In this series of blog posts, I will cover the sixteen sample projects I created for that session (JSONReader, Mastodon, DisplayDB, DrawCards, with separate versions for desktop, web, iOS and Android) in more detail.

You can watch the presentation on YouTube:

The accompanying hands-on session might also be interesting, where I show the projects running on Android:

You can also download all the sample projects. 

The first project is JSONReader, so let’s dive in.

JSONReader

This sample demonstrates a couple classes that can read some specifically formatted JSON. I generated this “mock” JSON data using Mockaroo.

The two classes are Staff and StaffDetail. The Staff class contains the JSON data as a constant for simplicity, but it could load it from anywhere, such as a file or from the web. These classes use standard Xojo framework code and are fully compatible with desktop, web, iOS and Android projects.

On Staff are three methods which are used to fetch information from the JSON: Everyone(), GetNames() and GetSlogans().

Each of these methods are similar in that they loop through the items in the JSON like so:

FOR pos As Integer = 0 To JSONData.Count - 1

The simplest method is GetNames() which just fetches the first and last name from the JSON and combines them into a single string. It then returns all of these names as a string array.

GetSlogans() is similar, but it instead fetches the Slogan field from the JSON, returning them all as a string array.

The Everyone() method makes use of the StaffDetail class which is just a storage class with properties for each field in the JSON. It also loops through the JSON, but grabs each value and puts it into a StaffDetail instance. All of these are collected into an array and returned.

Although this design is simple, it demonstrates how to separate processing code from the UI. Because everything related to JSON is hidden in these classes and returned as arrays, the UI code (which will be different between platforms) only has to deal with arrays and not with how they were created. You can copy and use the classes as needed in whatever project types you are creating.

For the desktop app, the Window has three buttons which display the results of the above methods in a ListBox.

For example, the NamesButton has this code in its Pressed event:

DataList.RemoveAllRows
Var allStaff As New Staff
Var names() As String = allStaff.GetNames

For Each name As String In names
  DataList.AddRow(name)
Next

The SloganButton is similar. The AllButton code only differs by having an array of StaffDetail:

DataList.RemoveAllRows
Var allStaff As New Staff
Var everyone() As StaffDetail = allStaff.Everyone

For Each detail As StaffDetail In everyone
  DataList.AddRow(detail.FirstName + " works on " + detail.Slogan + ".")
Next

When you look at the projects, notice that the code for the WebPage, iOS Screen and Android Screen buttons is exactly the same as the code for the desktop Window buttons!

That won’t always be the case, of course, but it is a good first start and demonstrates how similar the UI API is across platforms.

In my next post, I will look at the Mastodon sample projects which make use of URLConnection.

Paul learned to program in BASIC at age 13 and has programmed in more languages than he remembers, with Xojo being an obvious favorite. When not working on Xojo, you can find him talking about retrocomputing at Goto 10 and on Mastodon @lefebvre@hachyderm.io.

• XDC 2023 Playlist
• XDC 2023 Keynote Address
• Multiplatform Madness – Paul Lefebvre
• Getting to XAML Islands – William Yu
• Android Activation – Travis Hill
• Android Hands-On Training
• Microservices with Xojo – Ricardo Cruz
• Ask the Xojo Engineers Panel
• Graphic Charts Beyond Web – Javier Menendez
• Design Patterns For the Patternless – Marc Zeedar
• Creating a Multi-Language UI For Your Xojo Apps – Jim Meyer
• Extending Xojo with the MBS Plugins – Christian Schmitz
• Panel Discussion – The Future with Artificial Intelligence
• Continuing the AI Discussion – Yousaf Shah
• Web 1.0 to 2.0 Migration – David Cox
• Making Everything the Same – Bob Gordon
• JSON – Your Best Friend – Stefanie Juchmes
• From Desktop and Web to iOS Lands – Javier Menendez

Please note that if materials, such as example projects, are available there will be a link in the video description. Not all sessions have materials available.

Conference Apps

The XDC App is available on both iOS and Android for the first time ever! Search ‘XDC 2023’ in the Google Play Store or iOS App Store. A shoutout and big thank you to Xojo MVPs Martin T and Jérémie Leroy for making these apps. Martin wanted to test out the Android pre-release by developing a real world Android app. Jeremie then used Martin’s project to create an iOS version in a few days.

XDC Videos

We are pleased to announce that all of the XDC session videos and keynote will be available free on Xojo’s YouTube channel (XDC 2023 Playlist). You can subscribe to the YouTube channel to receive notifications when new videos are posted.

Bug Bash

As we announced at the last conference, we are spending two weeks per release cycle working on bug bash type bugs. This means we are looking for bugs that do not meet the regular criteria, so they are old, only affect one person or a small number of people, etc. For Xojo 2023r2 there are already 17 issues of this sort that have been resolved. One of them, for example, was reported twelve years ago. We are committed to focus on bug fixes and will continue to fix these types of bugs during each release cycle. As a reminder, if you have a bug that is a showstopper for you, something you cannot work around, please contact us – our technical support team may be able to help you or can escalate it to an engineer.

Recent New Features

In his Keynote, Geoff discussed some recent new features, including PDF, the ChartControl, Filtering the Debugger and more.

DesktopXAMLContainer: This is the foundation for what will be our updated Windows controls. We will start with using the new controls in the Desktop XAML container but in the future they will replace the Win32 controls with modern controls. William will be talking more about this in his session.

Popover Control: A dialog-like layout that can pop-up over the existing layout is in the works.

DatabaseConnection Class: A lot of work has been done to make connecting to databases easier with more on the way.

Xojo Libraries (formerly Xojo Plugins): Using Xojo libraries, you will be able to take some portion of a Xojo project and compile to a library you can distribute or use in your other projects.

Sales & Community Growth

Sales of Xojo licenses continue to grow in 2023! This year-to-date, license renewals are up 10% over the same period last year and new license sales are up 20%.

In-Person Events

Apple, Google and others have moved to mostly online events. And in that same light, Xojo will be focusing more on on-demand events and videos. Given peoples’ comfort and preference for online, on-demand content, we do not plan on having an XDC 2024.

Android

Xojo Android is currently at 96% completion with only a handful of things remaining. Android will be shipping in the next release of Xojo, 2023r2 (marked as beta). If you have a current Xojo iOS, Pro or Pro Plus license, Android will be included at no additional charge. The iOS license will become a Mobile license and will build for both iOS and Android.

Android in the Future

Initially, you will need to develop separate Android and iOS projects. The end that we are working towards will be a single mobile project that builds for both Android and iOS similar to how Desktop projects build for Mac, Windows an Linux.

Now that we are getting closer to Android shipping, we look forward to more time for us to focus on other things.

Artificial Intelligence

AI may not be on the roadmap but we are definitely thinking about it. There are some significant gains in the apps and how you create them. If you have input please reach out to us and let us know how you could use AI in your projects, or create a feature request. We are excited to see how the world of development and software in general will change with AI.

The rest of the sessions today will be presented by the Xojo Engineers. We look forward to hearing from Paul, William, Travis and Ricardo. We will keep this blog post updated and will let you all know when the videos are ready to watch! We look forward to the next few days and a great conference!

Now, please don’t worry, the Xojo Developer Conference in London is going to be an excellent event. Check out the growing list of sessions. And to keep XDC excitement high, we are releasing session videos from XDC 2022 over the coming weeks, watch them and get a feel for what a cool event a XDC is! That said, we don’t have plans for a XDC 2024. And that is why I am writing this. More than a few people have mentioned they plan to skip this event. But when attendee numbers aren’t growing like they used to, and the costs and logistics are increasing, XDC and many events like it may not be around next year. In the US, conference costs have gotten astronomically higher as hotels struggle to recover from the pandemic; this is in addition to general inflation and an increased costs of goods. Previous XDC hotels have seen more than 150% increase in cost per night. One hotel that previously hosted a XDC has seen a 300% increase in cost per night. XDC hasn’t ever been profitable, but we have always recognized its importance to the Xojo Community, and we also like it a lot ourselves. Dana works hard to keep the event big and cost low, but that isn’t feasible in a world where hotel costs are up 300%.

I’m not saying XDC is over. After all, we’ve taken breaks from XDC before. I’m saying things change and if you want to come to XDC, you should come to London. If you are thinking perhaps you will come to XDC in 2024, I highly recommend you come to London.

And for those of you who cannot be there, we are keeping an eye on all things conference related and we are listening to what the Xojo Community tells us. Currently, there is a huge demand for live webinars, Xojo has 2 planned for March, and training videos. And we may host more meetups like the one Dana hosted in London in November and the one Geoff hosted last month in California.

There is no shortage of things to see, do, eat, drink and experience in London. There is something to appease every interest – from history to food, fashion, music, the arts and everything in between. Having so much extracurricular options makes London the ideal city to host the Xojo Developer Conference.

XDC will take place from Wednesday, April 26th through Friday, April 28th at the Hilton Euston. With London being such a large city there’s no shortage of hotels. We chose this hotel because it had the right amount of meeting space and availability, is in a very accessible location and we’ve stayed there before (as recently as last week!) and it’s been positive, comfortable and the staff is friendly and helpful. There are a lot of options for food in the area, as well as coffee and breakfast, it’s just a 2 minute walk to Costa and Pret a Manger.

The rate the hotel is offering our group includes both breakfast and VAT, however, if this hotel is not in line with your budget, take a look on Google Maps- there are several hotels in the area. If you are traveling with kids, the Hilton Euston does offer family rooms, you can find those via their main booking site or on Hotels.com.

