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Category: Technology

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

Published April 5, 2016 by Greg O'Lone

“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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Headless Pi: Using Xojo and Raspberry Pi Without a Display

Published March 30, 2016 by Paul Lefebvre

You don’t need to hook up your Pi to a physical display, keyboard and mouse. You can set up VNC on the Pi so you can remotely connect to it.

My Raspberry Pi 2 sits on my desk next to one of my speakers. It’s not hooked up to any display. I use a combination of SSH, SFTP and VNC when I need to work with it.

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Raspberry Pi 3 Announced!

Published March 8, 2016 by Paul Lefebvre

On Monday February 29th, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the new Raspberry Pi 3. This updated Pi has some significant improvements over the Pi 2, including:

  • A 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU (~10x the performance of Raspberry Pi 1)
  • Integrated 802.11n wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.1
  • Complete compatibility with Raspberry Pi 1 and 2

That last bullet point is notable because it means that Xojo is also fully compatible with the new Raspberry Pi 3!

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If Smartphone Encryption Is A Red Herring, How Do We Track The Bad Guys?

Published February 4, 2016 by Geoff Perlman

In the blog post Smartphone Encryption is a Red Herring, I pointed out the folly of requiring an encryption back door for the Good Guys to use. So the question arises- “What can be done? If we don’t want a global encryption back door that can be used by anyone, can we still track the Bad Guys?”

The answer is yes. There are plenty of options that don’t require a global back door. I’m not passing judgment on whether these are inherently good or bad options, just that they are available when there is a reason to track a Bad Guy.

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Smartphone Encryption is a Red Herring

Published January 27, 2016 by Geoff Perlman

EnigmaMachine.pngAs the Founder and CEO of a software company that makes a development tool for mobile platforms, as well as for desktop and web, I have a lot of experience with encryption. The current controversy over encryption is really important to me. During World War II, the Germans created a way of sending encrypted messages to commanders in the field. The device came to be known as an Engima machine. It looked like a typewriter but had an encryption key that changed a message into unreadable noise. That message could only be decoded if you knew the key used to encrypt it. The Allies worked very hard to get their hands on one of these devices so they could learn how it works and be able to decrypt the messages and know what the German military plans. Ultimately the Allies figured it out and it helped them win the war. If this has peaked your curiosity, check out the movie U-571 (a fictional account of the effort to obtain an Enigma machine) and The Imitation Game about the team that figured out the encryption key.

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Tip: Automatic Reference Counting

Published January 18, 2016 by Paul Lefebvre

As defined on Wikipedia, Automatic Reference Counting (or ARC) is a “memory management enhancement where the burden of keeping track of an object’s reference count is lifted from the programmer to the compiler.”

With object-oriented programming, each new object you create takes up space in memory. This memory needs to be managed somehow. In the beginning, this management of memory was left entirely to the programmer, such as with C++ or originally with Objective-C.

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Write a Slackbot in Less Than 20 Lines of Code

Published January 12, 2016 by Paul Lefebvre

What is Slackbot?

Slack has an API called “slash commands” that lets a user type a slash (/) followed by a command name in order to perform a special action. For example, Slack has many built-in slash commands, one example is /help. Here’s how you can easily add your own slash commands using a Xojo web app and the HandleSpecialURL (or HandleURL) method.

Your slash command makes an HTTP request to your Xojo web service app. The web services does its thing and then returns the result back to Slack to display.

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