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Category: Learning

Using Advanced Twitter Search

Twitter can be a great resource for developers and small business owners looking for new audiences. How do you find that tweet you saw last month from @xojo to that other guy about the graphics property?

Here’s an overview of Twitter’s search capabilities and some tips to get the most out of using the platform to promote your apps.

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Canvas: How to Create Custom UI Controls

Xojo includes a good amount of UI controls available from the Library for Desktop, Web, iOS and Raspberry Pi targets. These are the pieces that allow you to layout the user interface of your apps: properties, methods and events that, when combined, define the specific behavior of the project at hand.

Sometimes, subclassing the available controls is the answer to add specific behaviors you need. But what happen when none of the controls offer what you need, whether visually or functionally? The answer is the Canvas class (for Desktop projects), WebCanvas class (for Web projects) and iOSCanvas class for iPhone and iPad devices. But how do you create your own UI controls from scratch? Read on to learn…

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Guest Post: Process and Structure to Control Clutter

Ever been unable to find that document you need for your next meeting?

Have you lost focus while working on one thing because you can’t stop thinking about something else? Feeling overwhelmed? There are several types of clutter: physical, technology, and mental. And that clutter is likely affecting you negatively. 

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Tip: How To Deal with A Lot of Columns in Database Tables

Most of the time, the access to our databases tables involves a small amount of columns (fields), so the use of the Field method of the RecordSet class is the most practical approach to retrieve the selected columns values. But what can we do when the query returns, for example, dozens of columns we need to get values from?

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How To Speed Timers in Windows

The Timer and Xojo.Core.Timer classes gives us a resolution that is more than enough for most of the cases where we need to use them. In fact, under macOS we don’t find any kind of limitation when using the classes provided by the Xojo Framework: we can achieve a maximum resolution of 1 ms on any of the most recent computers.

But when working with Windows OS this is not so straightforward . It doesn’t matter if we try to set the Timer Period property to a minimum value of 1 ms; Windows imposes a minimum resolution of 16 ms, insufficient when we demand the maximum precision for a critical task (period interval between Timer firings).

Of course Xojo has a solution for this, you can resort to a third-party plug-in that works extremely well … or you might find the following technique useful for all kinds of projects.

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Guest Post: Achieving Success As A Xojo Developer

I’ve spent most of my career developing custom software. I’ve worked as an in-house developer creating custom “line of business” solutions. I’ve worked for software development firms that provide custom software for clients. And I’ve primarily been a self-employed custom software developer since first going out on my own in early 2000. Today, a lot of the work that I’m doing involves developing custom software solutions using Xojo.

I’m often asked by other developers – some who are already using Xojo and some who are not – where the opportunities for Xojo developers are, and how to find them. I also occasionally see these types of questions posted on the Xojo forum by developers who want to use their knowledge of and passion for Xojo to start their own business. So I thought I’d share some of my experiences and observations.

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Change your DNS settings for a smooth transition to a bigger, better server

Most Xojo Cloud users have already switched to the newer Xojo Cloud servers. These new servers have more RAM and SSDs and are the priced lower or the same as our previous servers. But moving your projects from one server to another is easier said than done. You’ll need to plan carefully to avoid downtime. Here is a simple change you can make to your DNS settings in order to limit downtime, making the move to a better server smoother.

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JSON Tree

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a great text-based data format that can be used for files and web services data communication.

The structure is simpler than XML which makes it much smaller and since it does not make use of all the tags you’ll find in XML, it is also significantly easier to read. However, if you open unformatted JSON in a text editor you’ll probably find it a bit dense. Here’s how to get around that.

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Control Sets and ContainerControl: A New Approach

A Control Set is the feature to use when there are several instances in a Window’s layout and you need to command (or access them) from code, both for those available by default in the Framework and ones based on your own graphic classes. For example, this allows us to invoke a method in a concrete instance, based on its control index, or invoke the same method to all of them (iteration). All of this without knowing in advance, at runtime, how many of such instances are placed in the layout.

An inconvenience of this feature is that you can’t use it when the graphic controls are placed on a ContainerControl due to the way ContainerControls are implemented. The good news is that this problem has an easy solution! Read on to learn about it:

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