Technology – Page 16 – Xojo Programming Blog

Daring to Defy Software Extinction: A Limited History of Development Tools

Published June 21, 2017 by Geoff Perlman

In 1998 Steve Jobs was the interim CEO of Apple and trying to keep his unprofitable company from sinking into bankruptcy. Just the previous year, when asked what he would do if he were in charge of Apple, Dell CEO Michael Dell said, “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

The Mac had single digit marketshare. Creating a development tool, independently of Apple or any company that makes a platform such a tool would support, was considered a fool’s errand. There were plenty of tools available from large companies. Apple made MPW (the Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop). Symantec created THINK C. Metrowerks developed CodeWarrior. IBM’s VisualAge. Macromedia Flash. If you needed to create a cross-platform desktop app, you’d be told to look no further than SUN Microsystems Java: THE cross-platform language. We were all promised that Java was going to run on everything from our computers to our cars to our can openers. Java was the safe and popular choice. Developers made up only about 5% of computer users anyway. Honestly, who would be crazy enough to launch a new development tool in a market crowded by giants?

We were.

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7 Reasons You Should Be Using PostgreSQL

7 Reasons You Should Be Using PostgreSQL

Published June 19, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

PostgreSQL is an open source object-relational database system that’s had more than 15 years of active development. Here are 7 reasons you should be using PostgreSQL.

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RSA: Private/Public keys between Xojo and PHP

Published June 6, 2017 by Javier Menendez

Among other topics, Cryptography and data ciphering always fascinated me. Beyond their mathematical perspective, most of the time it is a matter of putting them in practice with developed solutions: dealing with data only visible between the transmitter and the receiver. As it happens, the Xojo framework makes it really easy to deal with ciphered data.

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Thoughts On WWDC 2017

Published June 5, 2017 by Geoff Perlman

This morning Tim Cook offered Apple’s keynote for WWDC 2017, where he focused on the new technology that is coming from Apple for developers, though there was not much on the API specifics. Over the last few years we’ve expanded our support for macOS by adding new platform features and we will continue to add new features to Xojo iOS. We’ll be looking at Apple’s product direction for new ways to advance Xojo and expand your ability to build cross-platform apps quickly and simply with Xojo.

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Making a Web App: Comparing Xojo and Visual Studio for Mac

Published June 5, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

In previous articles, I’ve written about how Xojo is often much, much easier to use and more capable than Visual Studio for Mac for creating Mac and cross-platform desktop apps.

Visual Studio can also create web apps and as it would turn out, you may find that Xojo is a better option for web apps.

Technically, Visual Studio for Mac can create ASP.NET Core Web Apps. These type of web apps use the ASP.NET framework, but do not provide a form (layout editor) for your app’s user interface. Instead you’ll have to create everything in code, including mapping UI actions to corresponding code. ASP.NET Core also requires you to use the MVC (model-view-controller) design pattern, which can be a bit daunting for beginners.

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JSON Feed iOS App

Published May 31, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

In a previous post I showed how easy it was to create a web app that displays the JSON Feed for Daring Fireball. In this post, I’ll show you how to make an iOS app to do it.

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Making a Cross-Platform Desktop App: Comparing Xojo and Visual Studio for Mac

Published May 25, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

Visual Studio for Mac was recently released. In a previous post I compared how much easier it is to make native Mac apps with Xojo than with Visual Studio for Mac. Now I’d like to talk about making cross-platform desktop apps.

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Making a Mac App: Comparing Xojo and Visual Studio for Mac

Published May 18, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

At the recent Build conference, Microsoft released the final version of Visual Studio for Mac. As a former Visual Studio developer who left that world for the fun, fast development that is Xojo, I had to check it out to see how it compares to Xojo.

First, if you’ve ever used Visual Studio on Windows before, be aware that Visual Studio for Mac is not the same thing. Essentially Visual Studio for Mac is new branding for Xamarin Studio (Microsoft bought Xamarin in 2016), so Visual Studio for Mac looks and works nothing like Visual Studio for Windows.

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Appreciating SQL

Published May 9, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

Noted recently at the SQLizer blog, the SQL language was first created 43 years ago. And what is remarkable about that is that SQL is still used today. According to the Stack Overflow 2017 developer survey it is the #2 programming language. Not many languages remain in use for such a long period of time. Although we’re happy to also note that Xojo celebrated our 20th anniversary in 2016!

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The Ultimate Password Solution

Published May 4, 2017 by Geoff Perlman

World Password Day brings attention to some simple steps everyone can take to secure their digital life: 1. Create Strong Passwords, 2. Use a different password for each account, and 3. Get a password manager, no, not a post-it note in your desk drawer!

The best password is one that is diffcult to guess. But difficult to guess takes on a new meaning when hackers use computers to do the guessing. Hence, the best password becomes one that would take a computer so long to guess that it’s not practical to do so. That means a long series of random characters and the longer and more random, the better, and a different password for every site you use.

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Category: Technology