Recently, Xojo CEO Geoff Perlman hosted a webinar about object-oriented programming. Also, Greg O’Lone hosted Xojo iOS Projects: Unlocking the Magic of Auto-Layout and Constraints that you can watch anytime from YouTube. Upcoming topics include Developing Android Apps with Xojo and A Deeper Look at Android.

Find all upcoming Xojo webinars listed at the Xojo website, scroll down to see recent webinars that you can watch on-demand. Check out the Xojo YouTube channel to watch all our previous webinars and find hundreds of other Xojo-related videos.

Your growth and success as a Xojo user is a priority to us. If you have a suggestion for a specific webinar topic or are interested in participating as a guest speaker, please reach out to us. See you at the next Xojo webinar!

William Yu grew up in Canada learning to program BASIC on a Vic-20. He is Xojo’s resident Windows and Linux engineer, among his many other skills. Some may say he has joined the dark side here in the USA, but he will always be a Canadian at heart.

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• XDC 2023 Playlist
• XDC 2023 Keynote Address
• Multiplatform Madness – Paul Lefebvre
• Getting to XAML Islands – William Yu
• Android Activation – Travis Hill
• Android Hands-On Training
• Microservices with Xojo – Ricardo Cruz
• Ask the Xojo Engineers Panel
• Graphic Charts Beyond Web – Javier Menendez
• Design Patterns For the Patternless – Marc Zeedar
• Creating a Multi-Language UI For Your Xojo Apps – Jim Meyer
• Extending Xojo with the MBS Plugins – Christian Schmitz
• Panel Discussion – The Future with Artificial Intelligence
• Continuing the AI Discussion – Yousaf Shah
• Web 1.0 to 2.0 Migration – David Cox
• Making Everything the Same – Bob Gordon
• JSON – Your Best Friend – Stefanie Juchmes
• From Desktop and Web to iOS Lands – Javier Menendez

Please note that if materials, such as example projects, are available there will be a link in the video description. Not all sessions have materials available.

Recently an MVP brought up that they don’t like the policy of automatically closing Issues when there is no action for 2 years; they explained that if a case was verified it should stay open. All of the other MVPs agreed and threw out possible solutions, which led to a productive discussion. The ideal solution was that Xojo would re-verify the case and close it if it is no longer relevant. We continued evaluating the matter internally and going forward – at the suggestion of the MVPs – cases will no longer auto-close. Instead they will get the “Needs Review” label, we will review them and close them if they are no longer reproducible.

We appreciate the time everyone puts in to let us know if they encounter issues in Xojo, this helps us continue to improve Xojo. If you ever have anything you want to discuss or offer feedback on please reach out to any of us, including the Xojo staff or the MVPs, via PM on the Xojo Forum.

William Yu grew up in Canada learning to program BASIC on a Vic-20. He is Xojo’s resident Windows and Linux engineer, among his many other skills. Some may say he has joined the dark side here in the USA, but he will always be a Canadian at heart.

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There is no shortage of things to see, do, eat, drink and experience in London. There is something to appease every interest – from history to food, fashion, music, the arts and everything in between. Having so much extracurricular options makes London the ideal city to host the Xojo Developer Conference.

XDC will take place from Wednesday, April 26th through Friday, April 28th at the Hilton Euston. With London being such a large city there’s no shortage of hotels. We chose this hotel because it had the right amount of meeting space and availability, is in a very accessible location and we’ve stayed there before (as recently as last week!) and it’s been positive, comfortable and the staff is friendly and helpful. There are a lot of options for food in the area, as well as coffee and breakfast, it’s just a 2 minute walk to Costa and Pret a Manger.

The rate the hotel is offering our group includes both breakfast and VAT, however, if this hotel is not in line with your budget, take a look on Google Maps- there are several hotels in the area. If you are traveling with kids, the Hilton Euston does offer family rooms, you can find those via their main booking site or on Hotels.com.

Many of you have asked for a blog post listing things to do in London and there are no shortage of those already in existence, I won’t reinvent the wheel:

• First time in London? Start here.
• Get Tickets to the London Theater
• London Hop On Hop Off Tour & Thames Cruise Information
• See what concerts are coming to London – The Flaming Lips, Blue October and Postmodern Jukebox are all performing the weekend after XDC
• 101 best shops in London
• Best day trips from London
• London Natural History Museum
• National Gallery – See Monet, Manet, Van Gogh and more!
• The British Museum
• Tate Britain
• Tower of London
• List of Museums in London
• London’s Parks
• Film locations in London
• List of guided walking tours
• Public transportation information – the stations close to the hotel are Euston, Euston Square and King’s Cross/St. Pancras

If you are a Harry Potter fan, add these to your list:

• Blog Post with details about the Harry Potter Tour
• Harry Potter Tour Information
• Tip: Check out the Harry Potter store and brick wall at King’s Cross Station

For something random, if you like optical illusions check out Twist Museum on Oxford Street. It’s not free, like many of the museums in London, but it is quite interesting and doesn’t take too long. A nice break if you’re visiting Selfridge’s for some shopping!

