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Year: 2017

JSON Feed Desktop App

Published June 1, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

Recently, a new syndication format was introduced by Brent Simmons and Manton Reece called JSON Feed. It is an alternative to RSS/Atom to get feeds for blog posts and podcasts. RSS/Atom are XML-based making them complex to work with. As its name implies JSON Feed uses JSON and is much simpler. I’ve shown in previous posts how easy it is to make a web and iOS apps with Xojo to display the feed.

In this post, I’ll show you how to create a Xojo desktop app to display the JSON feed for Daring Fireball in less than 20 lines of code. This app works without changes on macOS, Windows and Linux.

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JSON Feed Web App

Published May 30, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

Recently, a new syndication format was introduced by Brent Simmons and Manton Reece called JSON Feed. It is an alternative to RSS/Atom to get feeds for blog posts and podcasts. RSS/Atom are XML-based, making them complex to work with. As its name implies, JSON Feed uses JSON and is much simpler.

In fact, it is so simple that you can easily make web, desktop and iOS apps with Xojo to display the feed. In this post, I’ll show you how to create a Xojo web app to display the JSON feed for Daring Fireball in less than 20 lines of code.

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Making a Mac App: Comparing Xojo and Visual Studio for Mac

Published May 18, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

At the recent Build conference, Microsoft released the final version of Visual Studio for Mac. As a former Visual Studio developer who left that world for the fun, fast development that is Xojo, I had to check it out to see how it compares to Xojo.

First, if you’ve ever used Visual Studio on Windows before, be aware that Visual Studio for Mac is not the same thing. Essentially Visual Studio for Mac is new branding for Xamarin Studio (Microsoft bought Xamarin in 2016), so Visual Studio for Mac looks and works nothing like Visual Studio for Windows.

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Using a Property as a Constant

Published May 15, 2017 by Norman Palardy

Wikipedia says:

In computer programming, a constant is a value that cannot be altered by the program during normal execution, i.e., the value is constant.

In Xojo we have constants that can be defined in code or added to modules, classes, etc. What you’ll notice about Wikipedia’s definition of “constant” is that it’s a behavior, not a specific type.

There is another way to define a “constant” or “a value that doesn’t change throughout the run of your application”.

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Auto-Launch Raspberry Pi Apps

Published May 15, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

For XDC 2016 I needed a way to demonstrate a Raspberry Pi app that used the GPIO and updated an LCD character display. But I didn’t really have access to a screen that I could use to show the desktop so that I could run the app. And I could not remotely connect to the Pi because I did not have a good way to get it on the wifi network in the first place.

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SoundEx Algorithm

Published May 12, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

Soundex is a phonetic algorithm for indexing names by sound, as pronounced in English. It is commonly used with databases to help with searching and is built-in to many database engines such as PostgreSQL and MySQL. SoundEx is not included with SQLite by default and there may be situations when you want to use it when searching.

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