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Xojo Programming Blog Posts

Fractional Scale Factors

Published February 15, 2017 by William Yu

With all the Retina/HiDPI work done in the past few years, we’ve had to add some new features along with it. One of these newer features is the Graphics ScaleX and ScaleY properties.  For the purposes of Retina/HiDPI, the scale factor is used when converting user space coordinates to backing store coordinates.  While mostly integral on MacOS (unless originating from some code that’s probably not ours), it can vary on Windows, and perhaps arguably mostly fractional.  This is because Windows allows you to set DPI scales at 125%, 150%, etc. So when dealing with fractional scales there are a few things to watch out for:

  1. Rounding issues
  2. Anti-alias effect

While the framework takes care of rounding issues, for the most part, the secondary issue of anti-aliasing is up to you.

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Choose the Right Development Tool for Your Business

Choose the Right Development Tool for Your Business

Published February 7, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

From a recent Ars Technical article called “The future of Microsoft’s languages“, emphasis mine:

In spite of its name, the current Visual Basic is not the same language as the ancient Visual Basic 6, nor the Visual Basic for Applications used for macroing. The transition to .NET in 2002, with what was called, at the time, Visual Basic.NET, left developers familiar with those languages high and dry; although the new language was called Visual Basic, and looked a bit like Visual Basic, it was really just C# in disguise. There was no good migration path from old to new, and much of the simplicity of those older languages was forfeit.

This is a primary reason why so many Visual Basic developers choose Xojo after trying Microsoft Visual Basic (.NET): they don’t want “C# in disguise”.

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TextField: Getting the User Input

Published February 6, 2017 by Javier Menendez

Xojo is a modern, powerful programming language with an IDE that simplifies all kind of tasks related your project creation and deployment. One such helpful feature is the UI layout design; you can find it under the Library Panel, it’s a meaningful collection of graphic classes (Controls) ready to use in our apps. Probably one of the first and most used controls in apps design is the TextField, TextField simplifies the way an app can get the input from the user. Let’s see its main properties and how this control behaves when used in Desktop, Web (WebTextField) and iOS (iOSTextField) apps!

You can watch the video (in Spanish, with English subtitles) as you read and work through this post.

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What is Xojo?

Published February 1, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

2017’s first “What is Xojo?” webinar was well received and there were lots of questions. Rather than include the questions in the video, I’ve included a…

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Localizing Web Apps: Dates & Numbers

Published January 24, 2017 by Paul Lefebvre

In desktop apps, you can use Xojo.Core.Locale to get the user’s locale for formatting dates and numbers. However, in a web app this value returns the locale used by the web server rather than the locale of the current user session.

To display dates formatted in the locale of the user session, you need to get the LanguageCode from WebSession and use that to create a locale that you can then use to display the date.

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Creating Wrapper Apps With Xojo

Published January 17, 2017 by Javier Menendez

You already know, you can use Xojo to create practically any kind of application; from apps used by corporations, Universities and even Government agencies around the world, to apps used by photographers, designers and, of course, developers; and even those small utilities that makes our lives a bit easier.

In fact, a lot of these little utilities are what are known as Wrappers. That is, a nice user interface that simplifies and makes more user friendly a feature that is already available in the native operating system; often, in the form of one or more combined commands that need to be typed from the Command Line prompt.

You can watch the video (in Spanish, with English subtitles) as you read and work through this example.

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Xojo Community Growth in 2016

Published January 5, 2017 by Geoff Perlman

As you may already know, 2016 was Xojo’s 20 Anniversary. Sitting down to write this post, I can’t help but think back to 20 years ago and starting what has now become Xojo. Most of the developer tools that were around when we started either no longer exist or are no longer published by the people who had the original vision to create them in the first place. In that respect, we are members of a very exclusive club. I’m also pleasantly surprised at how many users from way back then are actively using Xojo today. I take great pride in the fact that we have created something that has that kind of staying power.

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