As you can see there is no shortage of activities and entertainment in London, this list could be so much longer! We have an exciting 3-day conference planned with great sessions and the whole Xojo Team is looking forward to seeing everyone. We hope you will join us – save on your registration when you sign up by February 14th!

William Yu grew up in Canada learning to program BASIC on a Vic-20. He is Xojo’s resident Windows and Linux engineer, among his many other skills. Some may say he has joined the dark side here in the USA, but he will always be a Canadian at heart.

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The environment at XDC is one of a kind. As Marc Zeedar said of the Nashville Conference in xDev Magazine, “Xojo itself is a unique product and the community is special; we really are a family. That’s evident at events like this and it’s a connection you just can’t form online as easily. I am looking forward to whatever comes next.”

Attending an XDC you’ll find everyone, including the Xojo Team, is approachable, willing to help and eager to hear about how you use Xojo. Karen Bintz has attended XDC multiple times, she said, “I’ve found this to be one of the most open groups of developers that I’ve ever encountered. At the company level all the way up through the CEO and the other developers who are attending are all very approachable, very willing to help and have discussions. It’s a great environment!”

Another multi-year attendee is Kem Tekinay, whose popular sessions range from MemoryBlocks to Text Encodings, said “The benefit of the XDC is not just in the sessions. Those are very valuable, to be sure, as you gain information and perspective from experienced professionals. It’s not solely in the unfettered access to the Xojo engineers who are eager to share their vast knowledge of the IDE, language, and direction of the product. Perhaps more important than these are the fellow attendees, your colleagues, who arrive as strangers and leave as valuable friends. The collective experience of these seasoned pros is unmatched and irreplaceable.”

Call for Speakers

We are now accepting session proposals for XDC London. If you have ever thought about presenting at a conference, this is your chance, plus all speakers get a 50% discount on their conference ticket! Send your proposed session topic and short description to xdc@xojo.com on or before January 10th, 2023.

Why become a XDC speaker?

• Boost your resume or CV with presentation experience.
• Share a tip or helpful topic that you think others can benefit from.
• Detail your experiences so others can learn from your success (or mistakes).

Pricing

Registering early has many benefits: it guarantees you a spot, it helps us with planning and it gets you the best price. For this conference we are introducing registration at our lowest price yet. All 3 days, including lunch, dinner, sessions, evening events, and session videos, is $475 now through December 31, 2022. After that time the price increases, full price is $700. Register now!

Accommodations

The conference will take place at the Hilton London Euston. This is conveniently located a few minutes walk from St. Pancras, so if you’re coming to London via the Eurostar you won’t have far to go. It’s also very easy to get to via the Underground from Heathrow and other airports. We have an arranged rate of £229/night, which does include breakfast, and though you do not have to stay at the conference hotel, we do recommend it. The booking link will be available soon.

Getting to London

If you’re coming from Europe, flights are affordable to get to London. To make it easy here are the flight prices during our date range from a few major cities:

• Amsterdam: $138
• Berlin: $102
• Frankfurt: $126
• Brussels: $113
• Paris: $85
• Dublin: $65
• Belfast: $45
• Madrid: $89
• Vienna: $109
• Salzburg: $113
• Rome: $101
• Stockholm: $84
• Prague: $124
• Lisbon $84
• Oslo: $67
• Athens: $120

To give you some idea, Eurostar (return) from Paris is $127 and from Brussels is $116.

From North America, there are many nonstop options. Austin, for example, now has two nonstop flights (on British Airways and Virgin Atlantic) that are around $700. Some North American options to consider:

• New York: $370
• Boston: $551
• Atlanta: $684
• Houston: $638
• Los Angeles: $620
• Chicago: $488
• Vancouver: $652
• Montreal: $593

Registration

Registration for XDC London is now open! There is a discussion on the forum about it here. We will be updating the schedule soon with more information once sessions are ready to announce, etc. In the meantime if you have any questions please write us and xdc@xojo.com. Hope to see you in London!

Last week while traveling in London I hosted a Xojo meetup. This was a social event where local developers could meet, share ideas, ask questions and get to know each other. Many of us who attended the Xojo Developer Retreat in Nashville were excited we got to see each other twice in such a short timeframe.

Though a small gathering, which was slightly affected by the possibility of train strikes, it was refreshing to get the opportunity to chat with everyone there. Most people were attending locally, but Xojo Engineer Javier Menéndez flew over from Valencia, Spain and MVP Jérémie Leroy attended from Paris, France. We got a lot of great feedback, the most popular being that there is a lot of enthusiasm to finally host a London Xojo Developer Conference. All I can say at this time is… we hope to! I had a great time getting to know everyone and hope to do another meetup again soon somewhere in the world!

Day one of the conference began with breakfast and Geoff’s keynote. He talked about many of the things that happened at Xojo since the last conference, such as 302 new features, 286 changes and 1400+ bug fixes. He also talked about Android and the Bug Bash, which are summarized below:

Android – When we showed Android at the last XDC it was essentially just a proof of concept. We had three possible routes we were going to take in terms of code compilation and had not even tried the first one. We ultimately went with plan B, which worked as expected. We are now feature complete for the first Android release and are rapidly fixing bugs. More on Android was discussed by Xojo Engineer Travis Hill during his session, The ABC’s of Android.

