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Category: Cross-Platform

Set Focus to a Field Using an iOS Declare

You can call into Cocoa Touch APIs to use methods and properties that are not built into the framework by using the Declare command. To create a Declare statement you first need to track down the API you want to use in Apple’s documentation: Apple Developer Documentation. Most of the time you will reference the Foundation and UIKit libraries, but there are many other libraries as well. Xojo Declares use the Objective-C names so be sure to refer to those in the documentation rather than the Swift naming.

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Unlock the all in one, low-code, cross-platform solution

Like his father, my teenage son loves video games. The single player games where you take a character through some kind of adventure are the ones I like most. These usually have a fair number of AI-controlled enemies that must be defeated. My son, on the other hand, prefers to play against other human beings. When I asked him why, he said, “The AIs are so predictable.” To prove this to me, he took over when I was having trouble defeating a particularly difficult enemy and quickly dispatched him, narrating his strategy as he went and barely being scratched in the process. My son is an elite player compared to me partially because he puts a lot more time into it than I do but also because he loves video games far more than I do.

Just as people have varying levels of skill and interest in video games, the same is true of app development. There are those that are happy to devote enormous amounts of time to learning everything they possibly can. They don’t care how long it takes. They want to have control over everything and are willing to do whatever is necessary to make that happen. I’m so glad those people exist because there’s a lot of great software that might not otherwise have been created without them. I’m not one of those people. I really want to focus mostly on what makes my application unique, abstracted from the nitty-gritty of app development.

That’s why I have always been attracted to tools like Xojo. I am a citizen developer. Of all the job titles I have had over the years, all of them in tech,  none have ever included words like programmer or engineer. I do some software development but it’s just a part of my job. It’s something I do to help me in my work or to help my co-workers.

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PDF File Generation? There is an API for that!

I’ve heard it several times: how can I export to PDF from Xojo? Sure, there are lots of answers pointing to a bunch of resources, including excellent plug-ins from third parties. But can you accomplish the same thing using an already available API? Yes, there is a remote API for that! The requirement is that your Xojo app will need to have access to Internet … and, of course, you’ll need to do just a bit of coding.

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Avoiding False-Positive Virus Detection in Windows Apps

Viruses continue to be a big problem on Windows. As a result, anti-virus software can be a bit over-zealous about detecting what it believes to be apps that have viruses embedded within them. We have had reports over the years that apps made with Xojo are sometimes falsely identified as being infected with a virus. This sometimes occurs because the 32-bit Xojo compiler puts executable code in a location where the anti-virus software doesn’t expect to find it. We’ve seen this occur even when users are debugging apps from the IDE. Fortunately in that case, there’s a fairly easy solution.

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How to Add User Interface Controls at Runtime

Admit it – this is one of those questions that, sooner or later, arise to every Xojo newcomer: How can I add new UI controls to the Window at runtime? And if you are considering this too, then the good news is that the answer is more simple than you probably expect… sitting right there on the Inspector under the Attributes tab. Yes, this is all about the Control Set!

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