Desktop – Page 9 – Xojo Programming Blog

FileMaker Developers Enhance & Expand App Development With Xojo

FileMaker Developers Enhance & Expand App Development With Xojo

Published September 7, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

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

Published August 15, 2017 by William Yu

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

Published June 1, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

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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Making a Cross-Platform Desktop App: Comparing Xojo and Visual Studio for Mac

Published May 25, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

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.

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Making a Mac App: Comparing Xojo and Visual Studio for Mac

Published May 18, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

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.

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ContainerControl: Making a Multiplatform Search Field

Published April 26, 2017 by Javier Menendez

The 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.

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Taking Your App From In-House to Commercial

Published April 25, 2017 by Xojo

Server 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.

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Windows Graphics: Direct2D/DirectWrite Direction

Published April 12, 2017 by William Yu

In 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.

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Controls on Layouts: Who owns what?

Published April 10, 2017 by Norman Palardy

Recently 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.

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Sending Notifications with Pushover

Published March 6, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

Want 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!

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Category: Desktop