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Category: Fun

The Klingon Translator App You Definitely Need

Published March 7, 2019 by Paul Lefebvre

I love the new Star Trek Discovery and there are a fair amount of Klingons in it, from time to time. It occurred to me that someone has probably built a web service to translate English to Klingon and if so, I needed to build a Xojo app to use it.

A quick Google search turned up an API by FunTranslations: https://funtranslations.com/api/klingon

It has simple usage where you send along the text in English and you get back a JSON result containing the text translated to Klingon. Here’s the result of my 15 minutes of effort to use this in a Xojo desktop app:

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Hour of Code: Xojo Dojo

Published November 29, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

December 3rd kicks off Computer Science Education Week 2018! Computer Science Education Week is held in early December every year in recognition of the birthday of computing pioneer Admiral Grace Hopper. Alongside this is the Hour of Code promotion where schools throughout the world get students to try at least 1 hour of programming at some point during the week.

Each year for Hour of Code, I volunteer at the local Middle School to talk to the students about what it is like to be a programmer and do a little bit of programming. This year I plan to demonstrate Xojo Dojo with a Raspberry Pi and show the kids how much fun coding and Xojo programming can be.

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#JustCode Challenge Week 14 – Marching Band ScoreKeeper

#JustCode Challenge Week 14 – Marching Band ScoreKeeper

Published September 21, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

For the final week of the #JustCode Challenge I’ve made an iOS app that keeps the score for high school marching band shows. The ScoreKeeper app lets you add a show or event and then set the scores when they are announced at the end of the show. Though this is for marching band, it can easily be adjusted to keep track of a set of scores for any sort of competition or game.

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#JustCode Challenge Week 13 – Xojo Speed

#JustCode Challenge Week 13 – Xojo Speed

Published September 14, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

When Geoff and I were driving around Germany with Christian Schmitz of MBS Software before the MBS Xojo Conference started, the topic of speed limits on the autobahn came up. Christian mentioned than many cars in Germany have the speedometer set to display a speed that is a little higher than what you are actually doing. I have noticed that my Toyota Tacoma shows 70mph on the speedometer when it is really going more like 67.

Geoff wondered if there was a way to determine how accurate your car’s speedometer was and it made me think of a Xojo iOS app I had made a while ago: Xojo Speed.

Run Xojo Speed on your iPhone while you’re driving and it uses the iOSLocation class to calculate the miles per hour or kilometers per hour in a large, easy-to-read display.

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#JustCode Challenge Week 12 – MultiTemp

#JustCode Challenge Week 12 – MultiTemp

Published September 7, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

It’s week 12 of #JustCode and I’m in in Munich, Germany at the MBS Xojo Developer Conference! I’ve never been to Germany and had no idea what the temperature would be, so instead of using the Weather Channel, I found a web API called OpenWeatherMap and built an iOS app to fetch the weather for display in a table. I even implemented the new table refresh feature added to Xojo 2018r2.

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#JustCode Challenge Week 10 – NetTank

#JustCode Challenge Week 10 – NetTank

Published August 24, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

For the 10th week of the #JustCode Challenge I took a look at networking. For my project this week I’ve created a networked version of the Combat game, which has two tanks on the screen shooting at each other. The network version allows you to control one tank with the app running on your computer and someone else to control the other tank with the app running on their computer. I call it NetTank.

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#JustCode Challenge Week 9 – Quote Web Service

#JustCode Challenge Week 9 – Quote Web Service

Published August 17, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

We’re wrapping up week 9 of #JustCode with a web app that demonstrates a web service, JSON and SQLite. The web app functions as both an app with a UI and a web service. It lets you enter your own quotes which are saved in a SQLite database. The web service randomly fetches a quote and returns it as JSON.

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#JustCode Challenge Week 8 – JumpStart App Launcher

#JustCode Challenge Week 8 – JumpStart App Launcher

Published August 10, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

A long, long time ago (1989) one of the first apps I ever made was an app launcher for the Atari ST. I called it JumpSTART. I originally wrote it in GFA BASIC and then later re-implemented it in Pascal (OSS Personal Pascal, technically).

When I got my first modem I went online with Genie and Delphi and uploaded JumpSTART as freeware. Even though it was freeware, I got a few checks in the mail from people that liked it.

I was reminded of JumpSTART when I saw my dock getting crowed. I thought replicating JumpSTART in Xojo would be a good project for week 8 of #JustCode. Though let’s just call it JumpStart this time around.

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