Blog about the Xojo programming language and IDE
Posts related to Windows-specific development.
In his poem, “The Mouse”, Robert Burns wrote:
The best-laid plans of mice and men oft go astray…
As Burns so eloquently stated, no matter how carefully you plan sometimes things just don’t work out. Anyone who has done software development for long knows this all too well.
Comments closedI love listening to music and have been a happy Apple Music subscriber since it was first released in 2015. Having access to 30 million songs is great even if I mostly just listen to the ones in the “Hard Rock” category (current favorite song: You Don’t Know by Kobra and the Lotus). Unlike some other streaming services, when you listen to a song with iTunes that has not been downloaded to your computer, it does not technically stream it while it’s playing. Instead iTunes downloads the full song to a cache folder and plays it locally from there. This has the advantage of there being fewer stutters as the song is playing, but does mean it takes a moment before the song starts playing the first time. Subsequent plays of the same song are instant, though, since it doesn’t have to download it again which may also save you some Internet data usage. A notable downside to this design is that it also means that these songs are using up space on your drive and with today’s smaller SSDs often every bit of space counts. It doesn’t appear that this space is ever cleared by iTunes, either.
These songs files are saved in a cache folder buried in hidden folders on macOS and Windows, which you can get to manually if you are comfortable with the command line.
Alternatively, you can easily make a quick Xojo app to do it for you.
Comments closedRecently, a new syndication format was introduced by Brent Simmons and Manton Reece called JSON Feed. It is an alternative to RSS/Atom to get feeds for blog posts and podcasts. RSS/Atom are XML-based making them complex to work with. As its name implies JSON Feed uses JSON and is much simpler. I’ve shown in previous posts how easy it is to make a web and iOS apps with Xojo to display the feed.
In this post, I’ll show you how to create a Xojo desktop app to display the JSON feed for Daring Fireball in less than 20 lines of code. This app works without changes on macOS, Windows and Linux.
Comments closedIf you are a Mac or Linux web or cross-platform developer, one of the easiest ways to test your apps on Windows is to use a virtual machine. And you can test Windows in a VM completely for free by using the test VMs provided by Microsoft.
Comments closedAt the recent Build conference, Microsoft released the final version of Visual Studio for Mac. As a former Visual Studio developer who left that world for the fun, fast development that is Xojo, I had to check it out to see how it compares to Xojo.
First, if you’ve ever used Visual Studio on Windows before, be aware that Visual Studio for Mac is not the same thing. Essentially Visual Studio for Mac is new branding for Xamarin Studio (Microsoft bought Xamarin in 2016), so Visual Studio for Mac looks and works nothing like Visual Studio for Windows.
Comments closedIn Xojo 2016 Release 4 we switched our main graphics rendering engine on Windows from GDI and GDI+ to Direct2D/DirectWrite. Direct2D/DirectWrite was first introduced by Microsoft in Windows 7, with support in Vista via a Platform Update. It is (or was at the time) Microsoft’s new high-performance 2D vector Graphics API.
Comments closedXojo 2017 Release 1 includes support for running and debugging 64-bit apps right from the IDE for macOS and Linux. Windows support is noticeably absent. Why? The answer is a bit complicated but interesting.
Comments closedThere’s been a bit of discussion about how the new Xojo.Net.HTTPSocket is slow for some users on Windows, which we’ve been trying to isolate to…
Comments closedIt is likely that later this week, Microsoft will be announcing Visual Studio for Mac. Is this really true? Why would they do this? What does it mean for Xojo users?
Comments closedSam Rowlands has been developing Xojo apps since 1997. He and his wife, Joy Sha, make up Ohanaware and they have been building award winning apps since 2008, notably Funtastic Photos, HDRtist and Shine. Sam is an active Xojo developer and he also offers App Wrapper, which simplifies the process of preparing applications for submission to the Mac App Store and deploying on web sites, in the Xojo Third Party Store.
I’d like to introduce you to Ohanaware’s latest Made With Xojo application we’ve created for us Xojo developers. It’s called “Iconographer” and it is designed to simplify the process of creating stunning and platform-consistent icons for Mac, Windows & iOS.
Comments closed
