Visual Studio for Mac was recently released. In a previous post I compared how much easier it is to make native Mac apps with Xojo than with Visual Studio for Mac. Now I’d like to talk about making cross-platform desktop apps.
Comments closedCategory: Desktop
mac windows and linux
At the recent Build conference, Microsoft released the final version of Visual Studio for Mac. As a former Visual Studio developer who left that world for the fun, fast development that is Xojo, I had to check it out to see how it compares to Xojo.
First, if you’ve ever used Visual Studio on Windows before, be aware that Visual Studio for Mac is not the same thing. Essentially Visual Studio for Mac is new branding for Xamarin Studio (Microsoft bought Xamarin in 2016), so Visual Studio for Mac looks and works nothing like Visual Studio for Windows.
Comments closedThe ContainerControl is one of the most versatile control classes included in the Xojo framework both for Desktop and Web apps. In fact, it paves the way to complex UI controls creation with the same simplicity you are used to while designing your window layouts. Even better, once you create your complex UI controls using the ContainerControl, you will be able to add them to your Window layouts as if they were regular controls. Plus, you will enjoy the fruits of better OOP encapsulation and the fact that you can create and use the controls dynamically at run time. Want to see this in action? Follow this tutorial and video to create the basis of a multiplatform search field based on the ContainerControl class.
Comments closedServer Ranger started life as a small in-house Xojo console project that I used to monitor servers for several clients. Rather than getting paged (in the very early days) or getting angry phonecalls from clients, it was much more pleasant to have my app play an alert on my Mac and send me an email to notify me of a server issue. With this heads-up, it was often possible to have the issue resolved before a client even realised there had been an issue.
Like many in-house solutions, the demand on Server Ranger increased over time and it became a more vital part of my business.
Comments closedIn Xojo 2016 Release 4 we switched our main graphics rendering engine on Windows from GDI and GDI+ to Direct2D/DirectWrite. Direct2D/DirectWrite was first introduced by Microsoft in Windows 7, with support in Vista via a Platform Update. It is (or was at the time) Microsoft’s new high-performance 2D vector Graphics API.
Comments closedRecently there was a question posted on the Xojo Forum about why a protected property on a control subclass could not be manipulated by an event handler in an instance event handler.
Comments closedWant a quick and easy way to send notifications to your devices (iOS, Android and web browsers) from Xojo desktop and web apps? Perhaps you want to send a notification if a purchase is made, an error occurs or a long process has finished. If so, the free Pushover web service might be what you need!
Comments closedHere are the questions people asked during our February “What is Xojo” webinar. Did you miss the webinar? It’s less than 30 minutes and you can watch it right here:
Comments closedSometimes you need a feature that is not available directly from the Xojo framework. Responding to this need is what Declares are designed for: to get access to system native APIs. On OS X, you typically look at the Cocoa APIs. On Windows, the Win32 APIs. Finally on Linux, the GTK APIs.
Comments closedNow that you’ve finished creating your Windows app, how do you distribute it to Windows users? Microsoft Windows users expect an installer, so you can’t really get away with just using a ZIP file to distribute your apps. What are your options?
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