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Tag: Beginner Tips

5 Questions to Ask When Choosing a Development Tool

These 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:

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Set Focus to a Field Using an iOS Declare

You can call into Cocoa Touch APIs to use methods and properties that are not built into the framework by using the Declare command. To create a Declare statement you first need to track down the API you want to use in Apple’s documentation: Apple Developer Documentation. Most of the time you will reference the Foundation and UIKit libraries, but there are many other libraries as well. Xojo Declares use the Objective-C names so be sure to refer to those in the documentation rather than the Swift naming.

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An Insider’s Top 10 Code-Free Tips To Being A Skilled Programmer

At Xojo we’re a company of programmers who work with programmers and after 21 years or so, we like to think we know our stuff. In honor of International Programmer’s Day today, we’d like to offer our experience in the form of a listicle 😉

Whether you’re new to programming or an experienced developer, there are some things you’ll just never find in a reference manual. We’re passionate about writing good code and these are our 10 tips to be a better programmer.

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Learn The Fundamentals of Xojo Programming

The ability to code is an increasingly valuable skill. At Xojo we believe that anybody can learn to make their own apps. And Xojo is a great language for students looking to add programming to their skillset and for citizen developers.

Learn to code using Xojo and you can build apps for Mac, Windows and Linux, web apps, iOS apps and Raspberry Pi apps (and Android- it’s coming!). With the exception of iOS which requires a Mac, you can build for any platform we support from any platform we support. Want to build Windows apps for your friends from your Mac? That’s what Xojo is great at! Want to make your work day easier with a database app to track your inventory? Xojo’s great at that too!

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Daring to Defy Software Extinction: A Limited History of Development Tools

In 1998 Steve Jobs was the interim CEO of Apple and trying to keep his unprofitable company from sinking into bankruptcy. Just the previous year, when asked what he would do if he were in charge of Apple, Dell CEO Michael Dell said, “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

The Mac had single digit marketshare. Creating a development tool, independently of Apple or any company that makes a platform such a tool would support, was considered a fool’s errand. There were plenty of tools available from large companies. Apple made MPW (the Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop). Symantec created THINK C. Metrowerks developed CodeWarrior.  IBM’s VisualAge. Macromedia Flash. If you needed to create a cross-platform desktop app, you’d be told to look no further than SUN Microsystems Java: THE cross-platform language. We were all promised that Java was going to run on everything from our computers to our cars to our can openers. Java was the safe and popular choice. Developers made up only about 5% of computer users anyway. Honestly, who would be crazy enough to launch a new development tool in a  market crowded by giants?

We were.

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Simple Web Development with Xojo

Do you find it frustrating to create web apps? HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and AJAX can be challenging, and frameworks such as Node, React, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET, PHP and Java are often overwhelming for those just beginning web development.

There is a simpler solution: Xojo. Using a single programming language and a single IDE, you can go from zero to a working web app in an amazingly short amount of time with Xojo.

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Making a Web App: Comparing Xojo and Visual Studio for Mac

In previous articles, I’ve written about how Xojo is often much, much easier to use and more capable than Visual Studio for Mac for creating Mac and cross-platform desktop apps.

Visual Studio can also create web apps and as it would turn out, you may find that Xojo is a better option for web apps.

Technically, Visual Studio for Mac can create ASP.NET Core Web Apps. These type of web apps use the ASP.NET framework, but do not provide a form (layout editor) for your app’s user interface. Instead you’ll have to create everything in code, including mapping UI actions to corresponding code. ASP.NET Core also requires you to use the MVC (model-view-controller) design pattern, which can be a bit daunting for beginners.

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Making a Mac App: Comparing Xojo and Visual Studio for Mac

At the recent Build conference, Microsoft released the final version of Visual Studio for Mac. As a former Visual Studio developer who left that world for the fun, fast development that is Xojo, I had to check it out to see how it compares to Xojo.

First, if you’ve ever used Visual Studio on Windows before, be aware that Visual Studio for Mac is not the same thing. Essentially Visual Studio for Mac is new branding for Xamarin Studio (Microsoft bought Xamarin in 2016), so Visual Studio for Mac looks and works nothing like Visual Studio for Windows.

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