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Category: Windows

Posts related to Windows-specific development.

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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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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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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