Blog about the Xojo programming language and IDE
Are you ready to sell your app? Whether you have a web app, desktop or mobile app, it’s time to think about how to package and distribute that app, how get the word out and, of course, how to get paid for sales.
In this #longread blog post, we’ll walk you through preparing your app for distribution, offering your app on your website and in app marketplaces for sale, as well as first steps to marketing your app.
Comments closedIn many of our development projects, if not all, we are confronted with situations when we need to test our classes before the final deployment of a project. I’m not talking about Unit Testing here, though I highly recommend the excellent session on that topic from XDC 2018.
For example, it would not be desirable to send hundreds of emails to all the entries in a database simply to test one of the workflow steps or to verify that emails are being delivered as expected. It would be a lot simpler, and less disruptive to those using your app, to test using a few email addresses that are under your control.
So let’s establish a mechanism that allows us tell our apps when to run in a “simulated” mode vs. a “real” mode for all or some of the components that we need to test along the development cycle.
Comments closedThese days everyone has a great idea for an app. Maybe you have an idea that would save you time at work, or maybe you’ve been thinking of an app that would automate something you do at home. Not sure where to start? One of your first steps is choosing a development tool that is right for you and for your project.
Here are five questions to guide your decision:
Comments closedXojo 2018 Release 1 has a new feature for Xojo Cloud users: Xojo Cloud Server Stats.
Comments closedLike his father, my teenage son loves video games. The single player games where you take a character through some kind of adventure are the ones I like most. These usually have a fair number of AI-controlled enemies that must be defeated. My son, on the other hand, prefers to play against other human beings. When I asked him why, he said, “The AIs are so predictable.” To prove this to me, he took over when I was having trouble defeating a particularly difficult enemy and quickly dispatched him, narrating his strategy as he went and barely being scratched in the process. My son is an elite player compared to me partially because he puts a lot more time into it than I do but also because he loves video games far more than I do.
Just as people have varying levels of skill and interest in video games, the same is true of app development. There are those that are happy to devote enormous amounts of time to learning everything they possibly can. They don’t care how long it takes. They want to have control over everything and are willing to do whatever is necessary to make that happen. I’m so glad those people exist because there’s a lot of great software that might not otherwise have been created without them. I’m not one of those people. I really want to focus mostly on what makes my application unique, abstracted from the nitty-gritty of app development.
That’s why I have always been attracted to tools like Xojo. I am a citizen developer. Of all the job titles I have had over the years, all of them in tech, none have ever included words like programmer or engineer. I do some software development but it’s just a part of my job. It’s something I do to help me in my work or to help my co-workers.
Comments closedI’ve heard it several times: how can I export to PDF from Xojo? Sure, there are lots of answers pointing to a bunch of resources, including excellent plug-ins from third parties. But can you accomplish the same thing using an already available API? Yes, there is a remote API for that! The requirement is that your Xojo app will need to have access to Internet … and, of course, you’ll need to do just a bit of coding.
Comments closedIf you are just starting the development of your first web app you may be wondering if you need to get a Xojo Cloud server right away. In most cases, the answer is no. You can develop your application on your own computer and sign up for a Xojo Cloud server when you are getting close to deployment and are ready to test in as close to a real world situation as possible.
There are differences of course between how a web app will execute on your computer with a single user (you) versus on a server that is anywhere from hundreds to thousands of miles away with many users connected all at the same time. For the most part, you don’t have to think very much about this but there are areas where you should.
Keep the following 3 things in mind when developing without a cloud server.
Comments closedAt each XDC (Xojo Developer Conference) I lay out, however roughly, what Xojo’s short-term development roadmap looks like for the next 12 months or so. Despite how well-conceived that roadmap may be, sometimes unexpected events occur that change or delay things.
Comments closedBefore we dive into what it means for developers, and in particular Xojo and other cross-platform developers, that IBM is pushing the Mac, let’s look at the recent history of the computer market. 10 years ago, the Mac had market share in the low single digits and was ignored by most of the world. These days the Windows PC market is in decline while the market share for Mac is rising at the expense of Windows.
How does IBM fit into this?
Comments closedWith the release of Xojo 2017 Release 2 we have updated our Linux Desktop framework to use GTK+ 3 instead of GTK+ 2. For those not familiar with Linux, GTK+ is a User Interface (i.e. UI) toolkit, much like Cocoa is for macOS and Win32 controls (or WinForms.NET or WPF) is for Windows. GTK+ 2 has been supplying the user interface for Xojo Desktop apps for Linux since we first targeted Linux over a decade ago. It has since been deprecated in favor of GTK+ 3 for quite some time now and GTK+ 2 is typically not installed by default on most Linux distros these days, which makes deploying Xojo Desktop apps on Linux more painful. Unfortunately GTK+ 3 is not ABI compatible with GTK+ 2 so we could not migrate to using GTK+ 3 without completely ditching GTK+ 2.
Let’s take a closer look at what this means for your Linux apps:
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