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Category: Cross-Platform

The Real Reason Behind the Canvas/ContainerControl Transparent Property

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.

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The End of Windows XP

As we posted in September of last year, Microsoft announced that Windows XP, which was released 12 years ago, will no longer be supported after April 8, 2014. Our information tells us that only 3% of Xojo users are using Xojo on Windows XP. Supporting XP is limiting our ability to move Xojo forward on the Windows platform. Therefore, starting with Xojo 2014r1, we will no longer support Windows XP for the IDE itself.

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At Long Last…Web Standalone SSL

A little over a year ago, we started adding the features that were needed to directly support SSL connections in standalone web apps. We ran into a few issues during beta testing which blocked our ability to release at that time and the feature was pulled.

A recent flurry of questions regarding this feature, and the addition of Travis Hill to the web framework team this fall, prompted us to look at this feature again. It turns out that the items which were blocking the release of this feature got fixed as a result of other bug fixes in the fall and we have been able to confirm that standalone SSL does in fact work! If you’re using Xojo 2013r3 or higher, you should be able to actually use them!

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Progress Report: iOS Auto Layout in Xojo

We continue to work towards Xojo support for iOS. Since the last update, we have been working on support for Auto Layout. We demonstrated Auto Layout at XDC last year. However, at the time we only had support for it in the framework; not the IDE. In case the term Auto Layout is unfamilar to you, it’s a technology for controlling the size and postion of controls. In Xojo today, you use the locking properties. We determined early in the development of our iOS framework that locking would not be sufficent for iOS since the user will often radically change the size of the layout by rotating the device. Instead of locking, you will use Auto Layout. Think of it as locking on steroids.

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Getting Healthcare.gov to Handle 50,000 Users

Healthcare.gov, the US Government’s health insurance exchange website for states that didn’t provide their own, was supposed to handle about 50,000 to 60,000 simultaneous users. Unless you have been living under a rock, you know what a complete disaster the website as been. But it didn’t (and doesn’t) have to be that way.

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Building for Windows/Linux on Newer Macs

We 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.

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Writing High-DPI Aware Windows Apps

Today’s laptops and monitors support high resolution displays which allow you to pack more information and content on the screen. Although one common complaint is that people find the text to be too small at the maximum resolution, Windows’ solution to this is the ability for the user to adjust the DPI setting.

SetDPI.png

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