Many of you have asked for a blog post listing things to do in London and there are no shortage of those already in existence, I won’t reinvent the wheel:

• First time in London? Start here.
• Get Tickets to the London Theater
• London Hop On Hop Off Tour & Thames Cruise Information
• See what concerts are coming to London – The Flaming Lips, Blue October and Postmodern Jukebox are all performing the weekend after XDC
• 101 best shops in London
• Best day trips from London
• London Natural History Museum
• National Gallery – See Monet, Manet, Van Gogh and more!
• The British Museum
• Tate Britain
• Tower of London
• List of Museums in London
• London’s Parks
• Film locations in London
• List of guided walking tours
• Public transportation information – the stations close to the hotel are Euston, Euston Square and King’s Cross/St. Pancras

If you are a Harry Potter fan, add these to your list:

• Blog Post with details about the Harry Potter Tour
• Harry Potter Tour Information
• Tip: Check out the Harry Potter store and brick wall at King’s Cross Station

For something random, if you like optical illusions check out Twist Museum on Oxford Street. It’s not free, like many of the museums in London, but it is quite interesting and doesn’t take too long. A nice break if you’re visiting Selfridge’s for some shopping!

As you can see there is no shortage of activities and entertainment in London, this list could be so much longer! We have an exciting 3-day conference planned with great sessions and the whole Xojo Team is looking forward to seeing everyone. We hope you will join us – save on your registration when you sign up by February 14th!

William Yu grew up in Canada learning to program BASIC on a Vic-20. He is Xojo’s resident Windows and Linux engineer, among his many other skills. Some may say he has joined the dark side here in the USA, but he will always be a Canadian at heart.

• Facebook
• X
• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• YouTube

Xojo’s team was all vaxxed-up and so happy to get together in Nashville for #XDC2022. Tennessee’s Music City was a delightful backdrop for the first in-person Xojo event since 2019. Check out the short highlights video from Nashville and then join us for #XDC2023 in London, UK. You can register here.

This year the Xojo team and community welcomed a new Xojo engineer, Ricardo Cruz. Ricardo has applied his expertise to advance and improve Xojo Web. To quote one of Xojo’s engineers, “Ricardo coming in has been awesome,” a sentiment echoed on the Forum and the community in Nashville.

Xojo Web has come so far this year. Control reliability has improved, IDE previews have improved and reconnections have really improved. The web framework can now more often reconnect back to the same web session if it still exists. This is one of the things Ricardo is really happy about, “You can switch to your email app in your mobile, copy something to the clipboard, come back to the web app and it is still there, ready to continue.” Under the hood, some dependencies received updates, like jQuery. As a user, you don’t have to do anything, just use the new Xojo version! Try to tell that to another web developer, that’s sci-fi outside of Xojo. Also, thanks to the community, the memory and CPU usage continues to be improved release after release. “Honestly from my perspective it is just fun to play with little projects in it because it has really matured,” says Xojo’s Director of Engineering, Travis Hill.

Speaking of technical achievements, this year we added two new targets to Xojo: Windows on ARM 64 and Linux on ARM 64. On Windows, you can natively deploy to ARM-based tablets and laptops that run Windows. On Linux, you can deploy to 64-bit Raspberry Pi which can address significantly more RAM than 32-bit versions.

We built the Xojo Cloud Control Panel with an updated version of Xojo, and thanks to some Web framework improvements the controls now stay more responsive under load. Plus we’ve added Xojo Cloud servers in Sydney, Australia for web developers in Australia and New Zealand. We also continued improving and testing our upcoming support for Android, which is now feature complete and awaiting some remaining bug fixes before we make it available to everyone.

In addition, we want to brag about a few technical improvements, including the numerous PDF updates implemented by Xojo Engineer and now PDF expert, Javier Menéndez. Also there is the option to generate Program Database (PDB) files on Windows and improved multi-monitor support shepherded by Xojo Engineer William Yu. The list goes on: Code Assistants, on-device debugging in iOS, new Xojo Documentation site, adding Controls at runtime, loading speed faster for big projects, and the time team-Lefebvre built a web app to Calculate Combat Rolls in Twilight Imperium…

Inside Xojo we improved a lot too. Besides welcoming Ricardo and his beard to the team, we migrated Xojo’s bug and feature reporting platform from the internally managed Feedback tool to the much loved Issues. This has increased productivity, streamlined work flow, made it easier to search and find, comment, edit. The team couldn’t be happier!

This year also included Xojo’s first Bug Bash in a long time! During the Bug Bash, Xojo’s Code Editor got some much needed improvements resulting in noticeably faster updates. Plus updates to the Syntax Help Area thanks to Xojo Engineer and retro-computing expert, Paul Lefebvre. Besides the very real smashing of 100 bugs, the bash had the unintended consequence of giving the engineers an opportunity to work on things they don’t normally work on, giving engineers opportunities to collaborate and better solve things.

All in all, 2022 was a year of forward movement for Xojo. Which has us leaning into 2023 with a lot of excitement and expectation. Our team is committed to continuing to make Xojo the best cross-platform development tool and we thank you for being part of Xojo’s continued success!

The environment at XDC is one of a kind. As Marc Zeedar said of the Nashville Conference in xDev Magazine, “Xojo itself is a unique product and the community is special; we really are a family. That’s evident at events like this and it’s a connection you just can’t form online as easily. I am looking forward to whatever comes next.”

Attending an XDC you’ll find everyone, including the Xojo Team, is approachable, willing to help and eager to hear about how you use Xojo. Karen Bintz has attended XDC multiple times, she said, “I’ve found this to be one of the most open groups of developers that I’ve ever encountered. At the company level all the way up through the CEO and the other developers who are attending are all very approachable, very willing to help and have discussions. It’s a great environment!”

Another multi-year attendee is Kem Tekinay, whose popular sessions range from MemoryBlocks to Text Encodings, said “The benefit of the XDC is not just in the sessions. Those are very valuable, to be sure, as you gain information and perspective from experienced professionals. It’s not solely in the unfettered access to the Xojo engineers who are eager to share their vast knowledge of the IDE, language, and direction of the product. Perhaps more important than these are the fellow attendees, your colleagues, who arrive as strangers and leave as valuable friends. The collective experience of these seasoned pros is unmatched and irreplaceable.”

Call for Speakers

We are now accepting session proposals for XDC London. If you have ever thought about presenting at a conference, this is your chance, plus all speakers get a 50% discount on their conference ticket! Send your proposed session topic and short description to xdc@xojo.com on or before January 10th, 2023.

Why become a XDC speaker?

• Boost your resume or CV with presentation experience.
• Share a tip or helpful topic that you think others can benefit from.
• Detail your experiences so others can learn from your success (or mistakes).

Pricing

Registering early has many benefits: it guarantees you a spot, it helps us with planning and it gets you the best price. For this conference we are introducing registration at our lowest price yet. All 3 days, including lunch, dinner, sessions, evening events, and session videos, is $475 now through December 31, 2022. After that time the price increases, full price is $700. Register now!

Accommodations

The conference will take place at the Hilton London Euston. This is conveniently located a few minutes walk from St. Pancras, so if you’re coming to London via the Eurostar you won’t have far to go. It’s also very easy to get to via the Underground from Heathrow and other airports. We have an arranged rate of £229/night, which does include breakfast, and though you do not have to stay at the conference hotel, we do recommend it. The booking link will be available soon.

Getting to London

If you’re coming from Europe, flights are affordable to get to London. To make it easy here are the flight prices during our date range from a few major cities:

• Amsterdam: $138
• Berlin: $102
• Frankfurt: $126
• Brussels: $113
• Paris: $85
• Dublin: $65
• Belfast: $45
• Madrid: $89
• Vienna: $109
• Salzburg: $113
• Rome: $101
• Stockholm: $84
• Prague: $124
• Lisbon $84
• Oslo: $67
• Athens: $120

To give you some idea, Eurostar (return) from Paris is $127 and from Brussels is $116.

From North America, there are many nonstop options. Austin, for example, now has two nonstop flights (on British Airways and Virgin Atlantic) that are around $700. Some North American options to consider:

• New York: $370
• Boston: $551
• Atlanta: $684
• Houston: $638
• Los Angeles: $620
• Chicago: $488
• Vancouver: $652
• Montreal: $593

Registration

Registration for XDC London is now open! There is a discussion on the forum about it here. We will be updating the schedule soon with more information once sessions are ready to announce, etc. In the meantime if you have any questions please write us and xdc@xojo.com. Hope to see you in London!

Last week while traveling in London I hosted a Xojo meetup. This was a social event where local developers could meet, share ideas, ask questions and get to know each other. Many of us who attended the Xojo Developer Retreat in Nashville were excited we got to see each other twice in such a short timeframe.

Though a small gathering, which was slightly affected by the possibility of train strikes, it was refreshing to get the opportunity to chat with everyone there. Most people were attending locally, but Xojo Engineer Javier Menéndez flew over from Valencia, Spain and MVP Jérémie Leroy attended from Paris, France. We got a lot of great feedback, the most popular being that there is a lot of enthusiasm to finally host a London Xojo Developer Conference. All I can say at this time is… we hope to! I had a great time getting to know everyone and hope to do another meetup again soon somewhere in the world!

Day one of the conference began with breakfast and Geoff’s keynote. He talked about many of the things that happened at Xojo since the last conference, such as 302 new features, 286 changes and 1400+ bug fixes. He also talked about Android and the Bug Bash, which are summarized below:

Android – When we showed Android at the last XDC it was essentially just a proof of concept. We had three possible routes we were going to take in terms of code compilation and had not even tried the first one. We ultimately went with plan B, which worked as expected. We are now feature complete for the first Android release and are rapidly fixing bugs. More on Android was discussed by Xojo Engineer Travis Hill during his session, The ABC’s of Android.

