons, higher resolution versions needed to be supplied but aside from that, it was effortless.

The second big feature we’ve been working on is support for 64-bit. Integers are the issue here and are almost certainly the most common data type used in apps built with Xojo. If you have used the generic Integer type, in theory, building a 64-bit version of your app should be a simple matter of recompiling. That’s the theory. What’s the reality?

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Things to do in Denver while you’re developing

I always say you can’t be on time if you aren’t early and with that in mind here are some things to do in Denver before or after the upcoming Xojo Developer Conference in April 2018 – we’ll keep you very busy during the conference itself!

You probably know Denver, Colorado is the Mile High City, did you also know it’s 19th largest city in the US and the fastest growing city the US? Here are our top 8 things to do in Denver if you like history or nature or music or art or shopping or beer or wine or outdoor activities or, well, you the picture…read on 🙂

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Clear the iTunes Apple Music Cache on macOS and Windows

I love listening to music and have been a happy Apple Music subscriber since it was first released in 2015. Having access to 30 million songs is great even if I mostly just listen to the ones in the “Hard Rock” category (current favorite song: You Don’t Know by Kobra and the Lotus). Unlike some other streaming services, when you listen to a song with iTunes that has not been downloaded to your computer, it does not technically stream it while it’s playing. Instead iTunes downloads the full song to a cache folder and plays it locally from there. This has the advantage of there being fewer stutters as the song is playing, but does mean it takes a moment before the song starts playing the first time. Subsequent plays of the same song are instant, though, since it doesn’t have to download it again which may also save you some Internet data usage. A notable downside to this design is that it also means that these songs are using up space on your drive and with today’s smaller SSDs often every bit of space counts. It doesn’t appear that this space is ever cleared by iTunes, either.

These songs files are saved in a cache folder buried in hidden folders on macOS and Windows, which you can get to manually if you are comfortable with the command line.

Alternatively, you can easily make a quick Xojo app to do it for you.

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