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Tag: Software Development

What’s important in a programming language?

Published November 6, 2018 by Geoff Perlman

I 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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Upskill Your Best Employees to Citizen Developers

Upskill Your Best Employees to Citizen Developers

Published September 28, 2018 by Alyssa Foley

Employee turnover is expensive, time consuming and stressful. But the need for new skills, whether to bolster your existing sales and services or to usher your company into emerging markets, is a constant. You already have excellent employees that “know the ropes” of your business but they don’t always have the skills needed to take those next steps. These employees may be called “power users” or “business analysts”. This is where upskilling comes in, giving rise to the age of the citizen developer. The citizen developer is able to use low-code and rapid application development tools to make apps that improve efficiency or more easily collect or gather data that can benefit the company.

Encouraging and even educating your employees to become citizen developers doesn’t mean eliminating the IT department, it means improving productivity and efficiency with collaboration and innovation. After all, who better to say exactly what the marketing or sales department needs in an app, tool or automation than the department members who will utilize it the most?

This is where Xojo comes in.  Our long history (over 20 years) as an easy-to-use, rapid application development tool makes Xojo an ideal choice for would-be citizen developers.

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Name Your AppName Your App

Name Your App

Published July 25, 2018 by Dana Brown

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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Jump Right In! Just Code Challenge

Jump Right In! Just Code Challenge

Published June 18, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

I’m often asked by kids and adults how they can start coding and learn to make apps? You could start with the usual books or videos.

But maybe you want to jump right in. When I started programming that is exactly how I learned. I tried things to see what worked and what didn’t work. I also looked at and modified other programs I found.

You can learn to code if you just code.

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5 Questions to Ask When Choosing a Development Tool

5 Questions to Ask When Choosing a Development Tool

Published May 30, 2018 by Paul Lefebvre

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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Unlock the all in one, low-code, cross-platform solution

Unlock the all in one, low-code, cross-platform solution

Published March 15, 2018 by Geoff Perlman

Like his father, my teenage son loves video games. The single player games where you take a character through some kind of adventure are the ones I like most. These usually have a fair number of AI-controlled enemies that must be defeated. My son, on the other hand, prefers to play against other human beings. When I asked him why, he said, “The AIs are so predictable.” To prove this to me, he took over when I was having trouble defeating a particularly difficult enemy and quickly dispatched him, narrating his strategy as he went and barely being scratched in the process. My son is an elite player compared to me partially because he puts a lot more time into it than I do but also because he loves video games far more than I do.

Just as people have varying levels of skill and interest in video games, the same is true of app development. There are those that are happy to devote enormous amounts of time to learning everything they possibly can. They don’t care how long it takes. They want to have control over everything and are willing to do whatever is necessary to make that happen. I’m so glad those people exist because there’s a lot of great software that might not otherwise have been created without them. I’m not one of those people. I really want to focus mostly on what makes my application unique, abstracted from the nitty-gritty of app development.

That’s why I have always been attracted to tools like Xojo. I am a citizen developer. Of all the job titles I have had over the years, all of them in tech,  none have ever included words like programmer or engineer. I do some software development but it’s just a part of my job. It’s something I do to help me in my work or to help my co-workers.

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10 Universal Truths About Starting A Consulting Business

10 Universal Truths About Starting A Consulting Business

Published September 28, 2017 by Geoff Perlman

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:

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