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Category: Windows

Posts related to Windows-specific development.

Windows 10 is here!

Windows 10 is here, for some of you anyway. Yesterday (July 29th, 2015) marked the start of the roll out of Windows 10. If you reserved your copy using the prompt from your Windows 7 or Window 8 installation then you should soon have the option to download and install Windows 10, if you have not already.

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Rapid Application Development

Although not a new trend in software development, rapid application development (
RAD for short) is again on the upswing. What is RAD? It’s all about creating software quickly. The technology world is
always changing rapidly and change only seems to accelerate. Being able to create your own software and easily adapt to changes is incredibly important to nearly every business.

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Extending Control Features on Windows

Recently an issue with our Windows MoviePlayer was brought to my attention. Specifically, it was a problem with our Looping feature when using the native player. The bug was unfortunate, but luckily there was a workaround. However, it required a less often used feature of the MoviePlayer control, the MovieController.

When we design a control, whether it’s a PushButton or MoviePlayer, we try to anticipate the most often used features and add them into our product. However, we understand that there are occasions when a certain feature is needed that we may not have exposed. For this purpose we’ve added Handle properties on almost every control. You can use this Handle property, with the right Declare, to access additional features of that control. In some cases though, at least on Windows, a bare bones Handle wouldn’t be enough. In the Windows world our Handle refers to the HWND of the control. In most cases this would be enough, however, we do have a few controls which are ActiveX based. Currently, the native HTMLViewer and MoviePlayer are one of these few ActiveX based controls.

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HP Stream 7 and Xojo

Lately we’ve been talking a lot about our newly added iOS support for Xojo. Considering the popularity of iOS devices, it is understandable why we would be so excited. But iOS devices are not inexpensive.

On a lark, I purchased an HP Stream 7 (Signature Edition, which means no extra “bloatware” was installed) last week from the Microsoft Store. It was on sale for just $80! So what is an HP Stream 7 and how does it relate to Xojo?

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The Libs Folder

For those of you building apps for Windows and Linux, you’ll notice that each build includes a Libs folder. The name of this folder depends on the application name that you’ve set in your Build Settings. For example, if my Windows App Name is “My Application.exe” then the Libs folder would be named “My Application Libs”.

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There and Back Again: The Evolution of the Graphical User Interface

30 years ago this past January, Apple launched the Macintosh and with it, the first widely available computer with a Graphical User Interface or GUI. If you are less than 25 years old, there’s a very good chance you’ve never used a computer that didn’t have a graphical user interface. But at the time, it was a radical departure from the way in which most people interacted with a computer. Over the past 30 years, the GUI has evolved and in some ways has come full circle.

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