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Category: Technology

Guest Post: A Few Little Xojo Code Performance Tips by Eric Gibbon

Published August 5, 2015 by Xojo

Eric Gibbon has been using Xojo to develop bespoke cross-platform applications for Mac and PC and for the web for 15 years. He lives in Stamford, England, and is an active member of the Xojo UK User Group.

There’s an old programmer’€™s saying: If it works, leave it alone.€ But sometimes we have to go back to code that works to make it go faster, because it’€™s too slow.

Over time I have picked up some tips on how to get better performance from Xojo code. I have used these tips to improve old code running on all platforms and have seen big improvements. They are quick and easy to do.

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Time for a Reminder to Backup Your Data

Published July 31, 2015 by Paul Lefebvre

If you work with computers, having backups of your data is essential. This particularly came to light recently with people testing out Apple Music and discovering that it could make a mess of your iTunes library. In fact, this happened to me!

But “luck favors the prepared” and I had backups, so this Apple Music glitch only proved to be an annoyance and not a catastrophe.

In my case, I just restored my iTunes library from my Time Machine backup. But I know far too many people that don’t even have any type of backup system in place. I’m here to help.

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Rapid Application Development

Published July 22, 2015 by Paul Lefebvre

Although not a new trend in software development, rapid application development (
RAD for short) is again on the upswing. What is RAD? It’s all about creating software quickly. The technology world is
always changing rapidly and change only seems to accelerate. Being able to create your own software and easily adapt to changes is incredibly important to nearly every business.

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Gartner: Mobile apps can’t be created fast enough. What’s the solution?

Published July 20, 2015 by Paul Lefebvre

Speaking at one of their conferences, Gartner principal research analyst Adrian Leow said last week that enterprises are increasingly finding it difficult to build all the mobile apps they need. The demand for mobile apps is increasing far faster than the supply of mobile developers can create them and it’s only going to get worse. This is clearly a problem.

There are three possible solutions to this problem:

  1. Find a way to decrease the demand of mobile apps. (Good luck with that one.)
  2. Increase the number of mobile developers.
  3. Decrease the time it takes to build mobile apps.

Solutions 2 and 3 are not mutually exclusive. You could potentially do both. Adrian Leow even points to the solution when he suggests that developers use rapid mobile app development tools. These tools can provide solution 3, but they don’t create necessarily create more developers.

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Web App Security- It’s For More Than Just Your App

Published June 29, 2015 by Xojo

Web apps built with the traditional tools (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc.) are nothing more than a series of text files and thus not very secure. Once a hacker gets into a server, they can steal your code or modify it. One big advantage web apps built with Xojo have is that Xojo compiles your app to machine code so there’s no code on your server to steal. Additionally, the overwhelming majority of hackers have no experience with machine code, so modifying your app to do something nefarious can be extraordinarily difficult.

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Testing The Compiler

Published June 17, 2015 by Joe Ranieri

Over the course of the last year, there have been a huge number of changes to the Xojo compiler (just under 800 commits). We made large refactorings, like rewriting how unqualified name lookup works. We fixed around 35 bugs, some of them dating back years. We added major new features to the language, including ‘Using’, Iterators, and new data types. To top it all off, we shipped support for a completely new platform, iOS, and then met Apple’s deadline for building 64-bit iOS apps.

And after all of that, we ended up with around eight regressions in the compiler. While not the perfect zero, I think this is just as impressive as the changes themselves.

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Is the NSA going to get you to switch to DuckDuckGo?

Published June 17, 2015 by Geoff Perlman

Last October, I wrote a blog post about how vulnerable Google is in its search business (the overwhelming source of its revenue). I realized this vulnerability after discovering that another search engine, DuckDuckGo, was started for less than $10 million, has equivalent search results, a clean looking interface and a low cost of switching. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for over 8 months now, I didn’t make the switch from Google for privacy reasons, I simply liked the cleaner interface, but I’ll be honest and say that the privacy it offers is something I appreciate. Apparently, I’m among a growing group of savvy searchers.

duckduckgo2.png

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Programming Resources For Students

Programming Resources For Students

Published June 15, 2015 by Alyssa Foley

Can I learn to code in Xojo for free? Yes, Xojo is free for development and testing!

Do you have a free book so I can learn to code? Yes, Intro to Programming with Xojo is free!

Can I ask my beginner questions? Yes, the Xojo forum is a gateway to the friendly and helpful Xojo community.

The Xojo language is Object-Oriented. Object-Oriented programming is an excellent way to learn the fundamentals of computer programming. Xojo is also cross-platform, which means you can build apps for all kinds of platforms using a single code base. Xojo is a Rapid Application Development tool, which means it’s developed to make building apps simple and quick.

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