It’s always a good time to learn something new! And maybe you have some free time on your hands now? We know our screen time is up this year, so let’s put that extra screen time to good use and learn a new skill – programming. If you are going to add programming to your skillset, it’s logical to begin with a language that makes it simple to learn the basics of programming. Let me show you a learning path you can follow over 14 days that is aimed at giving you a confident and capable to start to programming.
Comments closedTag: Beginner Tips
A customer on the forum was asking for a way to do case-sensitive array sorting. The built-in array Sort command uses case-insensitive sorting and they wanted an alternative.
It turns out it is super-easy to use the Sort(Delegate) method to create your own sorting method and then pass it to the call to sort.
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Xojo includes a good amount of UI controls available from the Library for Desktop, Web, iOS and Raspberry Pi targets. These are the pieces that allow you to layout the user interface of your apps: properties, methods and events that, when combined, define the specific behavior of the project at hand.
Sometimes, subclassing the available controls is the answer to add specific behaviors you need. But what happen when none of the controls offer what you need, whether visually or functionally? The answer is the Canvas class (for Desktop projects), WebCanvas class (for Web projects) and iOSCanvas class for iPhone and iPad devices. But how do you create your own UI controls from scratch? Read on to learn…
Comments closedI started learning how to code as a teenager. Back then there weren’t very many programming languages. I remember BASIC, Pascal, Fortran, COBOL, C and a handful of others that were highly specialized. Why so few? Because in the 1970’s, computers just couldn’t do very much compared to today. The available languages were sufficient for the limited tasks computers had been assigned to manage.
Over the last several decades, computer technology has exploded. The smartphone I carry around in my pocket is far more powerful than the fastest computers of my youth. As a teenager, I rarely encountered anything where a computer had played a part. Today the rare encounter would be with things where computers had played no part. Computers handle so many tasks now that, as a natural consequence, there are thousands of programming languages with more appearing every year.
With so many languages, it can be difficult to choose one. What is important in a programming language?
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When Geoff and I were driving around Germany with Christian Schmitz of MBS Software before the MBS Xojo Conference started, the topic of speed limits on the autobahn came up. Christian mentioned than many cars in Germany have the speedometer set to display a speed that is a little higher than what you are actually doing. I have noticed that my Toyota Tacoma shows 70mph on the speedometer when it is really going more like 67.
Geoff wondered if there was a way to determine how accurate your car’s speedometer was and it made me think of a Xojo iOS app I had made a while ago: Xojo Speed.
Run Xojo Speed on your iPhone while you’re driving and it uses the iOSLocation class to calculate the miles per hour or kilometers per hour in a large, easy-to-read display.
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It’s week 12 of #JustCode and I’m in in Munich, Germany at the MBS Xojo Developer Conference! I’ve never been to Germany and had no idea what the temperature would be, so instead of using the Weather Channel, I found a web API called OpenWeatherMap and built an iOS app to fetch the weather for display in a table. I even implemented the new table refresh feature added to Xojo 2018r2.
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Whether you are looking to learn something new or perhaps just looking for some inspiration, podcasts can be a great investment of your time.
Check the points in bold under each podcast to see what its focus is.
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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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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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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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