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Author: Geoff Perlman

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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The Two-Finger Tap: Undo Gesture for iOS Apps

The only built-in gesture for undo on iOS at the moment is to shake the device. This is not very intuitive to me and I’ve certainly done it by accident many times. The makers of Procreate chose a two-finger tap and have found that their users adapted to it nicely. This gesture is being adopted by more and more iOS developers. Here’s all the code you need to implement the two-finger tap for undo in your Xojo iOS apps.

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Low-Code Doesn’t Mean No Control

There are low-code platforms that don’t provide ability to call directly into the operating system. Fortunately, Xojo does. Our vision for Xojo has always been to make the tool easy to learn and highly productive to develop applications, without sacrificing power when you need it.

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What’s important in a programming language?

I started learning how to code as a teenager. Back then there weren’t very many programming languages. I remember BASIC, Pascal, Fortran, COBOL, C and a handful of others that were highly specialized. Why so few? Because in the 1970’s, computers just couldn’t do very much compared to today. The available languages were sufficient for the limited tasks computers had been assigned to manage.

Over the last several decades, computer technology has exploded. The smartphone I carry around in my pocket is far more powerful than the fastest computers of my youth. As a teenager, I rarely encountered anything where a computer had played a part. Today the rare encounter would be with things where computers had played no part.  Computers handle so many tasks now that, as a natural consequence, there are thousands of programming languages with more appearing every year.

With so many languages, it can be difficult to choose one. What is important in a programming language?

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