Blog about the Xojo programming language and IDE
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There was a curious question on the forums about what # meant.
And from the way it was asked I could see the asker was thinking “I know what If means but what about that # in front of it?” And that if they knew what the # meant that the entire thing would make more sense.
And that’s a fair thought – except for one problem. The # by itself doesn’t “mean” anything. It isn’t like *, ^, + or – in that sense. It’s not an operator.
Comments closedA reader asked me to clarify something about my previous post. Their question was:
Comments closedWhen MyMethod is written as:
Sub MyMethod( i() as integer ) i = array(10,20,30) system.debuglog CurrentMethodName + " i(0) = " + str(i(0)) + " i(1) = " + str(i(1)) + " i(2) = " + str(i(2)) End SubWhat happens if instead of trying to assign a new array you just alter the values in the array passed in?
Let’s talk about the difference between a “reference type” and the BYREF modifier on a passed parameter.
Comments closedThe only built-in gesture for undo on iOS at the moment is to shake the device. This is not very intuitive to me and I’ve certainly done it by accident many times. The makers of Procreate chose a two-finger tap and have found that their users adapted to it nicely. This gesture is being adopted by more and more iOS developers. Here’s all the code you need to implement the two-finger tap for undo in your Xojo iOS apps.
Comments closedSo you’ve created an app that you plan to sell, now you’re done, right? Nope, not even close! Developing your app is just step one. Marketing and promoting your app is the key to its commercial success, starting with announcing it. We talked to one successful Xojo developer who has several apps in the App Store. He told us that he spends 50% of his time on development and 50% of his time on marketing. Marketing. You think it’s just something for the Pros or people with a big offering, but it’s not.
Making sure everyone knows about your new app or latest update is really important. I have been in PR/Marketing for many years and have seen it all! The biggest mistake I see is developers forgetting to put a link back to their website or sitelet when talking about their app. In announcements and on social media it’s so important to make sure people can find you easily! Here are the 3 most essential steps you should take when announcing your app (or release) to the world.
When I ask “What kind of variable are you?” I don’t mean “Are you an Integer, a String, a Variant, an Object?”. I am asking “are you a value type or a reference type?”. What’s the difference between the two?
Comments closedPrior to Xojo 2018r3 Window and Canvas both had a Graphics property that you could access and draw to. This was deprecated in 2011 because it had significant performance issues on all platforms. The preferred way to draw your graphics since 2011 has been to use the Window.Paint or Canvas.Paint event handlers and the supplied parameter g As Graphics.
Starting with Xojo 2018r3, this Graphics property was removed from Window and Canvas so if you had code that was still relying on it, that code will no longer compile. Here are some tips on how you can migrate your code to use the Paint event handlers and tell the Canvas to update with a call to Invalidate.
Comments closedWhile at the Xojo Developer Conference in Denver last spring*, we got a lot of great feedback about the features that people needed most from the iOS framework. We managed to sneak a few into recent releases of Xojo; here are three of my favorites!
Comments closedI started learning how to code as a teenager. Back then there weren’t very many programming languages. I remember BASIC, Pascal, Fortran, COBOL, C and a handful of others that were highly specialized. Why so few? Because in the 1970’s, computers just couldn’t do very much compared to today. The available languages were sufficient for the limited tasks computers had been assigned to manage.
Over the last several decades, computer technology has exploded. The smartphone I carry around in my pocket is far more powerful than the fastest computers of my youth. As a teenager, I rarely encountered anything where a computer had played a part. Today the rare encounter would be with things where computers had played no part. Computers handle so many tasks now that, as a natural consequence, there are thousands of programming languages with more appearing every year.
With so many languages, it can be difficult to choose one. What is important in a programming language?
Comments closedAbout three years ago, we added HiDPI/Retina support to our framework which was released to users as part of Xojo 2016r1 when we also shipped our first HiDPI IDE.
With Apple’s announcements at WWDC 2018 and the introduction of dark mode it was time to revisit our graphics and the overall appearance of the IDE again. Here are some things which contribute to the changes that have been made and ones that you will see in the coming months.
Comments closed