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Category: Desktop

mac windows and linux

#JustCode Challenge Week 1 – Color Picker

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

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

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

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

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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FileMaker Developers Enhance & Expand App Development With Xojo

If the deprecations and changes to the FileMaker platform have you searching for alternatives, Xojo is a solid place to start. FileMaker developers use Xojo for a variety of reasons, including lower cost, more powerful apps and native iOS apps.

Xojo is a powerful, full-featured development tool and as far as professional development tools go, Xojo is amazingly easy to use. For people with programming experience or those that want to learn, Xojo is a great choice for creating powerful apps to meet any business need – from cross-platform desktop apps, web apps, mobile and iOT apps.

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Goodbye GTK+ 2, Hello GTK+ 3

With the release of Xojo 2017 Release 2 we have updated our Linux Desktop framework to use GTK+ 3 instead of GTK+ 2. For those not familiar with Linux, GTK+ is a User Interface (i.e. UI) toolkit, much like Cocoa is for macOS and Win32 controls (or WinForms.NET or WPF) is for Windows. GTK+ 2 has been supplying the user interface for Xojo Desktop apps for Linux since we first targeted Linux over a decade ago. It has since been deprecated in favor of GTK+ 3 for quite some time now and GTK+ 2 is typically not installed by default on most Linux distros these days, which makes deploying Xojo Desktop apps on Linux more painful. Unfortunately GTK+ 3 is not ABI compatible with GTK+ 2 so we could not migrate to using GTK+ 3 without completely ditching GTK+ 2.

Let’s take a closer look at what this means for your Linux apps:

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JSON Feed Desktop App

Recently, a new syndication format was introduced by Brent Simmons and Manton Reece called JSON Feed. It is an alternative to RSS/Atom to get feeds for blog posts and podcasts. RSS/Atom are XML-based making them complex to work with. As its name implies JSON Feed uses JSON and is much simpler. I’ve shown in previous posts how easy it is to make a web and iOS apps with Xojo to display the feed.

In this post, I’ll show you how to create a Xojo desktop app to display the JSON feed for Daring Fireball in less than 20 lines of code. This app works without changes on macOS, Windows and Linux.

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