Bug Bash – We spent the month of August doing a Bug Bash and focused on different bug criteria than we usually focus on. We typically focus on the overall impact surface and bugs that we know will impact nearly everyone in a way that can’t be worked around get the highest priority. We realize that there are some bugs that do not affect many people but are very painful for those they do affect. And that is specifically where we wanted to focus our efforts with the Bug Bash this year.

The Bug Bash gave our engineers an opportunity to work on parts of Xojo they usually don’t work on making them more comfortable working in those areas. This increases our coverage in terms of who can work on what. In fact, today more of the team is comfortable working in different parts of Xojo than ever before. Most of the engineers have worked on the compiler, for example. We felt like this Bug Bash went really well and going forward we will dedicate 2 weeks per cycle to focus on fixing those types of bugs (mentioned above) when we look at what to focus on.  

Many other topics were covered in the keynote, like the Xojo community, Xojo’s participation in the GitHub Student Developer Pack, Xojo users, our design strategy and the Xojo product roadmap.

The rest of the morning continued with a session from Paul Lefebvre about how Xojo is made, followed by William’s session about the Xojo framework.

After lunch, we heard sessions from experts in the Xojo community. Always an interesting subject, Jim Meyer talked to us about using machine learning in Xojo apps. Kem Tekinay gave an interesting talk about using MemoryBlocks. Xojo Engineer Ricardo Cruz talked about the WebSDK.

We ended the day with two non coding sessions – Amy Barnes talked about the legal side of programming and Yousaf Shah discussed things you can do to improve your business other than coding. You can review the full sessions list and descriptions of all of the sessions here.

After sessions, it was time to go out on the town! We had a nice dinner at The Stillery, right in the midst of the craziness that is the Nashville Broadway area. After dinner a group headed out to one of the local honkey tonks to enjoy some live music!

Only morning sessions on day two when we heard from Christian all about MonkeyBread Plugins, his session gave some inspiration to Tim Dietrich, read about that here. Then Derrick Donnelly gave a very interesting talk about building digital forensic apps with Xojo (watch out for your fridge!) and the educational portion of the conference wrapped with Xojo Engineer Javier Menendez talking about integrating WooCommerce into Xojo apps.

We had lunch at a local diner, appropriately named The Diner. Then it was time for some fun – we visited an Escape Room (The Escape Game)! We split into three very competitive teams and entered the themed rooms where we had to “escape” by following clues and solving puzzles before the time ran out. Since we are all excellent problem-solvers, all of the groups amazingly made it out before the time ran out and none of the attendees or employees are still there. Everyone who particiapted really enjoyed it so we may do this type of activity at a future event.

It was really nice to get back to an in-person event and we look forward to doing more! Though we don’t have any plans to announce yet for the next conference, we are hosting a Xojo social meetup in London on November 9th, so if you happen to be there please come by and say hi!

William Yu grew up in Canada learning to program BASIC on a Vic-20. He is Xojo’s resident Windows and Linux engineer, among his many other skills. Some may say he has joined the dark side here in the USA, but he will always be a Canadian at heart.

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We love to share Xojo tips and tricks! Please write us if you have something to share.

In addition to the 100 fixed issues, many more issues were reviewed and closed for other reasons. For example, issues were closed because they were caused by errors in the user’s code, they were a problem in the OS, or they were duplicates of another issue, etc.

If an issue you nominated was not fixed, it will still be evaluated at some point. Over the next week the Bug Bash label will be removed from cases and we will be adding a to them so we can keep track of what issues are important to you. Going forward please use the to let us know what issues affect you.

We will be talking more about our long term plan for addressing bugs at the Xojo Developer Retreat.

The system brings a lot of improvements and more visibility, but there are some changes. Some users have asked “how do I find the bugs I have reported” or “how do I search for an issue number” and if you haven’t used this system, those may not be obvious.

Here are some tips for using Issues:

When do I use Issues?

Use Issues to let us know you have a bug or feature request for Xojo, the Xojo documentation, our website, or an example project. Discussing these things on the forum can be helpful but in order to officially let us know about a problem, please create a new issue.

For Customer Support, please contact us via email at hello@xojo.com. Contact Customer Support for general questions about licensing, questions about your account, technical support, etc. If you’re not sure, write us, we are here to help and usually respond very quickly.

How do I search for a specific issue?

If you are trying to find an issue by the issue number make sure you put “#” before it. For example, if you’re looking for issue 69360, make sure to type it in the search bar like this:

If you forget to type in the #, your search will not return any results.

To link to a specific issue, use https://www.xojo.com/issue/<issuenumber>.

How do I create an issue?

Click “New Issue” to create an issue. When you start typing in the title field, you’ll see a list of possible matches populate as you are typing which is helpful to see if your issue already exists.

How do I find the issues I have created?

