Community – Page 20 – Xojo Programming Blog

Daring to Defy Software Extinction: A Limited History of Development Tools

Published June 21, 2017 by Geoff Perlman

In 1998 Steve Jobs was the interim CEO of Apple and trying to keep his unprofitable company from sinking into bankruptcy. Just the previous year, when asked what he would do if he were in charge of Apple, Dell CEO Michael Dell said, “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

The Mac had single digit marketshare. Creating a development tool, independently of Apple or any company that makes a platform such a tool would support, was considered a fool’s errand. There were plenty of tools available from large companies. Apple made MPW (the Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop). Symantec created THINK C. Metrowerks developed CodeWarrior. IBM’s VisualAge. Macromedia Flash. If you needed to create a cross-platform desktop app, you’d be told to look no further than SUN Microsystems Java: THE cross-platform language. We were all promised that Java was going to run on everything from our computers to our cars to our can openers. Java was the safe and popular choice. Developers made up only about 5% of computer users anyway. Honestly, who would be crazy enough to launch a new development tool in a market crowded by giants?

We were.

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XojoTalk 032 – Copy, Paste, Search and Replace

Published June 14, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

The XojoTalk podcast is hosted by Xojo’s Developer Evangelist Paul Lefebvre. Paul talks with Xojo team members as well as Xojo developers and community members about Xojo and whatever the heck else comes up!

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Thoughts On WWDC 2017

Published June 5, 2017 by Geoff Perlman

This morning Tim Cook offered Apple’s keynote for WWDC 2017, where he focused on the new technology that is coming from Apple for developers, though there was not much on the API specifics. Over the last few years we’ve expanded our support for macOS by adding new platform features and we will continue to add new features to Xojo iOS. We’ll be looking at Apple’s product direction for new ways to advance Xojo and expand your ability to build cross-platform apps quickly and simply with Xojo.

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Auto-Launch Raspberry Pi Apps

Published May 15, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

For XDC 2016 I needed a way to demonstrate a Raspberry Pi app that used the GPIO and updated an LCD character display. But I didn’t really have access to a screen that I could use to show the desktop so that I could run the app. And I could not remotely connect to the Pi because I did not have a good way to get it on the wifi network in the first place.

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13 Tips For A Successful XDC Session Submission

Published March 31, 2017 by Dana Brown

Thinking about speaking at XDC or any conference. Here are 13 guidelines to help you craft your best possible session submission, from topic to title, abstract and speaker biography.

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Q&A: “What is Xojo?” Webinar

Published March 1, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

Here are the questions people asked during our February “What is Xojo” webinar. Did you miss the webinar? It’s less than 30 minutes and you can watch it right here:

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XojoTalk 031 – Virtual Office Rules

Published February 28, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

Join Paul as he talks with Dana Brown and Alyssa Foley, the two women that keep Xojo running, as they talk about how they came to Xojo, working from home, being full-time working moms, XDC and favorite TV shows.

women of xojo

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Choose the Right Development Tool for Your Business

Choose the Right Development Tool for Your Business

Published February 7, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

From a recent Ars Technical article called “The future of Microsoft’s languages“, emphasis mine:

In spite of its name, the current Visual Basic is not the same language as the ancient Visual Basic 6, nor the Visual Basic for Applications used for macroing. The transition to .NET in 2002, with what was called, at the time, Visual Basic.NET, left developers familiar with those languages high and dry; although the new language was called Visual Basic, and looked a bit like Visual Basic, it was really just C# in disguise. There was no good migration path from old to new, and much of the simplicity of those older languages was forfeit.

This is a primary reason why so many Visual Basic developers choose Xojo after trying Microsoft Visual Basic (.NET): they don’t want “C# in disguise”.

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What is Xojo?

Published February 1, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

2017’s first “What is Xojo?” webinar was well received and there were lots of questions. Rather than include the questions in the video, I’ve included a…

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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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Category: Community