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.
Comments closedAuthor: Geoff Perlman
This Thanksgiving we wish to give thanks to all of you who use Xojo. You make our work possible.
Comments closedI 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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Last year the Federal Communications Administration (FCC) voted to rollback the Net Neutrality law passed during the Obama administration. I’ve written about this previously. I think I’m on safe ground when I say that most people would agree that laws designed to keep the Internet on a level playing field make sense given that most US citizens don’t have much if any choice when it comes to Internet access. That’s why states have taken the matter into their own hands.
California recently passed its own Net Neutrality law. This is a big deal because Internet providers cannot realistically apply one set of standards to traffic in California and a different set everywhere else. California is big enough that it can effectively influence legislation on a national level. It did this in 1966 when the state established the first tailpipe emissions standards, which resulted in all cars sold throughout the US having catalytic convertors. When California passes a law affecting companies that do business across the United States, it can change how those companies operate in all states.
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Earlier this week, the FCC’s repeal of Net Neutrality officially when into effect. What does this mean? It means that the rules that were put into place to prevent ISPs from abusing their power are gone. You might be wondering what power they actually have? I’ve already written about this before but in summary, most people only have a single option for internet service. That means that for them, there is no competition. Their ISP has them by the proverbial short hairs and there’s no other place most of us can go for Internet access. Net Neutrality at least prevented those ISPs from really abusing their monopoly. That’s now gone.
As the Electronic Frontier Foundation said, you’re not going to see your Internet service suddenly slow to a crawl or block specific sites. It will be more of a steady decline. It’s like having terminal cancer. It won’t kill you tomorrow but it will eventually.
Comments closedIf you spend enough time trying to predict the future, you learn that the more variables there are, the more difficult it becomes to determine a future. Take the weather for example. It’s not hard to predict tomorrow’s weather because there’s not much that will change over the next 12 hours or so. Try to predict the weather 7 days from now, 7 months or worse, 7 years from now, and your results will begin to vary dramatically.
This is certainly the case when it comes to writing apps. The bigger any one particular feature is, the more variables there are that affect it and thus the more difficult it becomes to predict how long it will take to finish. You don’t have to work in the software business very long to figure this out. Like most people in the software industry, we’ve been trying (with varying degrees of accuracy) to do this not just for our own internal planning but because we know you want, and need, to know as well.
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Like his father, my teenage son loves video games. The single player games where you take a character through some kind of adventure are the ones I like most. These usually have a fair number of AI-controlled enemies that must be defeated. My son, on the other hand, prefers to play against other human beings. When I asked him why, he said, “The AIs are so predictable.” To prove this to me, he took over when I was having trouble defeating a particularly difficult enemy and quickly dispatched him, narrating his strategy as he went and barely being scratched in the process. My son is an elite player compared to me partially because he puts a lot more time into it than I do but also because he loves video games far more than I do.
Just as people have varying levels of skill and interest in video games, the same is true of app development. There are those that are happy to devote enormous amounts of time to learning everything they possibly can. They don’t care how long it takes. They want to have control over everything and are willing to do whatever is necessary to make that happen. I’m so glad those people exist because there’s a lot of great software that might not otherwise have been created without them. I’m not one of those people. I really want to focus mostly on what makes my application unique, abstracted from the nitty-gritty of app development.
That’s why I have always been attracted to tools like Xojo. I am a citizen developer. Of all the job titles I have had over the years, all of them in tech, none have ever included words like programmer or engineer. I do some software development but it’s just a part of my job. It’s something I do to help me in my work or to help my co-workers.
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As I’ve written before, the FCC’s claim that rolling back Net Neutrality will result in more competition (which presumably will be better for consumers) is flawed because of the cost of the last mile. What that means, in summary, is that over the last 30 years various cable and telecom companies have bared the cost of laying all the cable/wire necessary to bring internet service to most of the homes and businesses in US cities. They did this because city governments were more than willing to trade the enormous cost of creating a citywide network for the provider having (in most cases) an effective monopoly on providing internet access.
This isn’t the first time a service or utility has evolved in this manner in the United States. The railroads, the telegraph and later telephone service were all networks that were developed in much the same way.
Comments closedViruses continue to be a big problem on Windows. As a result, anti-virus software can be a bit over-zealous about detecting what it believes to be apps that have viruses embedded within them. We have had reports over the years that apps made with Xojo are sometimes falsely identified as being infected with a virus. This sometimes occurs because the 32-bit Xojo compiler puts executable code in a location where the anti-virus software doesn’t expect to find it. We’ve seen this occur even when users are debugging apps from the IDE. Fortunately in that case, there’s a fairly easy solution.
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As most of you know, this past Saturday morning, the people of Hawaii got a shocking notification on their smartphones warning of a incoming ballistic missile and that this warning was not a drill. I can only imagine the fear that raced through the minds of more than a million people. This warning, as well all now know, turned out to be a false alarm accidentally set off by a state employee who was attempting to perform an internal test.
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