Bug Bash – We spent the month of August doing a Bug Bash and focused on different bug criteria than we usually focus on. We typically focus on the overall impact surface and bugs that we know will impact nearly everyone in a way that can’t be worked around get the highest priority. We realize that there are some bugs that do not affect many people but are very painful for those they do affect. And that is specifically where we wanted to focus our efforts with the Bug Bash this year.

The Bug Bash gave our engineers an opportunity to work on parts of Xojo they usually don’t work on making them more comfortable working in those areas. This increases our coverage in terms of who can work on what. In fact, today more of the team is comfortable working in different parts of Xojo than ever before. Most of the engineers have worked on the compiler, for example. We felt like this Bug Bash went really well and going forward we will dedicate 2 weeks per cycle to focus on fixing those types of bugs (mentioned above) when we look at what to focus on.  

Many other topics were covered in the keynote, like the Xojo community, Xojo’s participation in the GitHub Student Developer Pack, Xojo users, our design strategy and the Xojo product roadmap.

The rest of the morning continued with a session from Paul Lefebvre about how Xojo is made, followed by William’s session about the Xojo framework.

After lunch, we heard sessions from experts in the Xojo community. Always an interesting subject, Jim Meyer talked to us about using machine learning in Xojo apps. Kem Tekinay gave an interesting talk about using MemoryBlocks. Xojo Engineer Ricardo Cruz talked about the WebSDK.

We ended the day with two non coding sessions – Amy Barnes talked about the legal side of programming and Yousaf Shah discussed things you can do to improve your business other than coding. You can review the full sessions list and descriptions of all of the sessions here.

After sessions, it was time to go out on the town! We had a nice dinner at The Stillery, right in the midst of the craziness that is the Nashville Broadway area. After dinner a group headed out to one of the local honkey tonks to enjoy some live music!

Only morning sessions on day two when we heard from Christian all about MonkeyBread Plugins, his session gave some inspiration to Tim Dietrich, read about that here. Then Derrick Donnelly gave a very interesting talk about building digital forensic apps with Xojo (watch out for your fridge!) and the educational portion of the conference wrapped with Xojo Engineer Javier Menendez talking about integrating WooCommerce into Xojo apps.

We had lunch at a local diner, appropriately named The Diner. Then it was time for some fun – we visited an Escape Room (The Escape Game)! We split into three very competitive teams and entered the themed rooms where we had to “escape” by following clues and solving puzzles before the time ran out. Since we are all excellent problem-solvers, all of the groups amazingly made it out before the time ran out and none of the attendees or employees are still there. Everyone who particiapted really enjoyed it so we may do this type of activity at a future event.

It was really nice to get back to an in-person event and we look forward to doing more! Though we don’t have any plans to announce yet for the next conference, we are hosting a Xojo social meetup in London on November 9th, so if you happen to be there please come by and say hi!

William Yu grew up in Canada learning to program BASIC on a Vic-20. He is Xojo’s resident Windows and Linux engineer, among his many other skills. Some may say he has joined the dark side here in the USA, but he will always be a Canadian at heart.

• Facebook
• X
• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• YouTube

One project that was just shared with me was from Tim Dietrich, a Xojo user who has spoken at our user conferences (see 2018 presentation and 2019 panel). Late last year Tim shared that he was working on a project that could get Xojo in front of a new audience and he’s blogged with some updates along the way. Yesterday he released SuiteTransmit, which is an application for NetSuite developers to monitor files they are working on and when a file is changed, it is automatically uploaded to the File Cabinet.

About the project and development process, Tim commented:

I developed SuiteTransmit so that my NetSuite development work would be more efficient, and so that I could use my preferred development tool (BBEdit). When I started working on the app, I had a basic idea of what I wanted it to do and how I wanted it to work, but I wasn’t sure what it would take to build it. 

The first version of the app (which was essentially a proof-of-concept) was a Xojo console app. It monitored files in a specific directory, and when a change was detected, the updated file was uploaded to NetSuite via a custom API. It worked, and I immediately felt more efficient. That was encouraging, and the development process was very fast. That’s one of the things I like about Xojo: You can go from a concept to a working solution in no time at all.

Then I realized that the console app approach wasn’t ideal, especially when it came to launching the app, passing parameters via the command line, and so on. So I took some of the code I had developed in the console app, and repurposed it in a Xojo desktop app. That was extremely easy to do. I then improved the interface a little, and added support for configuration files (so that I could use the app when working on multiple projects). It quickly started to feel like a “real app.” And I have to admit, as geeky as it sounds, it was cool to see my app’s icon in the macOS toolbar.

That was all back in November of last year, and I’ve been using the app ever since then. It has absolutely been a game changer for me. My NetSuite development work is now much more like the Web development work that I’ve been doing for years. SuiteTransmit empowers me to use a development approach and workflow that I’m familiar with. And because I can now make changes to my apps more quickly and efficiently, I’m much more likely to experiment and try new development techniques.

At that point, I decided that I’d make SuiteTransmit available to other NetSuite developers. I figured that if the app was helping me that much, then it might help others, too. But before releasing it, I needed to test it on Windows, and ensure that it worked properly. That was important because, based on what I know about the NetSuite development community, most developers use Windows-based PCs. During testing, there were some weird differences that I found, and they seemed to be with Windows itself (and not anything that Xojo was doing). Regardless, I was impressed by how easy Xojo made it to get the app working on both platforms. 

A lot of people ask me why I give so many of my development tools away for free. I do it for a number of reasons, but the main one is that I figure that if someone else can benefit from them, and if they make another developer’s work even a little easier, then that’s great. “A rising tide lifts all boats,” as the saying goes.

Also, I don’t feel the need to monetize these things. It’s not what I do, or what I want to do, or what I’m good at. I develop custom software. Period. That’s where I’ve found joy and success.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, we love to share what Xojo users are making! We always encourage you to add your projects to the Showcase or reach out to hello@xojo.com anytime to talk about writing a blog post about your app!

Why, you ask? What are the advantages of using a PDF for your presentations? PDF is portable, meaning you can distribute these files easily, usually, with a small file footprint. The content is vectorial (except for images), what means that it will look great no matter the screen resolution of the display/projector used for playing the presentation.

There is one current issue to watch out for, currently there’s a bug on macOS where Acrobat Reader is not able to apply the assigned transitions on Big Sur and later; they still work under Catalina and previous versions of macOS.

In this example project I will create a shortened version of the slides I used in the Using Xojo’s PDFDocument presentation. You’ll need to change the font names (and any other item) to those you are using and that are installed in your computer.

Setting the Viewer Options

Start by creating a new project for the target you’re most comfortable with – Xojo’s PDFDocument is cross-platform and supported on Desktop, Web, iOS and Console projects. Next, add the Opening Event Handler to the default DesktopWindow/WebWindow/MobileScreen, or choose the Run Event Handler if you chose to create a new Console Project.

Write the following lines of code in the associated Code Editor:

// Let's create a new PDFDocument instance with
// the page size set to HD resolution

Var Presentation As New PDFDocument(1920, 1080)

// Let's make sure that the fonts used are embedded in the
// document, so there are no unexpected problems when the
// PDF is opened in a device that doesn't have that
// same fonts installed

Presentation.EmbeddedFonts = True

The next lines of code will set the default for the View mode of the document when it is opened in Acrobat Reader or any other PDF reader. Since it’s a presentation, you’ll likely want the document to be opened in Full Screen mode by default, so let’s make that happen:

// Let's create a new Instance from the PDFViewerOptions class

Var ViewerOptions As New PDFViewerOptions

// And set the FullScreen property to True
// so the document will set that view size
// when opened in the PDF Viewer app

ViewerOptions.FullScreen = True

Drawing the Background of the Page

Use a linear gradient brush to fill in the background of all the slides. For convenience, create a new method for it using the following values in the Inspector Panel:

• Name: DrawPageBackground
• Parameters: g As Graphics

Type the following code in the associated Code Editor for the method:

Static backgroundfilling As LinearGradientBrush

If backgroundfilling = Nil Then
  backgroundfilling = New LinearGradientBrush
  backgroundfilling.StartPoint = New Point(g.Width / 2, 0)
  backgroundfilling.EndPoint = New Point(g.Width / 2, g.Height)
  backgroundfilling.GradientStops.Add(New Pair(0.0, &c000000))
  backgroundfilling.GradientStops.Add(New Pair(0.7, &c000000))
  backgroundfilling.GradientStops.Add(New Pair(1.0, &ccccccc))
End If

g.Brush = backgroundfilling
g.FillRectangle(0, 0, g.Width, g.Height)

All this code does is create a LinearGradientBrush instance ranging from full black to some degree of gray at the bottom of the page. Because we are not going to change the values of the gradient every time we need to call the method, it makes sense to assign it to a Static instead of a Variable.

Then the LinearGradientBrush is assigned to the Brush property of the received Graphic context and, finally, used as the “filling color” when drawing the filled rectangle.

