Firstly, the MVPs work as your advocates, drawing attention to issues that they feel are important to the community. Their passion comes through in all interactions with the Xojo team, from justifiably reminding us of bugs we need to address or features that would be appreciated by many.

Since the MVPs all use Xojo in different ways, this helps to make sure we get a wide variety of feedback. Sometimes we get direct, specific suggestions such as the Set class, which (due to the provided code), we were able to add as a feature to Xojo relatively quickly. Some especially valuable MVP insights regarding stack checking helped us to pinpoint areas where we could make changes to the Xojo framework that resulted in dramatic performance improvements to Xojo itself along with all your projects. MVP tips and testing have also helped us nail down some issues that helped improve debugger stabilization. MVPs have even created a supplemental unit testing suite to help test the Android framework!

Speaking of testing, the MVPs certainly do more than their fair share of testing. They have helped with an enormous amount of testing for many parts of Xojo, most recently including PDF, Barcode, Charts and Android. When they find bugs, MVPs always create thorough, well-explained Issues, usually with sample projects, allowing us to fix things faster for everyone’s benefit. At times MVPs even review your own submitted Issues and may offer suggestions or advice for you to try.

In addition to testing and providing feedback on the product as you see it today, MVPs get to see stuff early, sometimes even before designs or implementations are finalized. This may be in the form of demos or test builds. Their tips, comments and suggestions can help provide direction to how we end up actually implementing a feature or change.

The Xojo documentation is also continuously improved by MVP feedback and suggestions. MVPs were first to see the new documentation site before it was unveiled to everyone and their keen eyes have helped us improve search, sample code and continue to polish things.

From inception to documentation, this group of dedicated Xojo experts has helped us shape Xojo. If you are pleased with what Xojo is today, you should thank a Xojo MVP.

To Anthony, Christian, Gavin, Jeremie, Kem, Martin and Wayne we at Xojo offer a heartfelt “Thank You!” and have made donations on your behalf to several open-source projects that also help make Xojo possible: LLVM Foundation, Bootstrap and Ubuntu.

Textbook, Books & Magazines

• Introduction to Xojo Programming Textbook – This is where you start if you are new to programming. Learn the fundamentals of programming. The book uses Xojo to teach programming, but the concepts are applicable to any programming language.
• Teacher’s Guide – A guide to help teachers introduce students to the basics of programming. using the Textbook
• I Wish I Knew How To…. – A Book Series from Eugene Dakin that covers many topics including I Wish I Knew How to … Program SQLite with Xojo, I Wish I Knew How To … Program the Canvas Control and I Wish I Knew How to … Program Plugins with Xojo on Windows, to name a few.
• xDev Magazine – A staple of the Xojo community. Subscribe annually or review the collections, books and back issues for articles.

Xojo Documentation

The Introduction section in the Xojo Documentation is great place to start if you already familiar with Xojo or object-oriented programming. From there, you can choose a QuickStart for Desktop, Web, iOS or Android. Xojo’s Documentation site is organized by the following sections:

• GETTING STARTED – step by step tutorials and a high-level overview
• TOPICS – categorized discussions on accomplishing specific tasks
• API – guide to the specifics of the Xojo language and framework
• RESOURCES – information including licensing, system requirements, how to report bugs or request features, etc

You can also find many Third Party resources from the Xojo community in the Xojo Documentation, including books, magazines, tutorials, free source code, open-source projects and more.

Browse the sections or search for exactly what you need.

Xojo Examples

Experiment with Xojo example projects. Run example code, edit it and use it to get your own project started.

• In Xojo, choose File > New Project and then click on Examples.
• Search for a specific example.
• Download the examples to work off-line.

Xojo Programming Blog

The Blog is an ever-growing resource that offers insight into Xojo features with code examples and best practices, plus community news and events. The Xojo Programming Blog includes guest posts from Xojo users and third party developers as well as posts from Xojo team members.

Xojo Video Library and Webinars

Xojo’s YouTube Channel has hundreds of videos from beginner topics, object-oriented programming concepts to how to use databases with Xojo. It also hosts recordings of the Xojo Webinars.

Xojo Forum

A search of the Xojo Forums often leads to a helpful discussion or a solution to that thing you just could not figure out on your own. And if it doesn’t, forum members are friendly and free with their Xojo knowledge. The forum is free for everyone, no license required. Enable Forum Access in your Xojo Account and go to the Xojo Forum to read the discussions and ask your questions.

Email Xojo, we’re happy to help you find a resource or take a request for a topic for a future blog post, webinar or tutorial.

• Facebook
• X
• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• YouTube

Xojo Web is an excellent way to expose the features of your electronics projects without having to attach any screen to them. It’s never been easier to build a Web GUI for your smart clocks, drones, POS, domotics, robots or just some automation services. Thinking about building a solar powered server to automate your tweets? Why not!

