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Category: Windows

Posts related to Windows-specific development.

Xojo Retina/HiDPI: The journey of a thousand pixels…

“Retina” is the name for high resolution screens on Mac and iOS devices while “HiDPI” is the Windows equivalent. For simplicity, I’ll use HiDPI (which really is the universal technical term) for the rest of this blog post. Now that we have HiDPI support in Xojo, if you app doesn’t use any pictures, you can simply open your project, click on Shared under Build Settings and turn on the “Supports Retina/HiDPI” option. That’s all you need to do to have a HiDPI version of your app!

Having said that, if you are creating or using pictures in your project, there may be a few adjustments you’ll need to make to your code. A little over a year ago the process of making sure we had all of the necessary graphics together to build a Retina/HiDPI IDE was added to my to-do list. While 95% of the icons created for the Xojo IDE in 2013 already existed, most of the graphics that made up the IDE itself did not, and the IDE itself needed a bit of an overhaul to get it ready for the big change, both in graphics and in code…

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How to Recursively Delete a Folder

While Xojo doesn’t currently provide a direct way of recursively deleting a folder, there are various options that will allow you to do this:

1. Recursively iterate through all the folders, deleting each one. You can read about that at our Developer Site, this is the best cross-platform way.
2. Use the Shell to recursively delete a folder (i.e. “del /s” on Windows, or “rm -rf” on OS X and Linux)

Windows specific ways:
3. SHFileOperation (an older API)
4. IFileOperation (the more modern API that Windows recommends over option #3)

I’ve decided to look at option #4, since this allows more customized options, like the ability to show a progress dialog. However, it is also the slightly more complicated option since it deals with COM & Delegates. The example illustrates this:

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O Retina, Retina, wherefore art thou Retina?

eyeball.pngDuring my keynote address last April at XDC, the Xojo Developer Conference, I said that we would be adding Retina support (the OS X feature that provides for ultra-high resolution displays) to the OS X framework in the 4th quarter of this year. We have been working very hard on Retina support both for the OS X framework and for the IDE itself. We didn’t want to stop there though. Windows also supports ultra-high resolution displays. For Windows, this technology is called HiDPI. Xojo is a cross-platform tool so we decided we should support both Retina and HiDPI, and do it in such a way that you don’t have to do much of anything and they just work.

UPDATE: Xojo Retina is here, April 2016

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Hour of Code: Cat Pictures

It’s time again for Hour of Code! The Hour of Code is a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries. Anyone, anywhere can participate in Hour of Code, from ages 4 to 104. At Xojo, we are again participating in this wonderful way to help people learn to program.

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Tip: Use Constants to Improve Code Readability

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.

Guest Post Tip: Formatted Text/Strings in Xojo

Writing long concatenated text in Xojo (or any programming language) tends to make the code difficult to read. Typically there is a block of code that has line extenders (_), a single line that goes on forever or a block of code that appends text to an existing variable. All are hard to read. And when you add SQL statements to the mix it can become difficult to easily see what you are trying to achieve.

I’€™ve started using Constants for this reason.

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