Drawing the Header

Now add the method that will be responsible for drawing the header shared by all the slides. Use the following values in the Inspector Panel:

• Method Name: DrawTopHeader
• Parameters: g As Graphics

And type the following code in the associated Code Editor:

Const kPDFDocumentHeader As String = "PDFDocument"

DrawUpperBand(g, 0, 50)

g.FontName = "Helvetica"
g.FontSize = 180
g.Bold = True

Var x As Double = g.Width / 2 - g.TextWidth(kPDFDocumentHeader) / 2
Var y As Double = 220

g.DrawingColor = &cC9F2C900
g.DrawText(kPDFDocumentHeader, x + 4, 224)

g.DrawingColor = Color.Black

Static linearGradient As LinearGradientBrush

If linearGradient = Nil Then
  Lineargradient = New LinearGradientBrush
  linearGradient.StartPoint = New point(x, y - 224)
  linearGradient.EndPoint = New point(x, y)
  linearGradient.GradientStops.Add(New Pair(0.0, &c00BD4E00))
  linearGradient.GradientStops.Add(New Pair(0.7, &c00FD1F00))
  linearGradient.GradientStops.Add(New Pair(1.0, &c25712900))
End If

g.Brush = LinearGradient
g.DrawText(kPDFDocumentHeader, x, y)

As you can see, this is quite similar to the previous code. We are using a new Linear Gradient as the filling for the “PDFDocument” text. But first, it calls the DrawUpperBand method. This is a method that will draw a picture with a 50% opacity behind the header text, as well as the XDC logo in the lower left corner of the slide. Add a new method using the following values:

• Method Name: DrawUpperBand
• Parameters: g As Graphics, x As Integer, y As Integer

Type the following snippet of code in the associated Code Editor:

g.Transparency = 50.0
g.DrawPicture(UpperBand, x, y)
g.Transparency = 0
g.DrawPicture(XDC2x, 20, g.Height - XDC2x.Height)

Both “UpperBand” and “XDC2x” are PNG image files added to the project.

NextPage

Because the background and the header are common items in all the slides, we will render them every time we add a new slide (page) to the presentation (document). Create a new method using the following values:

• Method Name: NextPage
• Parameters: g As Graphics

And type the following lines of code:

g.NextPage(1920, 1080)
DrawPageBackground(g)
DrawTopHeader(g)

Creating the Content of the Slides

Now let’s add the method that will be responsible for adding the text of the main topic on every slide:

• Method Name: DrawTopic
• Parameters: g As Graphics, topic As String

And type the following code in the associated Code Editor:

Var x, y As Double
g.FontName = "Anoxic Light"
g.FontSize = 150

x = g.Width / 2 - g.TextWidth(topic) / 2
y = g.Height / 2 - g.TextHeight / 2

Static LinearGradient As LinearGradientBrush

If LinearGradient = Nil Then
  linearGradient = New LinearGradientBrush
  linearGradient.StartPoint = New Point(x, y)
  linearGradient.EndPoint = New Point(x, y - 80)
  linearGradient.GradientStops.Add(New pair(1.0, &c9FE1FF00))
  linearGradient.GradientStops.Add(New pair(0.0, &cF6F6F600))
End If

g.Brush = linearGradient
g.DrawText(topic, x, y)

Setting Transitions Between Slides

PDFDocument does support the range of transitions available under the PDF standard. In this case we are going to use the simplest: Fade. So, create a new method with the following values:

• Method Name: AddTransitions
• Parameters: d as PDFDocument

And type the following lines of code in the associated Code Editor:

// New PDFTransition instance, using the Fade style
// with one second of length.

Var t As New PDFTransition(PDFTransition.Styles.Fade, 1)

// And apply it on every page of the PDFDocument, starting on Page 2.
If d.PageCount > 2 Then
  For n As Integer = 2 To d.PageCount
    d.TransitionAt(n) = t
  Next
End If

Putting It All Together

Now we have all the pieces needed to create this small presentation in PDF. Go back to the Opening Event Handler and type the following lines of code below the last one:

DrawPageBackground(g)
DrawTopHeader(g)
DrawTopic(g, "First Slide")
NextPage(g)
DrawTopic(g, "Second Slide")
NextPage(g)
DrawTopic(g, "Third Slide")
NextPage(g)
DrawTopic(g, "Fourth Slide")

AddTransitions(d)

d.Save(SpecialFolder.Desktop.Child("Presentation.pdf"))

Done! Run the project and the PDF document will be saved to your computer Desktop. Once you open it in Adobe Reader, the app will detect that the document wants to use the full screen mode and, as soon as you confirm, it will begin the presentation. Depending on your preferences in Acrobat Reader, you may need to use the mouse button or arrow keys to change slides, or it may automatically advance to the next slide after the amount of time set.

Javier Menendez is an engineer at Xojo and has been using Xojo since 1998. He lives in Castellón, Spain and hosts regular Xojo hangouts en español. Ask Javier questions on Twitter at @XojoES or on the Xojo Forum.

• Facebook
• X
• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• YouTube

Through the years of XDCs, attendees expressed how the sessions are great, but said over and over again that the true benefit is the discussion over a meal, the quick chats in the hallway or what they learned while sitting in the hotel bar with a group of Xojo users. See our past conference highlights videos to hear what attendees said – 2019, 2018, 2016, 2015. After having to (sadly) cancel multiple conferences in recent years, we wanted to get something in-person on the schedule. Choosing Nashville again feels a bit full circle, since we were days away from hosting XDC there in 2020 when the pandemic forced us to cancel.

Some of you have asked why we’re calling this event a retreat rather than a conference. We decided to call it a retreat to signify that we are emphasizing the part that attendees over the years has told us was the best and most beneficial part of XDC, the time spent with other users – networking, troubleshooting and building relationships. We are still going to have excellent sessions from Xojo and the community, but we are also going to find ways to ramp up the “hallway talk” opportunities.

The Hyatt Centric hotel is higher priced than hotels we have held previous conferences at and there are a few reasons for that. First, we want to hold conferences at a location within walking distance to local attractions and restaurants so you won’t need to rent a car or rely on hiring transportation. Second, September is a beautiful time of the year to visit Nashville. And third, in general, hotel prices are higher as hotels try to recover from the pandemic. To counter the higher hotel price, we lowered the event registration cost. Plus, there are a number of lower cost hotels (or maybe AirBNB) in the area that you can stay at while still attending all the retreat events. You can always save even more by presenting, Xojo is offering free passes for conference speakers!

If you want to meet the Xojo Team and community members, attend some great sessions, network, collaborate, have fun and enjoy Nashville, please join us at the Xojo Developer Retreat. Tickets are discounted by $100 through May 15th. Register early to save money and help us plan the best Xojo conference! We hope to see you there!

Download mp3 or watch on Xojo’s YouTube Channel.

Topics include:

• Xojo Team
• New Xojo Documentation
• Xojo 2022 Release 1 Release Notes

Xojo recently shipped the first pre-release supporting Android. We appreciate your enthusiasm as well as the dedication so many have shown to testing it. We will continue fixing the bugs you report and releasing updates until it’s ready for general release.

I don’t have to tell you that the pandemic has resulted in most large, in-person events being cancelled. Last year we scheduled the Xojo Developer Conference for March in Nashville. That had to be cancelled, of course, so we planned ahead for XDC in London in April 2021, then rescheduled for October, then March 2022 only to have to cancel that too. We look forward to this conference every year, not only to see Xojo users, but also to see each other. The Xojo team is distributed across North America and Europe and while we see each other on Zoom (a lot), as we all know, it’s not the same as being together in-person. We anxiously await the eventuality of the pandemic subsiding and holding the Xojo Developer Conference. What a wonderful reunion it will be!

Throughout the year we continued to work closely with the Xojo MVPs. They provide us with a lot of great feedback and ideas from their own experience and expertise, as well as from the community. The MVPs were extremely helpful in 2021, testing parts of API 2.0, Android and discussing features and improvements, like changes to Feedback. We look forward to continuing to work with them in 2022, if they continue to put up with us.

2021 really shined a light on the Xojo community! We were introduced to a few new guest bloggers on the Xojo Blog, plus multiple new YouTube Channels making videos for Xojo beginners and more. Thank you to all the creators out there talking about, teaching and sharing your experiences with Xojo! Word of mouth is always the best advertising since it comes with personal experience and we are very thankful for everyone who contributed to make the Xojo community a positive place for developers of all kinds. Follow @xojo on twitter to keep up with all the new creators and content!

This year we introduced the Xojo Educational license. This new license aims to empower educators of all kinds, whether they teach in traditional classrooms, adult education programs or clubs. We are ecstatic about the responses we’ve gotten from teachers from around the world! Xojo continues to participate in the GitHub Student Developer Pack which has resulted in thousands of young developers joining the Xojo community. We have heard of some interesting projects these students are doing such as building a college app, making a crypto currency blockchain system and more. We are excited to continue to offer resources to young developers and eager to see the creative ways they use Xojo!

We know you like the numbers so here are a few we are proud of this year. As of November 30th, Xojo license sales in 2021 are the highest they have been since Xojo was released in 2013. For those of you interested in more bug fixes, 61% more bugs were fixed in Xojo in 2021 than in 2020. We’ve learned that the vast majority of users are quite happy with Xojo. Our annual survey reflects that nearly 90% of users report they are “satisfied” with Xojo. As proof of that, the Xojo community really showed up to support us with the release of Xojo 2021r3 and the Android pre-release. In November, existing Xojo users renewed at nearly twice the rate projected!

We appreciate your continued support, it helps us to continue to push Xojo forward making it more functional, more reliable and easier to use than ever before. We’ve got a lot of exciting stuff in the works for 2022 and we look forward to sharing it with you. From all of us at Xojo, we wish you a happy and healthy holiday season and a wonderful new year!

New Xojo 2021r3

This latest update adds a number of exciting new features and improvements, including the ability to build and debug native apps for the Mac from Windows and Linux, Dark Mode support on Windows and new encryption features, like BlowFish and TwoFish. Read more about what’s in the new release. There’s never been a better time to get Xojo!

Android

Because Android is a new platform and this is a special pre-release, a current Xojo license is needed to participate in testing. You can build for Android using a Xojo Pro or Xojo iOS (soon to become Xojo Mobile) license. Testers can download the pre-release in the Testers channel in the Xojo Forum.

Xojo Storewide Sale

Save 20% in the Xojo store today through Monday, November 29th. No coupon required, discount will be automatically added in the store!

• New Xojo Licenses – All new Xojo licenses are on 20% off!

• Xojo Renewals – Renew now and get 20% off! Renewals give you access to Xojo updates for the next year (or 2 years), you’ll get 2021r3 which includes the ability to compile for Mac from Windows and Linux, Dark Mode for Windows and hundreds of other improvements!

