With the myriad of different Window Managers and themes on Linux, and personal preferences, you can be assured that your UI will look different from one Linux user to the next. The main challenge of being a native app is trying to normalize the UI experience across different platforms (yes, even different Linux distros).
Category: Linux
Posts related to Linux development.
When we added this property to the Canvas and ContainerControl there was probably a lot of head scratching going on. Some of you probably asked yourself (or us) “Why is this necessary?” or “Isn’t this pretty much the same thing as enabling DoubleBuffer?”
Well, yes to the latter question on Windows, and a slightly more optimized experience on OS X, but the impetus behind this property was really our redesigned IDE. More specifically, it was a need/requirement because of a long standing issue with our Linux framework.
Comments closedWe have discovered what we believe to be a bug in OS X Mavericks specifically on newer Macs. Apple started using Intel’s new Haswell processor in the MacBook Air in June, the iMac in September and the MacBook Pro in October. When you build for either Windows or Linux from OS X, any images you dragged into your project are converted to BMP format. The bug we discovered (which we have reported to Apple – RADAR case 15546907) results in a banding of the converted graphic.
Linux, especially Ubuntu, has quickly evolved, introducing core UI changes such as the global menu bar (akin to OS X’s single menubar system) as well as Overlay Scrollbars. Overlay Scrollbars were meant to reduce the amount of clutter needed around content areas by showing up only when hovered over, and always outside the content area. If you’re developing any kind of serious application on Linux, especially if you are targeting Ubuntu, you want to be able to detect whether or not the system supports Overlay Scrollbars.
As of July 23rd, Xojo is now available in the Ubuntu Software Center. Did you know you can also easily make your Xojo-created Linux apps available in the Ubuntu Software Center?
Comments closedUpdate for 2021: Modern Visual Basic for your Mac
Xojo is the modern alternative to Microsoft Visual Basic. Xojo is a single language to build apps for Mac, Windows and Linux desktop, plus web, mobile and Raspberry Pi. Cross-compile desktop apps and use the same powerful language to develop for web and mobile too.
Comments closedThere was a time when the idea of running the same code on different computers wasn’t even imagined. Programming languages were written specifically for a particular computer. And computers were purchased for very specific purposes so why would you even want to run a particular program on another type of computer?
It was the desktop computer revolution that changed that. By the mid-to-late 1980’s, there were more and more desktop computers and developers wanted to target all of them. Soon, however, Windows became so dominant that many developers chose to focus on that one OS. Some Mac developers, not wanting to miss out on the potentially enormous Windows market, either went to the trouble of writing two versions of their applications or used a tool/language that would allow them to target both Mac and Windows from a single code base. This was the beginning of cross-platform development.
Recently, I was asked by tech blogger Chris Pirillo if cross-platform was really important anymore. Cross-Platform is actually more important than ever. Why? First of all, while the Windows PC market is seeing flat or declining sales, Apple’s Mac marketshare is growing. We are seeing this at Xojo. More and more Windows developers are coming to us because they can no longer ignore the Mac market. Linux is the predominant server OS. If you want to write server software that can run on some combination of Linux, Windows and OS X, you’ll want to be writing cross-platform code.
Comments closed