Xojo Blog – Page 2

#JustCode Challenge Week 8 – JumpStart App Launcher

#JustCode Challenge Week 8 – JumpStart App Launcher

Published August 10, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

A long, long time ago (1989) one of the first apps I ever made was an app launcher for the Atari ST. I called it JumpSTART. I originally wrote it in GFA BASIC and then later re-implemented it in Pascal (OSS Personal Pascal, technically).

When I got my first modem I went online with Genie and Delphi and uploaded JumpSTART as freeware. Even though it was freeware, I got a few checks in the mail from people that liked it.

I was reminded of JumpSTART when I saw my dock getting crowed. I thought replicating JumpSTART in Xojo would be a good project for week 8 of #JustCode. Though let’s just call it JumpStart this time around.

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iOS Improvements in Xojo 2018 Release 2

Published August 7, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

Xojo 2018 Release 2 brings several improvements to iOS features such as iOSTable, iOSView and more.

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#JustCode Challenge Week 7 – Pitch Tracker

#JustCode Challenge Week 7 – Pitch Tracker

Published August 3, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

As many know, I’m a big baseball fan. I was recently at Sea Dogs game (our local AA minor league team) and was sitting behind home plate alongside many scouts who were carefully watching the pitchers. I noticed several were tracking pitch counts using an app on a tablet or laptop. I thought that would make for an interesting app to make in Xojo, so this week I’ve made an iOS app (I’m on an iOS roll it seems) to track the location of pitches, similar to what I observed the scouts using.

The app shows a grid of the strike zone and you tap where the pitch was. You can use the buttons on the bottom to mark the pitch as a ball, strike or in play changing its color. Click the Reset button to clear the pitches for the next batter.

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Tutorial: Active Words

Published July 31, 2018 by Javier Menendez

Follow this tutorial to learn how to create active (clickable) words in a text of a TextArea control using the OOP Delegate design pattern, which allows you to dynamically change how your app will react when the user clicks on any of these active words. Best of all, this is cross-platform, so you can use it for macOS, Windows and Linux deployments!

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#JustCode Challenge Week 6 – Bubble Popper

#JustCode Challenge Week 6 – Bubble Popper

Published July 27, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

For this week’s app, I created a simple iOS app where you tap on “bubbles” to pop them. This was actually suggested to me by Dana Brown some time ago as something that would make a great diversion for her son. I have found it helpful with some of my younger nieces and nephews.

This iOS app demonstrates the use of a Canvas and the detection of taps. When all the bubbles have been popped, more are added. It never ends!

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GTK3 Can Be a Pain in the Themes

Published July 26, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

Starting with Xojo 2017r2, Linux apps use GTK3. Since Xojo uses native controls that means your app’s controls will use the theme of the Linux distribution the app runs on. This can sometimes mean that your app’s UI will not look exactly like what you designed in the Layout Editor because a theme may dramatically change control sizes and padding. This is a problem that can occur with any modern GTK3 app.

If this is a problem for your apps, there are a couple ways you can work around it.

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Name Your App

Published July 25, 2018 by Dana Brown

Naming your app may seem like the last step and the easiest part of the process, but it actually should involve some careful thought and consideration. A name needs to set the right tone for your app, should relate to it in some way, and should be searchable, meaning something that can be found easily in search engines. For example, you don’t want to name your app TravelTips – there are thousands of google searches that will come up before your app. You want a name you can own.

When we changed our name from Real Studio to Xojo, we wanted to make sure we could find a name that we could own. Not only was Xojo a pretty wide open space in terms of search, but it also stands for something that describes what Xojo is – X is for Cross-platform and “OJO” is for Object-Oriented.

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#JustCode Challenge Week 5 – Math Quiz

#JustCode Challenge Week 5 – Math Quiz

Published July 20, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

For week five of the Just Code Challenge, I made a web app. My wife is a middle school math teacher and sometimes she needs to give the kids quizzes to help them with their math skills.

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#JustCode Challenge Week 4 – Mini Golf ScoreKeeper

#JustCode Challenge Week 4 – Mini Golf ScoreKeeper

Published July 13, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

Sometimes the idea for a great little app comes down to solving a silly little problem.

Last month, the family went mini-golfing for my son’s birthday. It was a lovely course called Pirate’s Cove Adventure Golf right next to the ocean. But they didn’t have scoring stands and we had to use a tiny pencil on a little cardboard scorecard to keep score. So this week’s app is a simple iOS app track of mini-golf scores!

The iOS app has two screens. The main screen has a giant Table that lists all the 18 holes. You tab on the detail button for a row (it’s the “I” icon) to go to the scoring screen.

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