Operator_Lookup and ParamArray are two language features that have been in Xojo for a while now, but most probably don’t know why they were originally added. The need grew out from having to support COM on Windows.
Author: William Yu
Recently an issue with our Windows MoviePlayer was brought to my attention. Specifically, it was a problem with our Looping feature when using the native player. The bug was unfortunate, but luckily there was a workaround. However, it required a less often used feature of the MoviePlayer control, the MovieController.
When we design a control, whether it’s a PushButton or MoviePlayer, we try to anticipate the most often used features and add them into our product. However, we understand that there are occasions when a certain feature is needed that we may not have exposed. For this purpose we’ve added Handle properties on almost every control. You can use this Handle property, with the right Declare, to access additional features of that control. In some cases though, at least on Windows, a bare bones Handle wouldn’t be enough. In the Windows world our Handle refers to the HWND of the control. In most cases this would be enough, however, we do have a few controls which are ActiveX based. Currently, the native HTMLViewer and MoviePlayer are one of these few ActiveX based controls.
Comments closedFor those of you building apps for Windows and Linux, you’ll notice that each build includes a Libs folder. The name of this folder depends on the application name that you’ve set in your Build Settings. For example, if my Windows App Name is “My Application.exe” then the Libs folder would be named “My Application Libs”.
Comments closedWith the myriad of different Window Managers and themes on Linux, and personal preferences, you can be assured that your UI will look different from one Linux user to the next. The main challenge of being a native app is trying to normalize the UI experience across different platforms (yes, even different Linux distros).
When we added this property to the Canvas and ContainerControl there was probably a lot of head scratching going on. Some of you probably asked yourself (or us) “Why is this necessary?” or “Isn’t this pretty much the same thing as enabling DoubleBuffer?”
Well, yes to the latter question on Windows, and a slightly more optimized experience on OS X, but the impetus behind this property was really our redesigned IDE. More specifically, it was a need/requirement because of a long standing issue with our Linux framework.
Comments closedToday’s laptops and monitors support high resolution displays which allow you to pack more information and content on the screen. Although one common complaint is that people find the text to be too small at the maximum resolution, Windows’ solution to this is the ability for the user to adjust the DPI setting.
Linux, especially Ubuntu, has quickly evolved, introducing core UI changes such as the global menu bar (akin to OS X’s single menubar system) as well as Overlay Scrollbars. Overlay Scrollbars were meant to reduce the amount of clutter needed around content areas by showing up only when hovered over, and always outside the content area. If you’re developing any kind of serious application on Linux, especially if you are targeting Ubuntu, you want to be able to detect whether or not the system supports Overlay Scrollbars.
