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Category: Tips

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Love it or Hate it, Networking is Necessary

So many of you in the Xojo community are independent developers and though you are smart for choosing Xojo for rapid, cross-platform development, you probably aren’t focused on marketing and promoting your app.

I’ve shared some tips on using Twitter to market you apps, and Dana has talked about other ways to market your app for free. These efforts do not live in a vacuum. Let’s discuss ways to integrate all these forms of marketing to make the greatest impact…let’s talk about Networking.

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PDF File Generation? There is an API for that!

I’ve heard it several times: how can I export to PDF from Xojo? Sure, there are lots of answers pointing to a bunch of resources, including excellent plug-ins from third parties. But can you accomplish the same thing using an already available API? Yes, there is a remote API for that! The requirement is that your Xojo app will need to have access to Internet … and, of course, you’ll need to do just a bit of coding.

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Avoiding False-Positive Virus Detection in Windows Apps

Viruses continue to be a big problem on Windows. As a result, anti-virus software can be a bit over-zealous about detecting what it believes to be apps that have viruses embedded within them. We have had reports over the years that apps made with Xojo are sometimes falsely identified as being infected with a virus. This sometimes occurs because the 32-bit Xojo compiler puts executable code in a location where the anti-virus software doesn’t expect to find it. We’ve seen this occur even when users are debugging apps from the IDE. Fortunately in that case, there’s a fairly easy solution.

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Supporting Multiple Cores

With today’s multi-core CPU’s it seems that an application made with Xojo running on a single core is somewhat restricting. If you have a lot of data to process, large images to manipulate or other things that could happen in the background, it would seem that with a multi-core machine you could do this faster “if only Xojo would make threads preemptive”. We get a lot of requests for preemptive threads so that people can take advantage of multiple cores.

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THIS IS NOT A DRILL: Poor Interface Design and its Potentially Dangerous Impact

As most of you know, this past Saturday morning, the people of Hawaii got a shocking notification on their smartphones warning of a incoming ballistic missile and that this warning was not a drill. I can only imagine the fear that raced through the minds of more than a million people. This warning, as well all now know, turned out to be a false alarm accidentally set off by a state employee who was attempting to perform an internal test.

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Control Subclass Constructors

A constructor is a special method that is used to initialize a class. They are very handy, but when you use them with control subclasses you have to be aware of how a control’s properties are initialized. Perhaps you’ve run into this situation:

“I have a constructor on my control and the values that I set in the constructor don’t stick.”

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8 Ways to Market Your App for Free

Though marketing may not be your forte, there are things you can do that are very effective in promoting your app and building your customer base. You can try some of the paid options and get varying results, but there are many free things you can do that can have a huge impact. We’ve already blogged about using Twitter to market your app for free.

Here’s a list of 8 additional ways your marketing team of 1 can promote your app at no cost:

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