• Upgrades – Get 20% off an upgrade to Desktop, Pro or Pro Plus! Upgrade for access to more features and 1 year of access to new releases like Xojo 2021r3!

• 3rd Party Products – 20% off plugins and add-ons from the community! Using third party software is a great way to expand Xojo’s functionality and support fellow Xojo developers!

As we go into the week of American Thanksgiving & Native American Heritage Day, Xojo is thankful for its dedicated team. They go above and beyond in developing and supporting our product and users. With that in mind, this year will be our last time participating in Black Friday. We want our team and everyone who celebrates this time to spend it with friends and family.

As always, all Xojo purchases are covered with a 90-day money back guarantee. 

Xojo Developer Conference Deal

With XDC 2022 London coming up quickly (March 30 – April 1, 2022), it’s time to start planning your trip! Buy one XDC ticket during the Black Friday sale and we’ll email you a 20% off coupon for a second ticket.

Auto-Renew

Black Friday falls on different dates each year, but if your license is set to auto-renew during the sale this year, you don’t need to do anything. Your auto-renewal will process with the 20% Black Friday discount.

*Xojo Cloud is not included in the sale.

Shop now!

A heatmap is a grid of fields that can have different sizes and colors. Heatmaps are often used to analyze website user behavior. Each area is assigned a color, and heat maps let you see the high and the low of that area. They often look like the image of a thermal camera, which is where the name comes from. Of course, a heatmap can also be used for displaying different temperatures, as its name so aptly describes. In this example we want to do that. We have the monthly mean temperature for a city for the last 10 years and we want to display this temperature by colors in a heatmap. 

The Data

To do this, we first create an array in which we write the years we have and an array with the individual month names: The information in these arrays will be needed later for the labelling of the axes. 

In order to be able to display values in a diagram, we want to write the values into a single array with all the months following with their values. We will combine the values as follow: 

Array( Jan ( 0 ) … Jan ( 9 ) , Feb ( 0 ) … Feb ( 9 ) , Mar ( 0 ) … , … Dec ( 9 ) )

We start with the January values and append the other months behind it. We can highlight special parts of the heatmap by adding a star, a polygon or a cross of any color to the area. 

Creating the Heatmap

Now we come to the creation of the actual diagram. We create an area 600 x 500 pixels in size; on this area we will later draw our chart and the legend. To do this, we create an instance of the class CDXYChartMBS and pass the size in the parameters. 

Dim c As New CDXYChartMBS(600, 500)

Above the chart, with addTitle, we can add a title that describes our chart. Our chart should be on an area of 400 x 400 pixels and have a distance of 80 pixels from the top edge. The background color, as well as the grid color is transparent. 

Dim p As CDPlotAreaMBS = c.setPlotArea(80, 80, 400, 400, -1, -1, CDBaseChartMBS.kTransparent, CDBaseChartMBS.kTransparent)

Now our symbol for minimum temperature is added. The minimum temperature is a small circle in a light blue color. In the addScatterLayer method we first specify the X and Y coordinate arrays as parameters then the title that will later be displayed in the legend next to the diagram and the shape of the symbol. Here we use PolygonShape. The number in the brackets behind the shape indicates the number of sides of the polygon. If this is 0, we see a circle. Then in the parameters follows the size of the symbol and the color. The structure is the same for other marks.

Call c.addScatterLayer(symbolX, symbolY, "Min value", CDBaseChartMBS.PolygonShape(0), 15, &hc6e2ff)

Now we create the heatmap with the method addDiscreteHeatMapLayer. It should have a size of 10 x 12 cells. 10 cells on the x axis and 12 cells on the y axis. In the parameters we first specify the array with the data and then the amount of cells on the x axis. For this we have to determined the array size of the array of the years. The cell amount for y axis is automatically determined from the amount of data. 

Dim layer As CDDiscreteHeatMapLayerMBS = c.addDiscreteHeatMapLayer(zData, xLabels_size)

We now set the labels for the axes. With the method setLabels we specify the text. With the method xAxis.setLabelStyle we specify the font and the font color. The label should be rotated by 90 degrees on the x axis so that it is easier to read. With setLabelOffset we set the distance of the text to the grid border. With a value of 0, the text would be on the left or upper edges of the cell and not in the middle. With setXAxisOnTop we indicate that the text of the x axis should be above the diagram. 

The setting of the y axis labels is similar

Call c.xAxis.setLabels(xLabels) 
Call c.xAxis.setLabelStyle("Arial Bold", 10, CDBaseChartMBS.kTextColor, 90) c.xAxis.setColors(CDBaseChartMBS.kTransparent, CDBaseChartMBS.kTextColor) 
c.xAxis.setLabelOffset(0.25) 
c.setXAxisOnTop 

Call c.yAxis.setLabels(yLabels) 
Call c.yAxis.setLabelStyle("Arial Bold", 10) c.yAxis.setColors(CDBaseChartMBS.kTransparent, CDBaseChartMBS.kTextColor) 
c.yAxis.setLabelOffset(0.25) 
c.yAxis.setReverse

Now we want to specify the individual colors for the value ranges. For this we create a new array. In this array we first enter the lower limit of the temperature that the color should describe, then the color value in hexadecimal followed by the uppermost value. The uppermost value is at the same time the lowermost value of the next color, so we don’t enter it twice, but give directly the next color. Our values all have a distance of 3 degrees. Afterwards we create the array colorLabels, which describes the text for our legend

Dim colorScale() As Double = Array(0.0, &h104E8B, 0.0, &h00BFFF, 3.0, &h7FFFD4, 6.0, &hFFFF00, 9.0, &hFFC125, 12.00, &hFF7F00, 15.00, &hff4500, 18.00, &hcd0000, 21.00,&h8B0000, 21.10) 
Dim colorLabels() As String = Array("<0.0", "0.0-3.0", "3.1-6.0", "6.1-9.0", "9.1-12.0", "12.1-15.0", "15.1-18.0", "18.1-21.0", „>21.0“)

We then apply the colors with colorAxis.setColorScale on the layer level.

layer.colorAxis.setColorScale(colorScale)

We place the legend 20 pixels to the right of the diagram. We use the font Arial Bold in size 10. With setKeySize we set the size of the legend boxes and with setKeySpacing the vertical distance between the individual legend entries.

Dim b As CDLegendBoxMBS = c.addLegend(p.getRightX + 20, p.getTopY, True, "Arial Bold", 10) 
b.setBackground(CDBaseChartMBS.kTransparent, CDBaseChartMBS.kTransparent) 
b.setKeySize(15, 15) 
b.setKeySpacing(0, 8) 
b.addText("Temp in °C“)

For the colors we use a trick, we read only the colors from the array that contains the color values and the temperature ranges by looking only at every second value. With the method addKey we then add the tag with the name and the extracted color. 

For i As Integer = colorLabels_size - 1 DownTo 0 
 Dim n As Integer = colorScale(i * 2 + 1) 
 b.addKey(colorLabels(i), n) 
Next

With the method makeChartPicture we get our diagram as picture:

pic = c.makeChartPicture

And you can show this picture as backdrop to better draw it with the paint event. If you use MakeChart with PDF type as parameter, you can get a PDF file to embed in a PDF page as vector graphics.

Then we can run the program and see our heatmap. You can then continue to work with this heatmap according to your own preferences. The final heat map looks like this:

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, you’ll need the MBS Xojo ChartDirector Plugin which you can purchase on the MonkeyBread Software website; or, at the moment, it’s included in super the Omegabundle deal. Besides ChartDirector, Omegabundle includes a ton of other tools for the sensational price of 399.99$. For example, you also get a DynaPDF Starter license with which you can use to write the chart into a PDF file. If you want to attend the Xojo Developer Conference 2022 in London and meet us, Omegabundle includes a discount of 100$ for the conference! Read articles from the Xdev developer magazine on the way to the conference, because it’s also included in the bundle! Have a look at the Omegabundle. It’s worth it. I hope you enjoy the heatmap!

Stefanie Juchmes studies computer science at the University of Bonn. She came in touch with Xojo due to the work of her brother-in-law and got a junior developer position in early 2019 at Monkeybread Software. You may have also read her articles in Xojo Developer Magazine. 

I have to confess that when the pandemic became a stark reality in March, I immediately assumed the worst. I started planning for a very different year than I had originally expected. If there’s one thing I have come to really appreciate this year, it’s pleasant surprises. Despite the uncertainty, 2020 has been a terrific year for Xojo by nearly every measure. Sales to new users are at a 5 year high and the community is growing in both adoption and retention of Xojo. We have also seen a double-digit increase in Xojo Cloud servers.

For Xojo and perhaps the world, the year 2020 can be summed up as a year defined by change. From traveling the world (XDC 2021 moved to October) to traveling to pick up groceries, it’s all different in 2020. A big change for Xojo was moving the web and mobile frameworks to API 2.0. This makes it easier than ever to use the same code across desktop, web and mobile apps. This has always been an important part of our vision for Xojo so we are happy to have delivered two more huge parts of that.

We partnered with Github on their Student Developer Pack. The Pack introduced Xojo, among other great tools, to 1.8 million students encouraged to learn programming by doing it. As a result, every day we see new student developers using Xojo. We also moved our forum from esoTalk to Discourse which has been a terrific improvement for the community. Because the pandemic has isolated many of us, we started doing video hangouts twice a week. There are regulars that show up for nearly every hangout and there are also new faces each time. I hope you’ll come by sometime. Links to the hangouts are available on the forum on Tuesdays and Fridays. We also launched the Xojo Showcase, a Xojo web app itself, to give Xojo users a way to share and show off their apps. You can scroll through the Showcase to see what other Xojo users have built and add your own Xojo-built apps.

