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Xojo Programming Blog Posts

5 Tips For Setting Up Your Home Office for Sanity and Productivity

These days it seems everyone is working from home at least a few days a week. That is great for us humans and our home planet too. Your commute across the hall is quick and traffic-free, which is amazing for your personal stress-level and the local air quality. And your home office is likely to make you more productive and happier in your job, if set up right.

As more of us are working from home more often, it’s important to set some basic guidelines for your job and your sanity.

Here are 5 tips to help you set up your home office right, along with a peek into the Xojo team’s own offices.

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Goodbye GTK+ 2, Hello GTK+ 3

With 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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Raise Your Events The Right Way

The other day I was asked: “Dumb question of the day! An Event Definition can have a Return Type defined. What is the syntax for RaiseEvent to make use of the Return Type?”

But this isn’t a dumb question at all since there are actually two valid ways to do this. I find one more obvious than the other. Here are both solutions so you can decide for yourself:

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A Better Alternative to PHP

Are you tired of the hassles of creating web apps using PHP? Why not develop faster and smarter with Xojo?

Like PHP, Xojo is object-oriented. Unlike PHP, Xojo has a coherent framework design that is easy to work with; plus the Xojo language is simple and focused.

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First Impressions Matter: 8 Surefire User Interface Design Tips

Your app’s user interface makes the first impression with your user and is vitally important to its success. With today’s modern development tools, it’s easy to create great user interfaces for your app.

Here are 8 proven tips to help ensure you create a user interface that your users will love.

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Big Transitions, Little Effort: One App’s Update to 64-bit

Our goal has always been to let you focus your energy on what makes your app unique. One of the ways we do that is by handling the nitty-gritty details of the various platforms Xojo supports. For example, you don’t have to worry about the differences in how files are accessed on Windows, Linux, macOS or iOS. We take care of that for you.

Saying all this is one thing, however, and delivering it is quite another. We’ve been through some significant technological hurdles over the years. Over the past 12 months we’ve had two big transitions. The first was support for HiDPI (called Retina on macOS and iOS) which made it possible for apps created with Xojo to support high definition screens. For Xojo users, adding HiDPI support was mostly a matter of recompiling their app. If they had pictures or icons, higher resolution versions needed to be supplied but aside from that, it was effortless.

The second big feature we’ve been working on is support for 64-bit. Integers are the issue here and are almost certainly the most common data type used in apps built with Xojo. If you have used the generic Integer type, in theory, building a 64-bit version of your app should be a simple matter of recompiling. That’s the theory. What’s the reality?

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