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Year: 2018

Upskill Your Best Employees to Citizen Developers

Employee turnover is expensive, time consuming and stressful. But the need for new skills, whether to bolster your existing sales and services or to usher your company into emerging markets, is a constant. You already have excellent employees that “know the ropes” of your business but they don’t always have the skills needed to take those next steps. These employees may be called “power users” or “business analysts”. This is where upskilling comes in, giving rise to the age of the citizen developer. The citizen developer is able to use low-code and rapid application development tools to make apps that improve efficiency or more easily collect or gather data that can benefit the company.

Encouraging and even educating your employees to become citizen developers doesn’t mean eliminating the IT department, it means improving productivity and efficiency with collaboration and innovation. After all, who better to say exactly what the marketing or sales department needs in an app, tool or automation than the department members who will utilize it the most?

This is where Xojo comes in.  Our long history (over 20 years) as an easy-to-use, rapid application development tool makes Xojo an ideal choice for would-be citizen developers.

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Web Services: Xojo Web, at your service

Using Xojo Web to create complete web apps and solutions means not having to learn a bunch of interpreted languages and dozens of ever-changing frameworks. I’m looking at you: HTML, CSS (is that even a language?), JavaScript, PHP, et al. Of course, Xojo Web not only makes it possible to create your own web apps, but it also acts as the perfect middleware that your desktop and iOS apps can communicate with. Learn about APIs and web services with Xojo in the tutorial blog post.

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#JustCode Challenge Week 14 – Marching Band ScoreKeeper

For the final week of the #JustCode Challenge I’ve made an iOS app that keeps the score for high school marching band shows. The ScoreKeeper app lets you add a show or event and then set the scores when they are announced at the end of the show. Though this is for marching band, it can easily be adjusted to keep track of a set of scores for any sort of competition or game.

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Localize Your Edit Menu on Mac

On macOS you may have noticed two special menu items that appear at the bottom of the Edit menu: “Start Dictation” and “Emoji & Symbols”. These menu items are added automatically by macOS provided your Xojo app follows a few simple rules.

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Quick Control Library Tips

When you start using Xojo one of the first things you’ll see is that there are many, many types of built-in controls. The area where you see all the controls is called the Library and each project type (desktop, web or iOS) has its own set of controls.

No matter the what type of project you are creating, learn these tips to make using the Library and finding controls fast and easy.

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#JustCode Challenge Week 13 – Xojo Speed

When Geoff and I were driving around Germany with Christian Schmitz of MBS Software before the MBS Xojo Conference started, the topic of speed limits on the autobahn came up. Christian mentioned than many cars in Germany have the speedometer set to display a speed that is a little higher than what you are actually doing. I have noticed that my Toyota Tacoma shows 70mph on the speedometer when it is really going more like 67.

Geoff wondered if there was a way to determine how accurate your car’s speedometer was and it made me think of a Xojo iOS app I had made a while ago: Xojo Speed.

Run Xojo Speed on your iPhone while you’re driving and it uses the iOSLocation class to calculate the miles per hour or kilometers per hour in a large, easy-to-read display.

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#JustCode Challenge Week 12 – MultiTemp

It’s week 12 of #JustCode and I’m in in Munich, Germany at the MBS Xojo Developer Conference! I’ve never been to Germany and had no idea what the temperature would be, so instead of using the Weather Channel, I found a web API called OpenWeatherMap and built an iOS app to fetch the weather for display in a table. I even implemented the new table refresh feature added to Xojo 2018r2.

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#JustCode Challenge Week 10 – NetTank

For the 10th week of the #JustCode Challenge I took a look at networking. For my project this week I’ve created a networked version of the Combat game, which has two tanks on the screen shooting at each other. The network version allows you to control one tank with the app running on your computer and someone else to control the other tank with the app running on their computer. I call it NetTank.

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