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Speeding up the Layout Editor

Published April 9, 2019 by Geoff Perlman

For more years than I’d like to admit, the Layout Editor has been slow in terms of dragging controls around. As you add more controls, it gets worse. For web layouts, it’s been even worse. That’s primarily because we have to draw everything for a web layout whereas for a desktop layout, the OS draws the controls for us.

In an engineering meeting, I mentioned a discussion I had with a user about the speed of the Layout Editor and Travis said he had recently been reminded of how slow it was too. While most of the time issues in Xojo are carefully calculated and prioritized for maximum bang for the buck (as we say around here), that’s not always how it happens. After the meeting, Travis decided to dive into the Layout Editor code and see what could be done to speed it up.

The results are pretty remarkable.

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Tutorial: Active Words

Published July 31, 2018 by Javier Menendez

Follow this tutorial to learn how to create active (clickable) words in a text of a TextArea control using the OOP Delegate design pattern, which allows you to dynamically change how your app will react when the user clicks on any of these active words. Best of all, this is cross-platform, so you can use it for macOS, Windows and Linux deployments!

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#JustCode Challenge Week 1 – Color Picker

#JustCode Challenge Week 1 – Color Picker

Published June 22, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

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

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5 Questions to Ask When Choosing a Development Tool

5 Questions to Ask When Choosing a Development Tool

Published May 30, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

These days everyone has a great idea for an app. Maybe you have an idea that would save you time at work, or maybe you’ve been thinking of an app that would automate something you do at home. Not sure where to start? One of your first steps is choosing a development tool that is right for you and for your project.

Here are five questions to guide your decision:

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10 Print

Published November 10, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

The other day I saw this article on Dev.To: A Universe in One Line of Code with 10 PRINT

It talks about how you could make a maze-like structure on a Commodore 64 with just this one line of code:

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

The author then goes on to show you how you might do something similar using Python and pygame.

I love all things retro and this seemed like fun, so I thought I would whip up the same thing in Xojo.

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The Best Cross-Platform Secret Weapon You’ve Never Heard Of

The Best Cross-Platform Secret Weapon You’ve Never Heard Of

Published November 8, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

In today’s world, the only way to be sure you are reaching all your potential customers is to target multiple platforms. But cross-platform development is crazy-hard, right? Perhaps, if you are using tools like Java, Qt, Delphi or Xamarin it certainly can be. But with Xojo, cross-platform apps are simple to create.

In fact, Xojo lets you easily cross-compile desktop apps for Windows, macOS, Linux and Raspberry Pi. Plus, you can use the same Xojo language to create web and iOS apps too (Android coming soon!).

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ipify for Xojo

Published September 26, 2017 by Javier Menendez

ipify is a very useful web service (an API) that promises to always be available to attend requests, letting us know the public (or external) IP address we are using to connect to Internet. We can get this small piece of information as pure Text or in JSON or XML formats.

This post was updated in 2021 to using Xojo’s API 2.0.

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