There are many options for searching. If you click inside the search field, you’ll see a pop-up menu with criteria you can choose from like Author, Label, My-Reaction, etc.

To find the issues you created, perform this search using the popup menu: Author = [Your Username]. For example, the search below will find the issues I have created.

You can search for your issues or those created by other users. Keep in mind that Issues uses the same username as the Xojo Forum.

What do I do if my issue already exists?

If you are searching for a problem that you’re experiencing and find that an issue already exists, please add a thumbs up. If you have additional information, you can add a comment by scrolling to the bottom of the issue.

If your information should be kept private please check the checkbox at the bottom: This note should only be visible to Xojo.

How do I bring more attention to an issue?

If there’s an issue you feel needs more attention than others, you can click the thumbs up button to upvote it. Conversely, if you feel there’s an issue that should get less attention, you can downvote it.

Be aware that the more you upvote issues, the less your votes matter. The same is true of downvoting issues though upvoting and downvoting have independent impact. In other words, upvoting several issues doesn’t change the impact you have when you downvote issues and vice-versa.

How do I find the issues I have added a to?

To see what issues you have added a to, search for: My-Reaction = 👍

How do I see the top feature requests from users?

You can search by Popularity using the dropdown menu to the right of the search field to sort your results. It is important to remember that the Popularity list is not our Roadmap.

Note: If you do a search that you like, add a Bookmark to quickly go back to it in the future.

How do I view my recent searches?

Click the icon to the left of the search bar to see a list of your recent searches:

How do I reopen a closed issue?

If you are the original author of an issue you can close and re-open it yourself. You do not have to ask Xojo to do it. If you are not the author and want to re-open it, just leave a comment on the issue to let us know that it still affects you and you’d like it re-opened. Then either Xojo or the original author will re-open it for you.

Does Milestone mean a feature will be coming in that specific milestone?

Just because something has a Milestone listed, that is not a guarantee that it will be fixed or added in that milestone. It means that it is an issue we are considering for that release.

If you want to read more about issues, check out this page in the documentation. Do you have other tips for using Issues? Please share on the Xojo Forum.

The Xojo MVPs give us regular feedback on issues affecting the community at large – sometimes that is about a new feature, early testing of a release or more general matters. Recently the MVPs emphasized to us that bugs that don’t affect a lot of users, but can be really annoying to a small group of users, don’t get much attention. We talked about how to best address some of these issues and since we haven’t done a Bug Bash in a while, we decided it was time to do one.

Nominating a Bug for the Bug Bash

Starting now, each user can nominate up to 10 bugs to be fixed during the Bug Bash. You don’t have to nominate them all at once, we will accept nominations through August 31st. To nominate a bug, post this exact language as a comment on the case(s) you wish to nominate in Issues: [BugBash2022Nominee]. Starting in August, our system will add a Bug Bash label to make it easy to find them.

If you find that a case is already nominated with the Bug Bash label, do not add it again. Per usual, if the case affects you, add a “thumbs up” so we have some idea of how many users are affected by a particular bug. Please note that Feature Requests will not be considered for the Bug Bash.

Not every case that is nominated will be fixed. There are a multitude of reasons for this, but each case nominated will be evaluated and we’ll let you know the outcome.

We hope you’ll participate in the Bug Bash. No case is too old, too small or too esoteric! Submit your nominations today!

Since we know you all love seeing stats, I wanted to share some from the survey:

• 85% of Xojo users are satisfied
• 71% have recommended Xojo to someone else
• 60% primarily use the current release of Xojo
• 40% primarily make apps that they sell
• 28% primarily make apps for themselves
• 24% primarily make apps they (or their coworkers) use at their workplace
• 29% use the Xojo Forum
• 87% have had a positive experience using Issues, our new bug reporting and feature request system
• 74% have had a positive experience using the new documentation
• Target platform breakdown: Windows (75.95%), macOS (75.11%), Web (31%), Linux (28%), iOS (20%), Pi (18%)
• 25% have contacted Xojo Support in the last 12 months

We really appreciate everyone who took the time to fill out this survey. We get feedback from users in a variety of ways and the annual survey is so valuable in highlighting concerns, letting us know what you thought we got right, and bringing all kinds of things to our attention. If you did not receive the survey, please check your email settings and make sure you are opted in to our emails so you’ll receive future surveys.

Dana Brown is Xojo’s Director of Sales & Marketing. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Communication and a Master’s degree in Advertising. Having worked in the marketing field for almost 20 years, primarily in the technology sector, she has extensive experience in everything from digital marketing to search engine marketing, content creation, website development, event planning, brand development, advertising and more.

One project that was just shared with me was from Tim Dietrich, a Xojo user who has spoken at our user conferences (see 2018 presentation and 2019 panel). Late last year Tim shared that he was working on a project that could get Xojo in front of a new audience and he’s blogged with some updates along the way. Yesterday he released SuiteTransmit, which is an application for NetSuite developers to monitor files they are working on and when a file is changed, it is automatically uploaded to the File Cabinet.

