Make it easier to launch Xojo web apps- add them to your iOS device’s home screen.
To add a web app to the home screen, you open it using Mobile Safari and then click the “Sharing” button and choose “Add to Home Screen”.
Category: Cross-Platform
If you use WebSessionContext in your Xojo web projects, you’re probably aware by now that they’re not working very well. I thought I’d take a few minutes to tell you what’s going on and how we’re planning to fix it.
What is a WebSessionContext anyway?
First of all, a quick description of what WebSessionContext is supposed to do for you. WebSessionContext is a mechanism for accessing a particular existing WebSession from within an area of your application that would otherwise not know where it belongs. These include Threads, Timers, System Events, App Events, etc. Normally you could tell because you would get a SessionNotAvailableException when trying to access a particular WebSession in your code.
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Since the introduction of iCloud, I have wanted to have a single Apple ID. When Apple recently added the two-step authentication for Apple IDs to make them more secure, I decided to sign in and update my Apple ID account. Part of the process is to verify a device you own which will be used, along with your password, to authenticate that you are who you say you are should you want to make changes (such as your password) to your Apple ID in the future. The webpage said it would list my devices, but none were listed. It didn’t take long to figure out why. The Apple ID I was updating was for iTunes, while the Apple ID Apple was using to find my devices was the one associated with my iCloud (MobileMe/mac.com) account.
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 closedWhen working with Windows services you’ll want to debug the application while it’s running as a service. To do this, you can Select Run Paused from the project menu, then create the windows service and start it. Now you’re debugging your app while it runs in service mode.
All of this takes time, and having to create/start the service each time slows down debugging considerably.
I have written a little utility that allows me to right click on the debug executable and automate the service creation and startup. You can download this utility from https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/18858366/DebugService.zip. The source for the Xojo project is included. The utility accepts the executable path as its argument, creates a service “_test” and starts the service.
Comments closedUnless you have been living under a rock for the past week, you know that Apple unvieled iOS 7 and its new user interface coming this fall to an iOS device near you. While there are some great new features, like the engine in a car, it’s not the first thing people notice. Most car shoppers are looking at the color of the paint, the sleekness of the design, the look of the interior and dashboard, etc. In other words, they look at the cars’ UI.
The new UI in iOS 7 is the most controversial thing about it by far. I’ll admit that when I first saw it, I thought they were changing it just to change it. I thought they hadn’t put enough thought into the reasons why or they were just bending to the pressure of change for change’s sake. In my role at Xojo, I think at a lot about UI design. Before long, I realized that of course Apple put a lot of thought into it. That’s what Apple does. It’s their culture. So why were they going with this new, simpler, non-skeumorphic design?
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.
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