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Category: Learning

Pro Tip: Inserting Text Quickly in a Xojo iOS App

Manipulating text can be a time-consuming operation. I recently found myself with the need to insert text in various places in a large text document. Normally I would use a regular expression to solve this problem, but this is an iOS app and Xojo doesn’t have regular expressions available for iOS just yet. So I wrote some code to loop through the document and find and replace. Then I wrote some better code to do it a lot faster.

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5 Tips For Setting Up Your Home Office for Sanity and Productivity

These days it seems everyone is working from home at least a few days a week. That is great for us humans and our home planet too. Your commute across the hall is quick and traffic-free, which is amazing for your personal stress-level and the local air quality. And your home office is likely to make you more productive and happier in your job, if set up right.

As more of us are working from home more often, it’s important to set some basic guidelines for your job and your sanity.

Here are 5 tips to help you set up your home office right, along with a peek into the Xojo team’s own offices.

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Raise Your Events The Right Way

The other day I was asked: “Dumb question of the day! An Event Definition can have a Return Type defined. What is the syntax for RaiseEvent to make use of the Return Type?”

But this isn’t a dumb question at all since there are actually two valid ways to do this. I find one more obvious than the other. Here are both solutions so you can decide for yourself:

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First Impressions Matter: 8 Surefire User Interface Design Tips

Your app’s user interface makes the first impression with your user and is vitally important to its success. With today’s modern development tools, it’s easy to create great user interfaces for your app.

Here are 8 proven tips to help ensure you create a user interface that your users will love.

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Clear the iTunes Apple Music Cache on macOS and Windows

I 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.

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IDECommunicator Protocol v2

About two years ago, at XDC 2015 in Austin, Philippe Casgrain from LightSpeed did a bonus presentation on the benefits of Continuous Integration when building projects with Xojo. Coincidentally, we at Xojo had decided just days before that we needed to move away from manual builds and automate as much of our build process as possible to keep up with the increasing complexity and number of our frameworks (later that summer we would be going from 3 to 8). After the presentation, we heard from several developers asking when the limitations of automated builds would be addressed and because we were working on our own process, it gave us an excellent place to try out new things while ironing out the wrinkles.

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Xojo Monthly Round Up: JSON, NASA & Punny References

We’re starting a new thing! At the end of each month we’ll round up a few of our favorite things – from blog posts, announcements, technology, science and whatever other stuff the Xojo team thinks was noteworthy and I’ll post it. It’s the new Xojo Monthly Round Up!

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