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Tag: Retina

Speeding up the Layout Editor

Published April 9, 2019 by Geoff Perlman

For more years than I’d like to admit, the Layout Editor has been slow in terms of dragging controls around. As you add more controls, it gets worse. For web layouts, it’s been even worse. That’s primarily because we have to draw everything for a web layout whereas for a desktop layout, the OS draws the controls for us.

In an engineering meeting, I mentioned a discussion I had with a user about the speed of the Layout Editor and Travis said he had recently been reminded of how slow it was too. While most of the time issues in Xojo are carefully calculated and prioritized for maximum bang for the buck (as we say around here), that’s not always how it happens. After the meeting, Travis decided to dive into the Layout Editor code and see what could be done to speed it up.

The results are pretty remarkable.

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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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Advanced Retina/HiDPI: BitmapForCaching and ScaleFactorChanged

Published April 7, 2016 by Joe Ranieri

The most direct way to support HiDPI* for custom controls is to draw into the Graphics object passed into the Paint event. That graphics object is already configured with the appropriate scale factor and double buffering- the entire control will be handled correctly by the framework if the DoubleBuffer property is set.

*As with other posts, we’ll use “HiDPI” to refer to both HiDPI on Windows and Retina on OS X.

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Xojo Retina/HiDPI: The journey of a thousand pixels…

Published April 5, 2016 by Greg O'Lone

“Retina” is the name for high resolution screens on Mac and iOS devices while “HiDPI” is the Windows equivalent. For simplicity, I’ll use HiDPI (which really is the universal technical term) for the rest of this blog post. Now that we have HiDPI support in Xojo, if you app doesn’t use any pictures, you can simply open your project, click on Shared under Build Settings and turn on the “Supports Retina/HiDPI” option. That’s all you need to do to have a HiDPI version of your app!

Having said that, if you are creating or using pictures in your project, there may be a few adjustments you’ll need to make to your code. A little over a year ago the process of making sure we had all of the necessary graphics together to build a Retina/HiDPI IDE was added to my to-do list. While 95% of the icons created for the Xojo IDE in 2013 already existed, most of the graphics that made up the IDE itself did not, and the IDE itself needed a bit of an overhaul to get it ready for the big change, both in graphics and in code…

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O Retina, Retina, wherefore art thou Retina?

Published December 8, 2015 by Geoff Perlman

eyeball.pngDuring my keynote address last April at XDC, the Xojo Developer Conference, I said that we would be adding Retina support (the OS X feature that provides for ultra-high resolution displays) to the OS X framework in the 4th quarter of this year. We have been working very hard on Retina support both for the OS X framework and for the IDE itself. We didn’t want to stop there though. Windows also supports ultra-high resolution displays. For Windows, this technology is called HiDPI. Xojo is a cross-platform tool so we decided we should support both Retina and HiDPI, and do it in such a way that you don’t have to do much of anything and they just work.

UPDATE: Xojo Retina is here, April 2016

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