This year we started the Xojo Most Valued Professional Program with the goal of improving communication between Xojo, Inc. and the user community. The MVPs were chosen by asking each member of the Xojo team to think of 5 users that have consistently been a positive force in the community. We then added up the votes and chose the 5 that received the most. They are (in no particular order): Kem Tekinay, Gavin Smith, Wayne Golding, Anthony Cyphers and Jérémie Leroy. They have all be doing a great job providing us with input on many things that impact the community.

We continue to hear exciting stories from members of the community about how they are using Xojo. The British Interplanetary Society in Italy (BIS-Italia), teaches students how rocket engines and launchers work. Nearly 2000 students assembled the avionics of one of the stages of the rocket launcher and tested the assembled launcher with a Xojo-based application. We were very excited to learn that Xojo is currently being used at the Spanish National Center for Biotechnology which uses “leading-edge technology in the fields of structural biology and image processing, cell biology, genetically modified mouse and plant models, genomics and proteomics, as well as bioinformatics and computational biology”. Using Xojo, they have developed internal web applications to track some of their cutting-edge experiments. In the US, Xojo is being used in classes in UCLA’s Department of Film, Television, and Digital MediaCinema and Media Studies Program. Last year the students used mostly desktop applications but with the improvements to iOS including MobileMoviePlayer, they are looking forward to moving to iOS with Xojo 2020r2.

The year wasn’t without sadness, all of us at Xojo and in the community continue to feel the loss of Xojo engineer and friend, Stéphane Pinel. As difficult a year as this has been, like so many of you, the Xojo team has adapted to the new normal. Having said that, we are looking forward to returning to at least some of the old normal. We will continue to plan and be hopeful for the future and we look forward to seeing you in person at XDC London in October 2021. Best wishes to everyone for a happy and healthy 2021.

If you have already registered, we will automatically move your registration to the new dates, but if you’d like a refund please contact Customer Service. The hotel has cancelled the hotel reservations that were made for the event, you will be able to re-book starting January 11, 2021 and we will get to keep our previously negotiated rate.

Those who have reached out with session ideas – we love your enthusiasm, please keep those topics in mind – we will open up the call for speakers in the new year. We are looking forward to seeing you all!

Let’s move forward with the idea that anything can happen and we’ll plan for the best – so go get your passport now and check the expiration date! If you need to renew so you can travel to London uninterrupted, I suggest you start the process now. The US Passport office is 1.2 million applications behind and processing times are months longer than expected. I experienced this personally when I had to renew my kids passports earlier this year – their applications were sent in late January with standard 6-8 weeks processing time. The passports didn’t show up until June (unfortunately our vacation was cancelled anyways).

Hope to see you all in London!

When I was researching questions to use in my dietitian study guide apps, I came across this topic called the Menu Engineering Grid.  This is a tool used by restaurant managers to evaluate foods in a specific category, the appetizers category for example. They look to see how each item does in comparison with others in the group in terms of its popularity and profitability. Depending on where an item falls on the grid, there are several recommendations on how to improve upon the item’s popularity and/or profitability. As the name says, this is a tool commonly used in the food industry, but I’ll show you how you might be able to incorporate this tool into your business practices.  The menu engineering grid looks like this below:

The x-axis shows the profitability, and the y-axis is the popularity.  You see there are 4 quadrants to the grid.

• Stars (upper-right):  Items that are very profitable and very popular. Goal:  Maintain the quality of the item since it is selling well and bringing in good revenue. Recommendations: No change to the item or maybe experiment with slight price increases.
• Horses (upper-left): Items that are very popular but not very profitable. Goal: Find ways to increase the profit margin. Recommendations: Try a price increase and/or using less expensive materials.  Now, digital goods really don’t use materials, per se. However, maybe a plugin could be considered a material for an app. If you purchase a plugin, you can look at using less expensive plugins that perform the functions you need, you can write the plugin yourself, or you can renew the plugin every other year instead of annually.  For me, I wouldn’t mess with the plugins. They’re working and hopefully are being updated to meet the needs of current Xojo releases and the latest operating systems. Plus, you’re helping out other small business developers by buying their products. Instead, I would recommend slight price increases for this category. People are already buying your app and haven’t been complaining about the price.
• Puzzles (lower-right): Items that are highly profitable but not very popular. Goal: Find ways to increase the popularity of the items without sacrificing the profitability too drastically. Recommendations: See if a slight decrease in the selling price brings in more sales. Other strategies include finding a new focus area of the app or maybe marketing it better on your website and social media.
• Dogs (lower-left): These items are not profitable and not popular. Recommendations: Don’t waste your time or money with improving these items and consider removing them from sale.

Next in the image, take note to the vertical and horizontal lines that separate the quadrants. These are not arbitrarily added. They’re calculated. Without getting into too much detail, the horizontal line separating the upper and lower quadrants is known as the popularity line and is calculated as 70% of the expected popularity:

Popularity line = 100% / total number of items X 70%

The vertical line separating the left and right quadrants is known as the average contribution margin, which is simply the sum of all item contribution margins divided by the total number of items.

The plot points utilize the popularity index (y-coordinate) and contribution margin (x-coordinate).

Popularity index = number of an item sold / total number of all items sold X 100

Contribution margin = selling price – item costs

Technically, the item costs of digital goods are essentially low. What are you actually buying for each item sold? Probably nothing, unless you are distributing on a removable media source. Maybe you are selling on your website and use a credit card processor. For example, I use PayPal, and for each sale made on my website, PayPal collects 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. You might also count the salary you pay yourself towards the item cost. There can be a lot of work to determine the item cost of apps since the costs associated are not as cut and dry as the food industry, for example.

So how can you, as an independent developer, utilize this tool? Allow me to share a real-world example. An example of my own business. I’ll show you how I utilized the menu engineering grid in some of my apps with actual before and after data.

I have three standalone study guide apps for students to prepare for the registered dietitian exam:

• Study Suite: By far my most popular product, accounting for over 85% of revenue. This product contains multiple study modules, providing students with different forms of studying and keeping them engaged in an interactive format.
• Flash Cards: An electronic version of flash cards. This product sells for $150.  The year prior to any changes, I sold 37 units, resulting in $5,550 for the year.
• Hanging with Nutrition: A hangman style game. This sells for $150. Year prior to changes had a whopping 13 units sold, resulting in $1,950 for the year.

Analysis: Study Suite is a star. While each of the three apps did bring in a profit, Flash Cards and Hanging run quite low on the popularity scale, falling into the puzzle category. Students understand Flash Cards is a method of studying, but maybe this is priced too high. Students may not understand Hanging with Nutrition is meant for study purposes, plus, this is priced too high.

Changes: Keep Study Suite as is since this is very popular and profitable. With both Flash Cards and Hanging with Nutrition, I decreased the prices of each to $100 and $50, respectively. In addition, I incorporated both products into Study Suite as separate add-on products. Now students continue to purchase Study Suite as their main study app. They can trial the two add-on products and see the value of the products and if these are something they want to include. The reduced price also entices students to make a purchase.

Post-change evaluation: The year after the price decrease plus incorporation of the apps as add-ons returned the following:

• Flash cards sold 113 units at $100 each for a total of $11,300 for the year.  More than 3 times the number of units and just over double the revenue from the previous year!
• Hanging with Nutrition sold 64 units at $50 each for a total of $3,200 for the year.  About one and a half times the revenue, plus over 300% increase in the popularity!
• I think the changes were quite successful with increasing the popularity of both apps.  Plus, I not only maintained the profitability, but actually increased it in both, even with a selling price decrease.

In terms of profitability, all apps should be considered profitable as long as they have helped bring in adequate revenue to cover your costs to develop the apps, such as your Xojo license and other licenses you may need to make your awesome apps. If you cover your costs and don’t even sell one more app during the year, you can essentially sit back and just let the app remain without any updates, maybe even for the unforeseeable future. But this isn’t ideal. Operating systems change, bugs are always being discovered, and let’s face it, as you grow, so does your knowledge in developing. In order to maintain the high quality of your apps and improve them, it must be worthwhile to you to continue working on them.  If I hadn’t changed up the way I market Hanging with Nutrition, I wouldn’t see 13 users per year on that product worth the time and effort to maintain it, at least regularly. Though when the number of students who are buying the product annually increases five-fold, it makes my decision of investing my time in keeping these apps up to date much easier.

Take this lesson as you will. Many of you probably have dozens of apps or more. How well are your apps selling? How are they priced for the market? Priced compared to the competition, if any? Do any of these serve a similar purpose and may benefit as an add-on or as an in-app purchase to another app? While we have some downtime in the world today, take a moment and evaluate your apps. Come up with a marketing plan, implement it, and see what happens. Don’t be afraid of change. Some small tweaks can have a big impact on your small business.  

Good luck, and stay safe and healthy.

Ryan Hartz has been a Xojo user for over 10 years. He is a registered dietitian with no formal education in software development, illustrating that anyone can learn development in Xojo with its ease of use and understandable language. In 2005, Ryan started his company, Visual Veggies Software, which offers software study guides to young nutrition students preparing to become registered dietitians.

2020 is going to be a very exciting year for Xojo – we finally see the finish line for several of our multi-year projects! Starting now you can watch Geoff’s 2020 Update to get an overview of what’s been going on behind the scenes at Xojo and what to expect this year. Then, check out our Android update with Paul and Web 2.0 with Greg videos below!

The 2020 Xojo Design Award Winners are:

Best Consumer App – HDRtist NX

Ohanaware: A detail-oriented High Dynamic Range Imaging app for MacOS X.

Best iOS App – PropertyMe Manager

PropertyMe: The PropertyMe Manager app gives property managers access to their portfolio wherever they are.