About the project and development process, Tim commented:

I developed SuiteTransmit so that my NetSuite development work would be more efficient, and so that I could use my preferred development tool (BBEdit). When I started working on the app, I had a basic idea of what I wanted it to do and how I wanted it to work, but I wasn’t sure what it would take to build it. 

The first version of the app (which was essentially a proof-of-concept) was a Xojo console app. It monitored files in a specific directory, and when a change was detected, the updated file was uploaded to NetSuite via a custom API. It worked, and I immediately felt more efficient. That was encouraging, and the development process was very fast. That’s one of the things I like about Xojo: You can go from a concept to a working solution in no time at all.

Then I realized that the console app approach wasn’t ideal, especially when it came to launching the app, passing parameters via the command line, and so on. So I took some of the code I had developed in the console app, and repurposed it in a Xojo desktop app. That was extremely easy to do. I then improved the interface a little, and added support for configuration files (so that I could use the app when working on multiple projects). It quickly started to feel like a “real app.” And I have to admit, as geeky as it sounds, it was cool to see my app’s icon in the macOS toolbar.

That was all back in November of last year, and I’ve been using the app ever since then. It has absolutely been a game changer for me. My NetSuite development work is now much more like the Web development work that I’ve been doing for years. SuiteTransmit empowers me to use a development approach and workflow that I’m familiar with. And because I can now make changes to my apps more quickly and efficiently, I’m much more likely to experiment and try new development techniques.

At that point, I decided that I’d make SuiteTransmit available to other NetSuite developers. I figured that if the app was helping me that much, then it might help others, too. But before releasing it, I needed to test it on Windows, and ensure that it worked properly. That was important because, based on what I know about the NetSuite development community, most developers use Windows-based PCs. During testing, there were some weird differences that I found, and they seemed to be with Windows itself (and not anything that Xojo was doing). Regardless, I was impressed by how easy Xojo made it to get the app working on both platforms. 

A lot of people ask me why I give so many of my development tools away for free. I do it for a number of reasons, but the main one is that I figure that if someone else can benefit from them, and if they make another developer’s work even a little easier, then that’s great. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” as the saying goes.

Also, I don’t feel the need to monetize these things. It’s not what I do, or what I want to do, or what I’m good at. I develop custom software. Period. That’s where I’ve found joy and success.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, we love to share what Xojo users are making! We always encourage you to add your projects to the Showcase or reach out to hello@xojo.com anytime to talk about writing a blog post about your app!

Through the years of XDCs, attendees expressed how the sessions are great, but said over and over again that the true benefit is the discussion over a meal, the quick chats in the hallway or what they learned while sitting in the hotel bar with a group of Xojo users. See our past conference highlights videos to hear what attendees said – 2019, 2018, 2016, 2015. After having to (sadly) cancel multiple conferences in recent years, we wanted to get something in-person on the schedule. Choosing Nashville again feels a bit full circle, since we were days away from hosting XDC there in 2020 when the pandemic forced us to cancel.

Some of you have asked why we’re calling this event a retreat rather than a conference. We decided to call it a retreat to signify that we are emphasizing the part that attendees over the years has told us was the best and most beneficial part of XDC, the time spent with other users – networking, troubleshooting and building relationships. We are still going to have excellent sessions from Xojo and the community, but we are also going to find ways to ramp up the “hallway talk” opportunities.

The Hyatt Centric hotel is higher priced than hotels we have held previous conferences at and there are a few reasons for that. First, we want to hold conferences at a location within walking distance to local attractions and restaurants so you won’t need to rent a car or rely on hiring transportation. Second, September is a beautiful time of the year to visit Nashville. And third, in general, hotel prices are higher as hotels try to recover from the pandemic. To counter the higher hotel price, we lowered the event registration cost. Plus, there are a number of lower cost hotels (or maybe AirBNB) in the area that you can stay at while still attending all the retreat events. You can always save even more by presenting, Xojo is offering free passes for conference speakers!

If you want to meet the Xojo Team and community members, attend some great sessions, network, collaborate, have fun and enjoy Nashville, please join us at the Xojo Developer Retreat. Tickets are discounted by $100 through May 15th. Register early to save money and help us plan the best Xojo conference! We hope to see you there!

It is really disappointing to have to do this again. One of my favorite things about my job is planning these fun events to get developers together. Unplanning a conference is now my least favorite thing to do; we already had our flights and hotels booked, so it felt like it was going to happen. Sessions and speakers were lined up. Evening event planning was in process. It was going to be an awesome event. I’d like to thank all of those who submitted sessions, it’s a lot of work to put those together and we really appreciate it!

When travel becomes more reliable, we will rebook the conference. In the meantime, we plan on holding a virtual event in the spring so we can tell you about all of the exciting things going on at Xojo. We hope to see you at a future Xojo event!

New Xojo 2021r3

This latest update adds a number of exciting new features and improvements, including the ability to build and debug native apps for the Mac from Windows and Linux, Dark Mode support on Windows and new encryption features, like BlowFish and TwoFish. Read more about what’s in the new release. There’s never been a better time to get Xojo!

