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Month: April 2019

Using Advanced Twitter Search

Twitter can be a great resource for developers and small business owners looking for new audiences. How do you find that tweet you saw last month from @xojo to that other guy about the graphics property?

Here’s an overview of Twitter’s search capabilities and some tips to get the most out of using the platform to promote your apps.

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Canvas: How to Create Custom UI Controls

Xojo includes a good amount of UI controls available from the Library for Desktop, Web, iOS and Raspberry Pi targets. These are the pieces that allow you to layout the user interface of your apps: properties, methods and events that, when combined, define the specific behavior of the project at hand.

Sometimes, subclassing the available controls is the answer to add specific behaviors you need. But what happen when none of the controls offer what you need, whether visually or functionally? The answer is the Canvas class (for Desktop projects), WebCanvas class (for Web projects) and iOSCanvas class for iPhone and iPad devices. But how do you create your own UI controls from scratch? Read on to learn…

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Speeding up the Layout Editor

For more years than I’d like to admit, the Layout Editor has been slow in terms of dragging controls around. As you add more controls, it gets worse. For web layouts, it’s been even worse. That’s primarily because we have to draw everything for a web layout whereas for a desktop layout, the OS draws the controls for us.

In an engineering meeting, I mentioned a discussion I had with a user about the speed of the Layout Editor and Travis said he had recently been reminded of how slow it was too. While most of the time issues in Xojo are carefully calculated and prioritized for maximum bang for the buck (as we say around here), that’s not always how it happens. After the meeting, Travis decided to dive into the Layout Editor code and see what could be done to speed it up.

The results are pretty remarkable.

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Guest Post: Process and Structure to Control Clutter

Ever been unable to find that document you need for your next meeting?

Have you lost focus while working on one thing because you can’t stop thinking about something else? Feeling overwhelmed? There are several types of clutter: physical, technology, and mental. And that clutter is likely affecting you negatively. 

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