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Category: Linux

Posts related to Linux development.

Xojo Programming Language: 6 Fascinating Facts

Xojo is similar to VB, Java and C#

The Xojo programming language is fully object-oriented and uses an object model that is quite similar to VB, Java and C#. If you are used those languages at all, you’ll be right at home with Xojo.

Available since 1998, Xojo was one of the first languages to use Automatic Reference Counting (ARC), something that other languages such as Swift and Objective-C now use. Xojo is type-safe and fully object-oriented making it easy to learn and use, but it also has advanced features such as namespaces, extension methods, exception handling, introspection, delegates and more.

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Advanced Retina/HiDPI: BitmapForCaching and ScaleFactorChanged

The most direct way to support HiDPI* for custom controls is to draw into the Graphics object passed into the Paint event. That graphics object is already configured with the appropriate scale factor and double buffering- the entire control will be handled correctly by the framework if the DoubleBuffer property is set.

*As with other posts, we’ll use “HiDPI” to refer to both HiDPI on Windows and Retina on OS X.

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Xojo Retina/HiDPI: The journey of a thousand pixels…

“Retina” is the name for high resolution screens on Mac and iOS devices while “HiDPI” is the Windows equivalent. For simplicity, I’ll use HiDPI (which really is the universal technical term) for the rest of this blog post. Now that we have HiDPI support in Xojo, if you app doesn’t use any pictures, you can simply open your project, click on Shared under Build Settings and turn on the “Supports Retina/HiDPI” option. That’s all you need to do to have a HiDPI version of your app!

Having said that, if you are creating or using pictures in your project, there may be a few adjustments you’ll need to make to your code. A little over a year ago the process of making sure we had all of the necessary graphics together to build a Retina/HiDPI IDE was added to my to-do list. While 95% of the icons created for the Xojo IDE in 2013 already existed, most of the graphics that made up the IDE itself did not, and the IDE itself needed a bit of an overhaul to get it ready for the big change, both in graphics and in code…

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O Retina, Retina, wherefore art thou Retina?

eyeball.pngDuring my keynote address last April at XDC, the Xojo Developer Conference, I said that we would be adding Retina support (the OS X feature that provides for ultra-high resolution displays) to the OS X framework in the 4th quarter of this year. We have been working very hard on Retina support both for the OS X framework and for the IDE itself. We didn’t want to stop there though. Windows also supports ultra-high resolution displays. For Windows, this technology is called HiDPI. Xojo is a cross-platform tool so we decided we should support both Retina and HiDPI, and do it in such a way that you don’t have to do much of anything and they just work.

UPDATE: Xojo Retina is here, April 2016

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Hour of Code: Cat Pictures

It’s time again for Hour of Code! The Hour of Code is a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries. Anyone, anywhere can participate in Hour of Code, from ages 4 to 104. At Xojo, we are again participating in this wonderful way to help people learn to program.

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The Citizen Developer

I’m seeing more and more headlines about how citizen developers are helping create the apps that business need.

In particular, a recent article at ZDNet, “The advent of the citizen developer” talks about how non-programmers can help create the apps needed by an enterprise company:

So the business-side has long had to place their fate in the hands of those with the requisite skills but often with little sympathy for or first-hand knowledge of the business itself. Or they just ended-up acquiring pre-existing software that was a close enough fit, and then had it configured to their needs. Neither path has typically produced tech solutions that fit business needs very well, and ‘good enough’ has usually been the mantra of the day.

These articles explain how “citizen developers”, sometimes referred to as a business analysts (or maybe even power-users), are using rapid application development tools to create apps that helps the business solve a problem more quickly than going through a more formal and lengthy IT process.

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