Android

Because Android is a new platform and this is a special pre-release, a current Xojo license is needed to participate in testing. You can build for Android using a Xojo Pro or Xojo iOS (soon to become Xojo Mobile) license. Testers can download the pre-release in the Testers channel in the Xojo Forum.

Xojo Storewide Sale

Save 20% in the Xojo store today through Monday, November 29th. No coupon required, discount will be automatically added in the store!

• New Xojo Licenses – All new Xojo licenses are on 20% off!

• Xojo Renewals – Renew now and get 20% off! Renewals give you access to Xojo updates for the next year (or 2 years), you’ll get 2021r3 which includes the ability to compile for Mac from Windows and Linux, Dark Mode for Windows and hundreds of other improvements!

• Upgrades – Get 20% off an upgrade to Desktop, Pro or Pro Plus! Upgrade for access to more features and 1 year of access to new releases like Xojo 2021r3!

• 3rd Party Products – 20% off plugins and add-ons from the community! Using third party software is a great way to expand Xojo’s functionality and support fellow Xojo developers!

As we go into the week of American Thanksgiving & Native American Heritage Day, Xojo is thankful for its dedicated team. They go above and beyond in developing and supporting our product and users. With that in mind, this year will be our last time participating in Black Friday. We want our team and everyone who celebrates this time to spend it with friends and family.

As always, all Xojo purchases are covered with a 90-day money back guarantee. 

Xojo Developer Conference Deal

With XDC 2022 London coming up quickly (March 30 – April 1, 2022), it’s time to start planning your trip! Buy one XDC ticket during the Black Friday sale and we’ll email you a 20% off coupon for a second ticket.

Auto-Renew

Black Friday falls on different dates each year, but if your license is set to auto-renew during the sale this year, you don’t need to do anything. Your auto-renewal will process with the 20% Black Friday discount.

*Xojo Cloud is not included in the sale.

Shop now!

Developer Tools

piDog DataView is a fast and flexible list viewer and includes one year of updates.

Markdown Parser for Xojo is a class that allows you to implement the ability to parse Markdown source text into HTML + the provided CSS styles, so it can be presented on the fly over an HTML control for its use “as-is”, as a starting point for invoices, reports, templates or document conversion.

If you don’t have anything from Monkeybread Software, then this is a great deal for you! Everything is 20% off from the Complete Plugin Set, which includes 54,000+ functions, to DynaPDF for creating and editing PDF documents and more.

Mime Parser is a class for parsing emails.

The OMP Plugin allows you to easily parse Microsoft Outlook Structured Storage (.MSG) files cross-platform from Xojo.

Also offered is a Spell Checker Class to easily spell check text.

User Interface

ARWaitingView is a class to prevent the user from navigating the interface while something is downloading or doing a long process.

AXControlGrid is a complete and powerful Xojo desktop UI component for macOS and Windows that it makes possible to put Canvas-based controls in a Page or a series of Pages of a given size and, optionally, their associated captions.

AXImageCanvas greatly simplifies the task of displaying a Picture with the ability to correctly display the image maintaining its original aspect ratio, and keeping the full resolution of the picture and reference to the original FolderItem.

AXNumValidatedTF is a Xojo TextField subclass (32/64 bits) for Windows and macOS allowing the input validation of a defined numeric range, using the system Locale settings for decimal and grouping text formatting.

Antonio Rinaldi offers Doughnut, which is an extension for iOSGraphics to draw circular graphs. Additionally, iOSTableViewExtended is a subclass that adds useful features including: swipe to reload, table header and footer, customer section header and footer, contextual menus, side index, TextEdit fix and more.

GraffitiSuite All Access, Desktop and Web are on sale! They are a collection of custom components for Xojo Desktop and Web.

MBS ChartDirector lets you create professional charts in Xojo, with 30 chart and gauge types.

RubberViews from Match Software maintains the place and relative size of every control when a Window or Container Control is resized. They also offer Window Placement and Screen Extensions that are modules that let you manage windows with greater control.

Database

DataViewer Component is a collection of objects for Xojo that can easily incorporate into your own projects to give SQL Query and DML functionality for SQLite and MySQL databases along with Data Export facilities. Full source code edition also available.

The MBS SQL Plugin is an alternative database interface to Xojo that gives access to SQL databases including Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, DB2, Sybase, Informix, InterBase/Firebird, SQLBase, MySQL, PostgreSQL, ODBC and SQLite. Also available is the MBS SQLite Extension is a plug-in for cubeSQL Server, a plug-in for SQLite Manager (sqlabs) and an extension for SQLite that you can use in all SQLite-based database engines, including the SQLiteDatabase class in Xojo.

SQLVue is the fast and easy way to manage your SQLite databases.

Distribution

App Wrapper from Ohanaware simplified the process of preparing applications for submission to the Mac App Store and deploying on websites. Get a 30-day or a 1 year single user or team update plan during this limited time offer.

BoxedApp Packer helps Xojo developers prepare a single executable file that contains all required files a Xojo application needs.

