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Author: Geoff Perlman

Xojo Community Growth in 2016

Published January 5, 2017 by Geoff Perlman

As you may already know, 2016 was Xojo’s 20 Anniversary. Sitting down to write this post, I can’t help but think back to 20 years ago and starting what has now become Xojo. Most of the developer tools that were around when we started either no longer exist or are no longer published by the people who had the original vision to create them in the first place. In that respect, we are members of a very exclusive club. I’m also pleasantly surprised at how many users from way back then are actively using Xojo today. I take great pride in the fact that we have created something that has that kind of staying power.

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Sorry, You’ve Run Out of Memory

Published March 4, 2016 by Geoff Perlman

Most of us build apps without thinking too much about how much memory the app will need. Sure sometimes you end up creating an app that is a real memory buster but that’s unusual. With virtual memory, gone are the days when your app would just run out of memory and crash, or are they?

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If Smartphone Encryption Is A Red Herring, How Do We Track The Bad Guys?

Published February 4, 2016 by Geoff Perlman

In the blog post Smartphone Encryption is a Red Herring, I pointed out the folly of requiring an encryption back door for the Good Guys to use. So the question arises- “What can be done? If we don’t want a global encryption back door that can be used by anyone, can we still track the Bad Guys?”

The answer is yes. There are plenty of options that don’t require a global back door. I’m not passing judgment on whether these are inherently good or bad options, just that they are available when there is a reason to track a Bad Guy.

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Smartphone Encryption is a Red Herring

Published January 27, 2016 by Geoff Perlman

EnigmaMachine.pngAs the Founder and CEO of a software company that makes a development tool for mobile platforms, as well as for desktop and web, I have a lot of experience with encryption. The current controversy over encryption is really important to me. During World War II, the Germans created a way of sending encrypted messages to commanders in the field. The device came to be known as an Engima machine. It looked like a typewriter but had an encryption key that changed a message into unreadable noise. That message could only be decoded if you knew the key used to encrypt it. The Allies worked very hard to get their hands on one of these devices so they could learn how it works and be able to decrypt the messages and know what the German military plans. Ultimately the Allies figured it out and it helped them win the war. If this has peaked your curiosity, check out the movie U-571 (a fictional account of the effort to obtain an Enigma machine) and The Imitation Game about the team that figured out the encryption key.

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O Retina, Retina, wherefore art thou Retina?

Published December 8, 2015 by Geoff Perlman

eyeball.pngDuring my keynote address last April at XDC, the Xojo Developer Conference, I said that we would be adding Retina support (the OS X feature that provides for ultra-high resolution displays) to the OS X framework in the 4th quarter of this year. We have been working very hard on Retina support both for the OS X framework and for the IDE itself. We didn’t want to stop there though. Windows also supports ultra-high resolution displays. For Windows, this technology is called HiDPI. Xojo is a cross-platform tool so we decided we should support both Retina and HiDPI, and do it in such a way that you don’t have to do much of anything and they just work.

UPDATE: Xojo Retina is here, April 2016

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