Best Lifestyle App – Crossword Wizard

Rush Software: Create and play crossword games.

Best Developer Tool – RegExRX

MacTechnologies Consulting: A cross-platform Regular Expression development tool.

Best Vertical Market App – qwireCast

qWire: Desktop app to help Hollywood casting director make cast lists.

Best Vertical Market App – bMD Medical Software*

bMD biomedical Developments SRL: Medical practice management software.

Best Plugin – MBS Plugins

MonkeyBread Software: This huge toolbox for Xojo developers includes thousands of classes, controls and examples to extend Xojo.

*Yes, there are two Best Vertical Market Apps, they were both so good we had no choice but to award them both!

Another reason this conference will be different has to do with the name change from The Xojo Developer Conference to XOJO.CONNECT. If you have ever been to one of our conferences before, how would you describe it? I guarantee one of the things you’d say is how important the connections you made and the conversations you had outside of the sessions were. The name change is to show that we do understand how valuable that aspect is to you (it’s extremely valuable to us) and we will be adding more opportunities to nurture those connections in Nashville.

The access you get to the Xojo Team is another thing that makes the conference exceptional. I talked to someone recently who told me one of the reasons he enjoys coming year after year is so he can give Greg his wishlist. Meeting the Xojo team in person is great for those who depend on Xojo. For example, we can arrange for you to sit down one on one and go through any issues you are having or talk about your specific feature requests. From engineering to marketing to support, we are all energized by the conversations we have with you at the conference, we love to see what you’re working on and we go back with so many ideas. One user said the week after the conference is the witching hour of Xojo developers, going home with tons of new ideas ready to implement into their projects, but for us — we have a conference post-mortem meeting where we share what we learned, what feedback we got — both good and bad — what new ideas we have. My to-do list triples, because I’m inspired by all of you.

Even though the conference is so much more than just the sessions, the sessions are still a very important part of it. We have a wide range of topics from a wide range of speakers. Many of the speakers, myself included, are first time Xojo conference speakers. New speakers, of course, mean new topics and fresh new perspectives. Some of the first-time speakers added to our lineup include Wayne Golding, who is joining us all the way from New Zealand, to talk about Windows service apps. Ryan Hartz of Visual Veggies Software who will talk about building and maintaining a software business. Ryan has been to several conferences and has been a guest blog writer on our blog, but this is his first time speaking. I heard Stefanie Juchmes talk about the MBS Plugins at the conference in Germany, and she will be speaking about SceneKit in Nashville. Zeke Burke attended his first Xojo conference last year (see him on our highlights video) and he will be talking about multi-platform web design. Our newest engineer, Javier Menendez, will be talking about Blobs – this will be his second US Xojo conference. We have a great lineup of sessions and no matter how much experience you have, we guarantee you’ll learn something new.

During the day, we have built more time into the schedule so you can have post-session conversations and the evenings will offer even more time to connect. It’s great to get to know one another in a more relaxed setting. With that goal in mind, we will take busses over to the new and highly popular 6th & Peabody where you can relax in a casual environment with a cold beer and tacos from the White Duck Tacos Shop truck. You can have a game of bean bag toss on the lawn or enjoy some retro games in the arcade! Plus there will be a Moonshine tasting for anyone who is interested…

The next night we will go down to the Honkey Tonk Highway (ye-haw) for some classic Nashville entertainment at Nashville Underground. After dinner, you can take our buses back to the hotel or explore the rest of the popular area and Uber back with your friends later. If all of this isn’t enough, we have a special treat for those staying Friday night – a pub crawl of the 2nd street district coordinated by a pub crawl professional. I said it before and I’ll say it again – this is where the “you-had-to-be-there” jokes get made. Remote Debugger!

Nashville is a new city for our conference, but one that has been highly requested. In fact, it has made our top 3 possible cities list for the last 4 years! Our conference has travelled to many different cities now, including (save this for trivia) Austin, Orlando, Las Vegas, Houston, Denver, Miami … and now Nashville. Nashville is one of America’s most popular cities, with so much to offer, even if you don’t like country music. I’ve watched the Bourdain episode, I’m ready to try some of Nashville’s famous hot chicken!

There really is no substitute for in person connections – whether it is something you decide to do to get out of your comfort zone or for new ideas, you will — as they say — be amongst friends. Last year a first time conference attendee said, “I decided to come because I really needed to connect with the developer community.” Agreed! For me, I love spending a week connecting with the Xojo community, having in person conversations, and seeing my co-workers (who I video chat with daily) in person! I love it!

We always try to pick a hotel that has about 400 rooms or less, so you will run into conference attendees frequently around the property. From the time you arrive you’ll see posts on the forum or on Twitter (also via the conference app) that people are hanging out in the lobby or restaurant or bar. Let us know when you arrive, Alyssa and I and other Xojo staffers will be around all week, and we will see you in the bar at 7 on Tuesday for early conference registration – if we don’t see you before.

If you’re not currently registered, we still have room and we have seen a number of flight deals recently from Frankfurt, London, New York City and more. Plus, you can still get our fantastic conference hotel rate though February 24th. This is going to be a great conference and a very exciting year for Xojo!

EAT LOCAL

If you like amazing pancakes enough to stand in line for an hour, The Pancake Pantry is for you. Locals say your patience will be repaid in the most delicious breakfast cakes. Ready for lunch? Head on down the Natchez Trace Parkway, the forest-lined road that was once the Natchez Trace Trail while getting into the country mood with Kacey Musgrave’s Biscuits. Next stop is The Loveless Cafe, “Nashville’s Biscuit”, for Southern cooking from the country ham to the red-eye biscuits. Brown’s Diner is mentioned in a lot of places but the website is down…which could be a good sign if you are looking for local favorites.

HOT CHICKEN

The official food of Nashville gets its own section. You can get Nashville Hot Chicken throughout the city, but if you want the source, the original, you go to Prince’s. Local will also swear by Hattie’s. Want to eat all the hot chickens? The Hot Damn! Hot Chicken and Beer Jeep Tour could be your dream come true.

DRINK

Visit local distilleries for whiskey (and other liquors too, I guess). The Corsair Distillery is the first craft distillery in Nashville since prohibition. And of course there is the Jack Daniels Distillery. Not interested in driving there? Jump on the Nashville to Jack Daniel’s Distillery Bus Tour.

GET MOVING

Cut a rug at Robert’s Western World. In true country fashion, this honky-tonk has just enough room for you to take a spin on the dance floor. Or just check out the scene while enjoying their Recession Special – a fried bologna sandwich, chips and a PBR for just $6!

If beers and bikes are more your speed, check out the Nashville Pedal Tavern. Their party bike is BYOB and a not-lazy and affordable way to experience Nashville, from Broadway to Music Row.

TAKE A TROLLEY

Night Trolley, Day Trolley, 2 Day Trolley, Music City Trolly

LEARN

Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park is a state park inside the city, under the shadow of the state capitol building and near the Tennessee State Museum and the Nashville Farmers’ Market. The park is lovely place to learn about Tennessee history without being stuck inside.

The Country Music Hall of Fame showcases the history of country music, featuring a variety of changing exhibits plus performances. From guitars to cars, the recent expansion offers more space to explore the permanent collection, which includes stage costumes, 600 instruments and hundreds of other objects.

GET SCARED, XOJO PUB CRAWL

Join a crew of Xojo people for a haunted pub crawl on Friday night after XOJO.CONNECT.

If you haven’t registered for XOJO.CONNECT in Nashville yet, grab your spot today! If you have already registered make sure you have booked your room at the Sheraton Music City and shine your boots because it’s only 63 days away! Finally, I’ll to wrap this up with a personal recommendation. You don’t get more Nashville than Dolly Parton and if you want to get a feel for the local color of Tennessee, and it’s most famous city, Dolly Parton’s America will give you that.

1. Xojo is for everyone

It doesn’t matter if you are just starting to learn how to develop software or if you are already a seasoned developer, Xojo is for everyone! If you are getting your feet wet in coding, then you’ll find that Xojo offers a programming language that is extremely easy to grasp from the start. In fact, you’ll find a lot of contextual help in Xojo while coding, and access to the global Help menu is only a click away.

In addition, the Xojo Documentation website offers really easy-to-follow QuickStarts, Tutorials and Guides letting you make your own Desktop, Web, Android, iOS, Raspberry Pi or Console apps in no time! Add that to the more than 300 video-tutorials you can find in the Xojo YouTube channel, and the fact that all the Xojo language documentation is packed with code snippets showing how to implement a particular feature- copy, paste and you are set.

Need some starting points for a better understanding of how Xojo Projects work? The Examples folder included with the Xojo Download includes dozens of complete example projects you can open, run and inspect to see in detail how to implement a particular task or behavior; then you can  adapt and use these for your own projects. Even you can use the Search feature for filtering the example projects by platform, operating system or other criteria.

One thing you’ll notice the very first time you run Xojo is that you aren’t inundated with features you don’t even know what to do with yet! Everything is clear and concise in front of you, hiding the complexity generally associated with the development workflow.

As you advance in your learning process and get more experienced in coding, you can discover more advanced features at your own pace. And even then, things like Web debugging, iOS or Android deployment or truly multi-platform development, are still effortless. Xojo does all of this without installing thousands of files on each operating system or requiring the additional installation of other components in order to properly work.

What if you’re an experienced developer coming from another development environment or language? Then you’ll be able to learn and master the Xojo programming language in a blink while watching your productivity increase! In fact, Xojo is an Event-Driven OOP (Object Oriented Programming) language, sharing the same “dot notation” syntax used by the most modern programming languages; and Xojo offers guides to port your existing projects, for example, from FoxPro or VB6 to modern and truly multi-platform deployment with Xojo. And even if you are coming from other development environments as FileMaker or 4D, Xojo makes your solutions available for a more wide range of platforms as native apps and without hidden or extra deployment costs.

