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Category: Cross-Platform

O Retina, Retina, wherefore art thou Retina?

eyeball.pngDuring my keynote address last April at XDC, the Xojo Developer Conference, I said that we would be adding Retina support (the OS X feature that provides for ultra-high resolution displays) to the OS X framework in the 4th quarter of this year. We have been working very hard on Retina support both for the OS X framework and for the IDE itself. We didn’t want to stop there though. Windows also supports ultra-high resolution displays. For Windows, this technology is called HiDPI. Xojo is a cross-platform tool so we decided we should support both Retina and HiDPI, and do it in such a way that you don’t have to do much of anything and they just work.

UPDATE: Xojo Retina is here, April 2016

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Hour of Code: Cat Pictures

It’s time again for Hour of Code! The Hour of Code is a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries. Anyone, anywhere can participate in Hour of Code, from ages 4 to 104. At Xojo, we are again participating in this wonderful way to help people learn to program.

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Deploy iOS apps to your devices without an Apple Developer Membership

With the release of Xcode 7, Apple combined the iOS and Mac Developer programs into a single Developer Program. Previously these programs were $99/year for each and now they are $99/year for the combined Apple Developer Program which lets you create and deploy apps for iOS and OS X.

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Tip: Use Constants to Improve Code Readability

Wayne Golding has been a Xojo developer since 2005. He operates an IT Company Axis Direct Ltd www.axisdirect.nz which primarily develops applications using Xojo that integrate with Xero www.xero.com.  Wayne’s hobby is robotics where he uses Xojo to build applications for his Pi2 often implementing IoT for remote control.

Guest Post Tip: Formatted Text/Strings in Xojo

Writing long concatenated text in Xojo (or any programming language) tends to make the code difficult to read. Typically there is a block of code that has line extenders (_), a single line that goes on forever or a block of code that appends text to an existing variable. All are hard to read. And when you add SQL statements to the mix it can become difficult to easily see what you are trying to achieve.

I’€™ve started using Constants for this reason.

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Guest Post: Using Gitflow for Team Development

Guest Post by Kem Tekinay, a consultant and developer based in New York. Kem has been an avid Xojo user since the early days and is a world-renowned thinker and philosopher, at least its his own mind. You can find him and his works through the MacTechnologies Consulting web site.

After months of work, your project is so fabulous that you need more developers. You’ve been using Git as your version control system and creating/merging branches to keep it all straight, but so far it’s just been for personal use. How do you coordinate with others to maintain some semblance of order?

Try the Gitflow Workflow.

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The Citizen Developer

I’m seeing more and more headlines about how citizen developers are helping create the apps that business need.

In particular, a recent article at ZDNet, “The advent of the citizen developer” talks about how non-programmers can help create the apps needed by an enterprise company:

So the business-side has long had to place their fate in the hands of those with the requisite skills but often with little sympathy for or first-hand knowledge of the business itself. Or they just ended-up acquiring pre-existing software that was a close enough fit, and then had it configured to their needs. Neither path has typically produced tech solutions that fit business needs very well, and ‘good enough’ has usually been the mantra of the day.

These articles explain how “citizen developers”, sometimes referred to as a business analysts (or maybe even power-users), are using rapid application development tools to create apps that helps the business solve a problem more quickly than going through a more formal and lengthy IT process.

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