As the old joke goes, “There are 10 types of people, those that understand how binary numbers work and those that don’t.” Let’s get you into the “understand” group.
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Are you tired of working for someone else or simply ready to start your own company? I founded and have been successfully running Xojo for over 20 years and prior to that I was a consultant for many years. I can attest to the importance of getting a business set up right from the beginning. Whether you are a developer looking to start a software consulting business or an entrepreneur looking into any other kind of consulting, some truths are universal.
Getting off on the right foot means your business will be that much closer to being in the 50% that will survive its 5th year. Here are ten truths for starting your own software consulting business:
Comments closedAt 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.
Comments closedManipulating text can be a time-consuming operation. I recently found myself with the need to insert text in various places in a large text document. Normally I would use a regular expression to solve this problem, but this is an iOS app and Xojo doesn’t have regular expressions available for iOS just yet. So I wrote some code to loop through the document and find and replace. Then I wrote some better code to do it a lot faster.
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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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If your app will be used by people all over the world, take the time to consider localizing it appropriately. Localizing your app is a great way to increase downloads and grow your user base.
Here are 5 basics to consider when localizing your app:
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John Gruber of Daringfireball.net recently wrote about the problem of so many iOS apps being over 100MB in size, which means they cannot be updated over a cellular connection. It really stinks to be forced to wait until you can get on WiFi just to update an app. And it can be especially bad if you really depend on the app.
Yesterday he mentioned that a big part of the problem is that apps written in Swift (and some other tools) end up bundling in a lot of standard libraries and developers don’t take the time to consider the ways in which they can trim their overweight apps down to size before shipping updates.
But you don’t have to be knowledgable about the many techniques you will need to trim your iOS apps. There is simpler solution to this problem: write your iOS apps in Xojo.
Comments closedIn 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.
Comments closedWe were really pleased to get all the great feedback our Livin’ La Vida Linux blog post. People sure love Linux! A few people asked about…
Comments closedDo you recall when your most indispensable app was last updated?