The GuancheMOS plug-in is a serial number creation and validation Engine. Also available is GuancheID, the easiest way to get a unique ID for macOS and Windows based computers, so you can use it in combination with GuancheMOS or your own software licensing scheme to make sure your software only runs on the computer the license has been generated for.

Quick License Manager protects your Xojo Windows application with licensing for trials, perpetual or subscription-based licenses.

Learning

AprendeXojo has 2 Spanish-language ebooks in the store available for $20 each during the sale: Programación Multiplataforma Xojo and SQLite.

xDev Magazine is an independent bimonthly publication focused on educating Xojo users through instruction, tutorials and programming. Score a 1 year subscription during the sale for just $40!

Shop Now

The Xojo Extras store has something for every kind of Xojo developer, whether you are learning something new or looking to save some time implementing something tricky. Take a look now to see what can help make your development life easier! The Xojo May Sale runs until midnight (CT) Friday, May 7th.

Xojo 2020 Release 2 is available for download now. Xojo is free to use for learning and development. For information on pricing and licensing options, please visit our store.

There are numerous ways to communicate with Xojo, so here’s how to reach us:

Customer Service

If you have a question and aren’t sure where it should go – reach out to our friendly Customer Service team at hello@xojo.com. We guarantee a response within 48 hours but it’s usually much, much faster. We understand that the issues you’re running into are important to you – often even time-sensitive (we’ve been there!), so we strive to get you the answer you need as fast as we can.

Submit a Case

Got a bug or feature request? Please submit a case for it in our Feedback app (make sure you have the latest version), this is our feedback tracking system for Xojo. Creating a case is easy – first search to see if your issue already exists. If it does, you can Subscribe to the case for updates. If not, create your own case – be as specific as possible, enter steps to reproduce and include an example project if you can.

Technical Support

Desktop, iOS, Web, Pro and Pro Plus licenses all come with Tech Support. You can fill out our contact form to get in touch with Tech Support and you’ll hear back ASAP. The more specific you are in the initial message (include Feedback case numbers if you can), the faster you’ll be able to get a resolution. If you encounter a show-stopping bug that you are not able to work around, you should contact Tech Support for help.

The Forum

The Xojo Forum is a great resource that is frequented by Xojo users, you’ll get an answer pretty quickly. You might also make a friend or two! Bonus – members of the Xojo Team stop by to help out when possible! It’s good to search first, as many questions have previously been answered.

We want to help you be successful with Xojo. Each of us strive to be accessible and Xojo offers multiple venues for support and questions. And if you want to say hi, stop by a Xojo Hangout*, tweet us, join our Facebook page or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

*Xojo Hangouts are community social Zoom video meetups which are currently held every Tuesday at 2PM ET and Friday at 4PM ET. Hangouts are attended by a number of Xojo staff (Geoff’s usually there!) as well as a fun group of users from around the world. Details to join are posted the day-of at the top of the Xojo forum.

If you have already registered, we will automatically move your registration to the new dates, but if you’d like a refund please contact Customer Service. The hotel has cancelled the hotel reservations that were made for the event, you will be able to re-book starting January 11, 2021 and we will get to keep our previously negotiated rate.

Those who have reached out with session ideas – we love your enthusiasm, please keep those topics in mind – we will open up the call for speakers in the new year. We are looking forward to seeing you all!

Let’s move forward with the idea that anything can happen and we’ll plan for the best – so go get your passport now and check the expiration date! If you need to renew so you can travel to London uninterrupted, I suggest you start the process now. The US Passport office is 1.2 million applications behind and processing times are months longer than expected. I experienced this personally when I had to renew my kids passports earlier this year – their applications were sent in late January with standard 6-8 weeks processing time. The passports didn’t show up until June (unfortunately our vacation was cancelled anyways).

Hope to see you all in London!

2020 is going to be a very exciting year for Xojo – we finally see the finish line for several of our multi-year projects! Starting now you can watch Geoff’s 2020 Update to get an overview of what’s been going on behind the scenes at Xojo and what to expect this year. Then, check out our Android update with Paul and Web 2.0 with Greg videos below!

Another reason this conference will be different has to do with the name change from The Xojo Developer Conference to XOJO.CONNECT. If you have ever been to one of our conferences before, how would you describe it? I guarantee one of the things you’d say is how important the connections you made and the conversations you had outside of the sessions were. The name change is to show that we do understand how valuable that aspect is to you (it’s extremely valuable to us) and we will be adding more opportunities to nurture those connections in Nashville.

The access you get to the Xojo Team is another thing that makes the conference exceptional. I talked to someone recently who told me one of the reasons he enjoys coming year after year is so he can give Greg his wishlist. Meeting the Xojo team in person is great for those who depend on Xojo. For example, we can arrange for you to sit down one on one and go through any issues you are having or talk about your specific feature requests. From engineering to marketing to support, we are all energized by the conversations we have with you at the conference, we love to see what you’re working on and we go back with so many ideas. One user said the week after the conference is the witching hour of Xojo developers, going home with tons of new ideas ready to implement into their projects, but for us — we have a conference post-mortem meeting where we share what we learned, what feedback we got — both good and bad — what new ideas we have. My to-do list triples, because I’m inspired by all of you.

