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Author: Paul Lefebvre

#JustCode Challenge Week 7 – Pitch Tracker

#JustCode Challenge Week 7 – Pitch Tracker

Published August 3, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

As many know, I’m a big baseball fan. I was recently at Sea Dogs game (our local AA minor league team) and was sitting behind home plate alongside many scouts who were carefully watching the pitchers. I noticed several were tracking pitch counts using an app on a tablet or laptop. I thought that would make for an interesting app to make in Xojo, so this week I’ve made an iOS app (I’m on an iOS roll it seems) to track the location of pitches, similar to what I observed the scouts using.

The app shows a grid of the strike zone and you tap where the pitch was. You can use the buttons on the bottom to mark the pitch as a ball, strike or in play changing its color. Click the Reset button to clear the pitches for the next batter.

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#JustCode Challenge Week 6 – Bubble Popper

#JustCode Challenge Week 6 – Bubble Popper

Published July 27, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

For this week’s app, I created a simple iOS app where you tap on “bubbles” to pop them. This was actually suggested to me by Dana Brown some time ago as something that would make a great diversion for her son. I have found it helpful with some of my younger nieces and nephews.

This iOS app demonstrates the use of a Canvas and the detection of taps. When all the bubbles have been popped, more are added. It never ends!

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GTK3 Can Be a Pain in the Themes

Published July 26, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

Starting with Xojo 2017r2, Linux apps use GTK3. Since Xojo uses native controls that means your app’s controls will use the theme of the Linux distribution the app runs on. This can sometimes mean that your app’s UI will not look exactly like what you designed in the Layout Editor because a theme may dramatically change control sizes and padding. This is a problem that can occur with any modern GTK3 app.

If this is a problem for your apps, there are a couple ways you can work around it.

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#JustCode Challenge Week 4 – Mini Golf ScoreKeeper

#JustCode Challenge Week 4 – Mini Golf ScoreKeeper

Published July 13, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

Sometimes the idea for a great little app comes down to solving a silly little problem.

Last month, the family went mini-golfing for my son’s birthday. It was a lovely course called Pirate’s Cove Adventure Golf right next to the ocean. But they didn’t have scoring stands and we had to use a tiny pencil on a little cardboard scorecard to keep score. So this week’s app is a simple iOS app track of mini-golf scores!

The iOS app has two screens. The main screen has a giant Table that lists all the 18 holes. You tab on the detail button for a row (it’s the “I” icon) to go to the scoring screen.

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The status of 32-bit and 64-bit macOS apps

The status of 32-bit and 64-bit macOS apps

Published July 11, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

In the Mac world, 32-bit apps have been disappearing more and more as time goes on. This year already we’ve seen significant steps toward 64-bit.

In January 2018 Apple stopped accepting 32-bit app submissions to the Mac App Store.

In February 2018, starting with macOS 10.13.4, Apple added a warning that displays the first time you launch a 32-bit app.

In June 2018 Apple stopped accepting updates to 32-bit apps in the Mac App Store. All new apps and app updates must now be 64-bit.

At WWDC 2018 Apple announced that macOS 10.14 will be the final version that support 32-bit apps. Although they did not announce a release date, based on the timing from the past few years macOS 10.14 will probably be released around the end of September 2018.

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#JustCode Challenge Week 1 – Color Picker

#JustCode Challenge Week 1 – Color Picker

Published June 22, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

It’s the first week of the Just Code challenge so I’m starting with something pretty simple. This app lets you choose a color using the system color picker and then shows you the color values in hexadecimal (useful for programming, HTML and CSS), RGB (red, green, blue), HSV (hue, saturation,value) and CMY (cyan, magenta, yellow).

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Jump Right In! Just Code Challenge

Jump Right In! Just Code Challenge

Published June 18, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

I’m often asked by kids and adults how they can start coding and learn to make apps? You could start with the usual books or videos.

But maybe you want to jump right in. When I started programming that is exactly how I learned. I tried things to see what worked and what didn’t work. I also looked at and modified other programs I found.

You can learn to code if you just code.

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