2019 – Page 7 – Xojo Programming Blog

The Klingon Translator App You Definitely Need

Published March 7, 2019 by Paul Lefebvre

I love the new Star Trek Discovery and there are a fair amount of Klingons in it, from time to time. It occurred to me that someone has probably built a web service to translate English to Klingon and if so, I needed to build a Xojo app to use it.

A quick Google search turned up an API by FunTranslations: https://funtranslations.com/api/klingon

It has simple usage where you send along the text in English and you get back a JSON result containing the text translated to Klingon. Here’s the result of my 15 minutes of effort to use this in a Xojo desktop app:

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Binary Magic with Signed Integers

Published February 27, 2019 by Norman Palardy

In binary the high bit (the one immediately following the &b in Xojo code) is the “sign bit”. When it’s set to 1, the value is interpreted as “negative” and when it’s set to 0, the value is “positive”. Meaning that bit is not used as part of the “number” itself.

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Avoiding Common Programming Pitfalls

Avoiding Common Programming Pitfalls

Published February 25, 2019 by Paul Lefebvre

Code doesn’t care whether you are new to programming or an old pro, a citizen developer or the head of engineering, some missteps can catch any of us. Read on to learn some of the most common programming pitfalls and how to avoid them.

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Working with XML

Published February 21, 2019 by Paul Lefebvre

XML can sometimes be a bit confusing, so here are some tips to help you work with XML files.

First, you need to make sure your XML is really XML.

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Me vs. Self

Published February 14, 2019 by Paul Lefebvre

When you add a control such as a PushButton to a Window (or a WebButton to a WebPage or an iOSButton to an iOSView), an instance of the control is created for you and added to the layout. Code that is in the event handlers of a control added in this way can refer to both its own properties and methods as well as the properties and methods of the window.

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How Code One-Liners Can Make Debugging Harder

Published February 12, 2019 by Norman Palardy

A lot of times you’d think that single lines of code, aka “one-liners”, like

if j >= 145 condition then dosomething()

if condition then return

might not have any downsides. I would argue that they do.

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Tip: SQLite in RAM … to improve speed!

Published February 11, 2019 by Javier Menendez

It’s very usual to use encrypted SQLite databases in our Xojo projects where we expect to get the maximum read speed from them. But the truth is that encrypting the data in these databases can introduce a penalty in our queries, both from read and writing/updating data to them. How can we improve this? One technique is the creation of a new in-memory based SQLite database, where we will be able to copy the table (or tables) we are interested in getting the maximum speed possible with. Continue reading to see how to do this.

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Recursion: Emptying a Folder

Published February 4, 2019 by Javier Menendez

Do you need code to delete the files and folders from the selected folder? In that case, there is a technique I propose to you and that is based on recursion. That is, the ability of a function to call itself repeatedly until the task is complete; in this case, the function will call itself every time it detects a new folder/directory inside the designated original folder/directory.

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Web: Create Sliding-Animated Menus

Published January 30, 2019 by Javier Menendez

Sometime ago a Xojo user asked if it is possible to use Xojo Web to create the kind of animated menus seen in several regular websites. After some investigation (and the invaluable help of Greg O’Lone), the answer is: yes, you can do that! If you are interested in seeing how to achieve this, continue reading!

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#If vs. If and Conditional Compilation

Published January 28, 2019 by Norman Palardy

There was a curious question on the forums about what # meant.

And from the way it was asked I could see the asker was thinking “I know what If means but what about that # in front of it?” And that if they knew what the # meant that the entire thing would make more sense.

And that’s a fair thought – except for one problem. The # by itself doesn’t “mean” anything. It isn’t like *, ^, + or – in that sense. It’s not an operator.

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Year: 2019