If you prefer, you can just expose a Web API instead that can be remotely consumed from another device.

What Raspberry Pi boards support ARM 64-bit Linux OS?

• Raspberry Pi Zero 2
• Raspberry Pi 3
• Raspberry Pi 4
• Raspberry Pi 400

Preparing your Raspberry Pi

The easiest way to get your operating system ready is by using the Raspberry Pi Imager.

At the moment of writing this article, it selects the 32-bit flavor by default. If you have one of the supported boards, go ahead and try Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit) or Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit). The later won’t include any desktop environment, you’ll have to access by SSH.

Select your SD Card storage and press on Write. Optionally, if you want to set a hostname for your board, enable SSH, or even configure your Wifi, press on the gears icon.

In just a few minutes you will have a ready to boot SD card for your Raspberry Pi.

Remotely debugging your projects

This is one of my favorite features of Xojo.

In your Xojo installation Extras folder, you will find a “Remote Debugger Console” and “Remote Debugger Desktop”, that also works for your Linux 64-bit OS.

Depending on which flavor of Linux you’ve selected in the previous step, send the Console or Desktop ZIP to your board, run it and configure the settings.

Inside Xojo, go to Preferences and press on the Debugging tab.

That’s it. Now you will be able to remotely run and debug your applications. Add a few breakpoints and the execution will stop as soon as it reaches it, allowing you to explore the current state.

Deploying the final version

Once you’re ready to build the final version of your application, all the wires attached and components soldered, the last step is to “Deploy” your application.

There is a tutorial covering this step in detail: Deploying Web Apps on Linux.

If you create a Raspberry Pi project, please make sure you open a Forum thread. The Xojo community loves seeing this kind of projects!

What will you build?

Ricardo has always been curious about how things work. Growing up surrounded by computers he became interested in web technologies in the dial-up connections era. Xojo has been his secret weapon and language of preference since 2018. When he’s not online, chances are he will be scuba diving … or crocheting amigurumis. Find Ricardo on Twitter @piradoiv.

More Xojo users means a bigger community. Given the varied demographics of the Xojo community, you’d think that common ground might be difficult to find. And yet from young to old, from hobbyist to citizen developer to professional developer, with users spanning the globe from different cultures, traditions, native languages, genders, orientations and from every continent (yes, we actually have a user in Antarctica), you come together via the support forum, emails, texts, tweets, posts, video chats, webinars and in-person at conferences and meetups to help each other get the most out of Xojo. So many friendships have been created as a result of the Xojo community. Seeing many of those friendships renewed each year at our annual conference is among my favorite things.

You, the members of the Xojo community, continue to help make this possible. And though we might sometimes have differing opinions about exactly how to take Xojo into the future, we know you want Xojo to keep growing and improving just like we do. Thanks to each and every one of you for being a member of the best part of Xojo.

In fact, we just updated the forum last week. One great new feature is that you can mark your topic as answered and the answer appears embedded within your question.

The forum is incredibly popular with over 23,000 posts* (in a little over 4 months) in more than 3,300 conversations.

If you have a question about using Xojo, the forum is a great place to go for answers. With nearly 2,500 members** (and growing) you can bet that there is someone there that will be able to help you. Plus, many Xojo staff members monitor the forum and offer their advice, myself included. You enable forum access by going to your account page at Xojo.com and selecting “Enable forum access”. We do request that people use their real names in the forum, like other places are starting to do. You can also add an avatar to display by creating a Gravatar account that is linked to your Xojo account email.

Below are two big reasons why we like the forum so much:

Usability: The forum is big, friendly and easy to read. Unread conversations and new posts are easy to find. There are several channels available to discuss your favorite Xojo topics, including: General, Getting Started, Databases, Windows, OS X, Linux, Web and SDKs. You can get email notifications of new posts in conversations and channels that interest you. And don’t forget with a Xojo Pro license you get access to the Xojo Pro channel which includes consulting leads.

There is a big search field (that says Filter conversations) at the top right that allows you to quickly find somethingn specific. It has all kinds of “gambits”, which are little shortcuts that allow you to control what gets searched and filtered. You can see these by just clicking in the search field and reviewing the drop-down list.

Replying to posts is easy: just start typing in the “write a reply” box. You can select text on previous messages and click the quote button to use the text as a quote in your reply. Plus you can do other formatting, embed images and format source code.

Community: The community is wonderful. We have a lot of active, passionate users. The forum is always buzzing with new conversations on all sorts of topics. Be sure to check out your Profile page (click on your name at the top) and add a little information about yourself. You can also see some stats and your forum activity.

I look forward to seeing you there!

UPDATE:

*The Forum has over 55,000 posts as of February 2014!

**The Forum reached over 5,000 members as of February 2014!

Read about Xojo’s Community Growth in 2014.