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Category: Cross-Platform

Guest Post: Running Xojo Apps on Windows with Elevated UAC

Published August 16, 2013 by Xojo

We’d like to thank Wayne Golding for offering the following tip. 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.

Do you need to run a Xojo Application on Windows with Elevated UAC? Here’s Wayne’s trick to achieve that goal.

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Xojo Apps in the Mac App Store

Published July 8, 2013 by Paul Lefebvre

Is it possible to put a Xojo-made application in the Mac App Store?

The answer is simple: Absolutely.

However, it can be a lot of work and you’ll have to pay heed to Apple’s rules regarding the Mac App Store and follow their very stringent requirements.

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WebSessionContext Changes in 2013

Published June 25, 2013 by Greg O'Lone

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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Merging iCloud and Apple ID Accounts

Published June 20, 2013 by Geoff Perlman

iCloud.jpegIf you have been around the Mac community long enough, you may have ended up with two Apple IDs. I have one for iTunes and another one that came from MobileMe. This resulted in effectively having two iCloud accounts. This can be inconvenient and probably will become more so in the future. Apple doesn’t provide a means to merge Apple IDs. They know they need to provide this, but they do not yet do so. I, however, have found a way.

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.

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GUEST POST: Testing a Windows Service Application with Xojo

Published June 19, 2013 by Xojo

When 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.

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The iOS 7 UI Controversy

Published June 18, 2013 by Geoff Perlman

Unless 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?

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More Important Than Ever: Cross-Platform’s History

Published June 13, 2013 by Xojo

There 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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