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Category: Tips

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Dumb Ways to Code

Dumb Ways to Code

By Geoff Perlman

Sung to the tune of “Dumb Ways to Die” by Tangerine Kitty

Use an object that's out of scope
Don't escape your SQL quotes
Ship without a beta test
Think Google Translate to localize is best
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Take advantage of your multi-core processor

Nearly all CPUs used by your devices, from computers to tablets to phones, now contain multiple CPU cores. With a multi-core CPU, your computer can literally do multiple things at one time, which is called multiprocessing. And with a little careful planning, your Xojo apps can use multiprocessing for significant performance improvements in your apps.

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Assigning Your Xojo License To Someone Else

Managers, Coordinators, Purchasing Agents, Xojo has got you covered! Did you know you can assign Xojo licenses from your account to other accounts? Assigning a license to a member of your team gives them access to that Xojo license, while you retain the ability to revoke and extend those licenses.

This blog post steps through a license owner assigning their Xojo license to an end user.

TL;DR  Go to go your Team pages. End users share their connection key with the license owner, then owner connects with end user’s account by adding that connection key. Now, the owner can assign licenses to anyone they are connected with from their Licenses Page.

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Accessing the User Interface from a Thread

Perhaps you already knew, but with desktop apps it has always been considered bad form to directly access any part of your user interface from within a Thread. Alas, even though this was frowned upon, it generally worked in most of your desktop apps.

Starting with 2013r1, this no longer works with Xojo for Cocoa apps. If a Cocoa app tries to access the UI from a thread, a ThreadAccessingUIException is raised. But what exactly does “accessing the UI” mean? In the case of Cocoa, it means any access to a built-in property or method on any UI control or Window. You can access your own methods or properties added to control subclasses as long as they do not access the UI themselves.

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Merging iCloud and Apple ID Accounts

iCloud.jpegIf you have been around the Mac community long enough, you may have ended up with two Apple IDs. I have one for iTunes and another one that came from MobileMe. This resulted in effectively having two iCloud accounts. This can be inconvenient and probably will become more so in the future. Apple doesn’t provide a means to merge Apple IDs. They know they need to provide this, but they do not yet do so. I, however, have found a way.

Since the introduction of iCloud, I have wanted to have a single Apple ID. When Apple recently added the two-step authentication for Apple IDs to make them more secure, I decided to sign in and update my Apple ID account. Part of the process is to verify a device you own which will be used, along with your password, to authenticate that you are who you say you are should you want to make changes (such as your password) to your Apple ID in the future. The webpage said it would list my devices, but none were listed. It didn’t take long to figure out why. The Apple ID I was updating was for iTunes, while the Apple ID Apple was using to find my devices was the one associated with my iCloud (MobileMe/mac.com) account.

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