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Category: Tips

sort code tips and tricks

Tip: Pass Values Between Windows with an API

A question on the Xojo Forum got me thinking that it may not be obvious how to avoid having to reach inside another window (or dialog etc.) to access its controls to get and set values. I’m sure we all have done this at one time or another but it really is something you should avoid. Here’s a small app to demo how to make an API instead:

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Taking Your App From In-House to Commercial

Server Ranger started life as a small in-house Xojo console project that I used to monitor servers for several clients. Rather than getting paged (in the very early days) or getting angry phonecalls from clients, it was much more pleasant to have my app play an alert on my Mac and send me an email to notify me of a server issue. With this heads-up, it was often possible to have the issue resolved before a client even realised there had been an issue.

Like many in-house solutions, the demand on Server Ranger increased over time and it became a more vital part of my business.

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Fractional Scale Factors

With all the Retina/HiDPI work done in the past few years, we’ve had to add some new features along with it. One of these newer features is the Graphics ScaleX and ScaleY properties.  For the purposes of Retina/HiDPI, the scale factor is used when converting user space coordinates to backing store coordinates.  While mostly integral on MacOS (unless originating from some code that’s probably not ours), it can vary on Windows, and perhaps arguably mostly fractional.  This is because Windows allows you to set DPI scales at 125%, 150%, etc. So when dealing with fractional scales there are a few things to watch out for:

  1. Rounding issues
  2. Anti-alias effect

While the framework takes care of rounding issues, for the most part, the secondary issue of anti-aliasing is up to you.

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TextField: Getting the User Input

Xojo is a modern, powerful programming language with an IDE that simplifies all kind of tasks related your project creation and deployment. One such helpful feature is the UI layout design; you can find it under the Library Panel, it’s a meaningful collection of graphic classes (Controls) ready to use in our apps. Probably one of the first and most used controls in apps design is the TextField, TextField simplifies the way an app can get the input from the user. Let’s see its main properties and how this control behaves when used in Desktop, Web (WebTextField) and iOS (iOSTextField) apps!

You can watch the video (in Spanish, with English subtitles) as you read and work through this post.

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What is Xojo?

2017’s first “What is Xojo?” webinar was well received and there were lots of questions. Rather than include the questions in the video, I’ve included a…

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