Being an OOP language means that Xojo will share the same set of paradigms and/or syntax you are used to dealing with in other programming languages; ranging from PHP to C++, Objective-C, Swift, JavaScript, Python, and others. In fact, you’ll discover that several of the language keywords, instruction blocks and function or methods calling conventions are very similar to the ones found in those.

Add that to the rich and complete Xojo Framework and the fact that you can even use external libraries if you need to; and you’ll realize all the possibilities you have at your hands for creating apps and complete solutions that can be used by individuals or companies of all sizes.

2. Make all kind of apps!

While several languages and IDEs are more suited or focused on developing a particular kind of products (database driven, mobile, IoT, etc.), with Xojo you’ll be using the same IDE and programming language to create all of these and more!

For what it is worth, that means that even if you are a self-employed developer, a Citizen Developer or need to develop a solution for a company, you’ll be saving a huge amount of time, money and resources in order to get all these things done with a single development environment. That translates into reduced costs and increased ROI in your development investments; from the simplest ones to the more complex and demanding, including Console apps acting as Daemons, background processes, task helpers… or APIs development as the middleware to interact with both Mobile, Web, Desktop or Raspberry Pi clients!

Do you offer consultancy services or are you working as a freelance developer? With Xojo you’ll significantly reduce the amount of time you usually spend following multiple changes and evolutions in programming languages, frameworks, SDKs, technologies and, probably, third parties IDEs (among other resources) in order to keep going with your business.

At the same time, due to the fact that Xojo shares the programming language and IDE among all the supported platforms (Desktop, Web, Android, iOS and Raspberry Pi) and architectures (both 32 and 64-bit / Intel and ARM), you can also expand the kind of solutions you can offer to you current or potential clients and keep them running as the technology evolves!

3. Truly Native, Cross-Compiled, Multi-Platform Apps!

Some development environments or programming languages are focused (or are more appropriate) to a particular platform or target. With Xojo you’ll find that all of your apps will be compiled to native binary code on every supported platform.

That means that they will not incur the performance penalties imposed by byte code translations or that they can be easily reverted to source code, even your Web products!

What’s more important: the compiled apps will look and behave as you expect on every one of the supported operating systems.

In general, all of this means that you can be more confident about the fact that your intellectual property will not be the targeted or exposed by the most common techniques or exploiting attacks; and that translates into additional peace of mind regarding how you protect your investment in developing and deploying your solutions.

Even Xojo is created with Xojo! That is, the IDE offers the same look and feel and set of features from Windows, macOS and Linux.

4. Do more with less

During the designing, coding, testing or deployment phases of the product you won’t need to do complex set-ups or check for ever-changing dependencies! The Xojo IDE abstracts you from all the inherent and underlaying complexity, so you can focus on what really matters: the features that make your product truly unique.

This kind of complexity abstraction is evident not only for Desktop apps, but also for Android and iOS deployments and is especially evident when deploy web apps in combination with Xojo Cloud.

In this last case, you only need to click a button in Xojo to have your web app transferred from the IDE to your Xojo Cloud server. Your app will be up and running in a matter of seconds, without needing to deal with complex server configurations or investing all the required time in being sure that you have all the server security issues covered and under control. Think about that for a moment: if you are a small company or just an independent developer, you don’t need to invest  extra resources, time and money in order to have your web apps secured and running with confidence.

Of course, if you have the resources and/or the required knowledge, you can deploy your web apps yourself on any VPS or web hosting service of your choice that meets the Xojo Web deployment requirements.

But the best part is that it doesn’t mind if you’re developing for Web, Android, iOS, Desktop or Raspberry Pi: you can develop for any of the Xojo supported platforms from the operating system of your choice! In the case of macOS and iOS apps, development can be done on any platform a Mac computer is required for compilation.

In summary: it doesn’t matter what OS or platform you want or need to code for, you’ll be using the same IDE and programming language in all the cases, abstracting you from all the particularities and underlaying complexity on every case. And that means doing more in less time!

5. Rapid Application Development

It doesn’t matter if you are creating a Desktop, Web, Android or iOS app; or if you want to build your solutions for Intel or ARM based architectures. With Xojo you will be able to design the user interface via Drag & Drop from a rich set of controls ready to use. It’s that simple. In fact, the Layout Editor provides visual clues to precisely align every control in the Window, View or Page of the app; and if you’re targeting for macOS, Web, Android or iOS you’ll be able to see how your designs react when used in Dark Mode!

Reacting to users’ interactions in your apps is as easy as selecting a user interface control in the Layout Editor, adding the kind of event you’re interested in from a list (with contextual help about what it does and when it is fired), and writing the code you want to be associated and executed to that particular Event.

Add that to the fact you can reuse your already developed Classes, Modules and other resources; you can even reuse your code between different kinds of projects and targeted platforms!

6. No chains!

It doesn’t matter if the apps or solutions created with Xojo are intended to be used by dozens or thousands of users, even if they are database driven! With Xojo you don’t have to pay royalties for absolutely anything! Even better: you don’t need to buy a license in order to try, learn and use Xojo! There is no limited trial, feature limitations or other drawbacks when using the free IDE. Download Xojo and begin learning, developing, running and debugging your projects all without a license.

Features include, the access and use of the supported database engines: from SQLite to MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, or any other you can access using ODBC, and of course the included features to work with Reports.

You can buy a Xojo license when you decide that is the time to build your projects. Further, all Xojo licenses are covered by a 90-day money-back guarantee.

In addition, you don’t even need to pay for what you are not going to use (or going to use right now). What does this mean? Well, let’s say that if you only work with Windows and only want to create apps for Windows, then you only need to buy the Windows Lite Edition license for that ($99 USD), while if you need your apps to be run from all the supported Desktop platforms (including Raspberry Pi), then the Xojo Desktop Edition license is probably what you’re looking for ($299 USD); or if you really want to grasp all the Xojo power and target all the Xojo supported platforms (Desktop, iOS, Web and Raspberry Pi), then Xojo Pro is undoubtedly for you ($699 USD)! Oh and Xojo Pi, for building desktop and console apps, is free!

You can even upgrade to Xojo Desktop or Pro at any time if you decide that you need to use more advanced features not present in your current edition. In other words, you don’t need to buy a new license from scratch if you don’t want to. You can even change your Xojo Cloud plan at any time you require!

7. You’re not alone!

With more than 400,000 users around the world and more than 20 years on the market, the awesome Xojo community is one of the best programming resources you can find around to join to. In the Xojo Forum you’ll find the largest community and best place to get your questions answered by a large group of enthusiastic and seasoned Xojo developers.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a simple or a more complex problem, you’ll feel welcomed and probably have your problem solved in record time! In fact, many of the replies come from members of the Xojo Staff, ranging from Customer Service to anyone on the Engineering Team or even the Founder and CEO of Xojo himself!

Of course, you have other resources you can (and should!) visit, ranging from a dedicated publication about Xojo development, to Users Groups and Xojo Pages in Facebook, developers blogs about Xojo, and of course the official Xojo channels in Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. Don’t worry, you don’t need to search the entire web to find these, we have collected some of these valuable resources here and here.

And if you need to get a richer experience and more in-depth knowledge, in a face to face way, then you won’t want to miss any of the usual Xojo Events taking place in several American and European cities each year! There you can chat with other Xojo developers to exchange experiences, attend technical sessions, socialize and create new relationships that can lead in new work projects, etc.

The biggest of these Events is XDC, with Xojo developers coming in from all around the world, and where you will be able to attend sessions from expert Xojo developers and where you can talk with all the Xojo Team!

8. And you won’t be left behind

Did you know that Xojo is still able to open and run projects from earlier releases, even many, many years ago? Sure that in more complex projects you will need to upgrade code, and that’s because Xojo has evolved, and continues to evolve, to match the own industry changes and evolution.

In fact, the apps created with Xojo are 64-bit compliant (although you can still generate 32-bit code, if you need), with support for HiDPI graphics, Dark Mode support both on macOS and iOS, the latest iOS SDK, native Silicon and M1 compilation and meeting other non-visual changes imposed by any of the current operating systems.

You can expect several Xojo version releases every year, adding new features, improving existing ones and fixing bugs. But we also keep a bigger picture about the medium to long term evolution of Xojo, so you can always see the big features we are working on that will be coming in future releases of Xojo. That way, all the effort you’re putting in the apps, products and solutions you create today won’t be left behind in the future. You’ll be able to improve and enrich them for your users, keeping them current as operating systems evolve.

Need to request a feature is important for you or did you find a bug you can’t workaround? We listen to you. Go to our Issues tracker system to get in touch with us about the things you want to be added or improved.

9. Add your own features!

The Xojo Framework is large enough to accomplish most of the usual app requirements you may need; but sometimes you need to go a bit further, even the thousands of already existing external libraries around whose functions you can use directly from your code … and in these cases you’re covered too!

Xojo Provides SDKs (Software Development Kits) both for Desktop and Web applications; so you just need to start digging in the provided documentation and example projects in order to create your own Xojo Plug-Ins. These will be loaded from the IDE and you’ll be able to use their exposed features with the same simplicity you do when using the rest of the internal Xojo Framework.

10. Xojo Ecosystem

Don’t be afraid if you don’t have the time, resources or knowledge needed to develop your own plug-ins.

You can resort to the broad offer of excellent third-parties plug-ins, add-ons, libraries and classes you can choose from. These range from commercial software to Open-Source projects, or just plain free classes, modules or libraries ready to download and use in your own Xojo projects.

We are here to help!

All in all it’s time to give Xojo a try, isn’t? It’s just a click ahead right now, so download Xojo and rediscover the pleasure of coding!