Even though the conference is so much more than just the sessions, the sessions are still a very important part of it. We have a wide range of topics from a wide range of speakers. Many of the speakers, myself included, are first time Xojo conference speakers. New speakers, of course, mean new topics and fresh new perspectives. Some of the first-time speakers added to our lineup include Wayne Golding, who is joining us all the way from New Zealand, to talk about Windows service apps. Ryan Hartz of Visual Veggies Software who will talk about building and maintaining a software business. Ryan has been to several conferences and has been a guest blog writer on our blog, but this is his first time speaking. I heard Stefanie Juchmes talk about the MBS Plugins at the conference in Germany, and she will be speaking about SceneKit in Nashville. Zeke Burke attended his first Xojo conference last year (see him on our highlights video) and he will be talking about multi-platform web design. Our newest engineer, Javier Menendez, will be talking about Blobs – this will be his second US Xojo conference. We have a great lineup of sessions and no matter how much experience you have, we guarantee you’ll learn something new.

During the day, we have built more time into the schedule so you can have post-session conversations and the evenings will offer even more time to connect. It’s great to get to know one another in a more relaxed setting. With that goal in mind, we will take busses over to the new and highly popular 6th & Peabody where you can relax in a casual environment with a cold beer and tacos from the White Duck Tacos Shop truck. You can have a game of bean bag toss on the lawn or enjoy some retro games in the arcade! Plus there will be a Moonshine tasting for anyone who is interested…

The next night we will go down to the Honkey Tonk Highway (ye-haw) for some classic Nashville entertainment at Nashville Underground. After dinner, you can take our buses back to the hotel or explore the rest of the popular area and Uber back with your friends later. If all of this isn’t enough, we have a special treat for those staying Friday night – a pub crawl of the 2nd street district coordinated by a pub crawl professional. I said it before and I’ll say it again – this is where the “you-had-to-be-there” jokes get made. Remote Debugger!

Nashville is a new city for our conference, but one that has been highly requested. In fact, it has made our top 3 possible cities list for the last 4 years! Our conference has travelled to many different cities now, including (save this for trivia) Austin, Orlando, Las Vegas, Houston, Denver, Miami … and now Nashville. Nashville is one of America’s most popular cities, with so much to offer, even if you don’t like country music. I’ve watched the Bourdain episode, I’m ready to try some of Nashville’s famous hot chicken!

There really is no substitute for in person connections – whether it is something you decide to do to get out of your comfort zone or for new ideas, you will — as they say — be amongst friends. Last year a first time conference attendee said, “I decided to come because I really needed to connect with the developer community.” Agreed! For me, I love spending a week connecting with the Xojo community, having in person conversations, and seeing my co-workers (who I video chat with daily) in person! I love it!

We always try to pick a hotel that has about 400 rooms or less, so you will run into conference attendees frequently around the property. From the time you arrive you’ll see posts on the forum or on Twitter (also via the conference app) that people are hanging out in the lobby or restaurant or bar. Let us know when you arrive, Alyssa and I and other Xojo staffers will be around all week, and we will see you in the bar at 7 on Tuesday for early conference registration – if we don’t see you before.

If you’re not currently registered, we still have room and we have seen a number of flight deals recently from Frankfurt, London, New York City and more. Plus, you can still get our fantastic conference hotel rate though February 24th. This is going to be a great conference and a very exciting year for Xojo!

Though we have made a lot of progress since our last demo in April, we still have some items left to complete, including adding Debugger support and completing the IDE integration.

After we ship our initial release of Android, we have a few things planned. We will be updating the iOS Framework to API 2.0 and adding auto-layout to Android. In addition, we plan to have a single mobile project for both Android and iOS, so just as you select your target OS on the desktop today, you’ll be able to do the same on mobile – Android or iOS.

The conference attendees were very excited to see the latest update, the mobile future on Xojo is bright! Stay tuned for more news and announcements.

**Xojo Android is not currently in beta and we have not yet announced a ship date.

Perhaps you don’t use Photoshop or have time to come up with eye-catching images. Maybe you don’t have a lot of training in design elements. There is a tool that another marketer recommended to me several years ago and we now use it almost exclusively here at Xojo, that tool is Canva. Using Canva, which has a very usable free (web-based) version, you can design images for anything from social media to online ads, business cards, presentations, basically any marketing collateral.

They have over 20,000 templates for you to pick from, with also a large bank of stock images – some free, some paid – and you can upload your own. They even offer free videos (aka Design School) to give you an introduction to graphic design.

Did you know that tweets with images have an 18% higher click through rate, 89% more favorites and 150% more retweets? Those statistics really are amazing – I am not suggesting you include an image with every tweet, but adding it to your general rotation could really improve your social media performance. So if you are struggling with how to have better creative on social media or, more importantly, on your website – check out Canva!

For more tips and tricks aimed at marketing your app or small business, click the “App Marketing” or “Social Media Marketing” tags at the bottom of this post!