We expect

Very useful words to keep in the communication between any company and its customers. Its not a promise. Just a rough outline of what things you are planning to do.

Some companies use phrases like this to let their customer base know “hey this is what we think we are going to be able to deliver” without having to promise a specific quarter or date.… Read the rest

Add item from clipboard

A post on the forums got me thinking that there might be a way to simply add a whole class, module etc to a project just from code copied from the forums.

So I sat and whipped up a little IDE script that takes a clipboard and will convert it to a class or module. Now there are some tricks.… Read the rest

Making a constructor sometimes illegal to call

Suppose you write a control subclass that you want people to be able to add to a window layout OR be able to create on the fly. But you want to make sure that when an instance is constructed in code it MUST have a parameterized constructor. However, in order to put an instance on a layout by drag and drop it has to have a no parameter constructor.… Read the rest

Sampling with a delay

MacOS terminal is a useful tool to know for a few really handy things.

One is getting a sample of a process after some delay so you can start doing whatever it is you want to sample.

Trying to do this in Activity monitor is not possible

But at the command line you can delay the start of the sample so you have a chance to set up the sampling and then switch back to Xojo to do the task you want sampled.… Read the rest

Why shadowing should be avoided

We’ll create a sample project to demonstrate why its a bad thing to do.

Start a new desktop project.

Add a new Class that is a subclass of ”CancelButton” by dragging a CancelButton from the library to the Navigator.

Name this new class “myPushButton”

Add a property  to it – enabled as boolean

Make sure the property is public

Now on Window1 add an instance of this new button subclass.… Read the rest

Simple but really useful alternate menus

macOS supports the notion of Alternate menus. One that even once you have opened the menu you can toggle between their textual description and short cut by pressing the Option Key or another modifier like Shift or Control.

And you can even set up several so pressing Shift is one, Shift + Ctrl is another, and Option is yet another.… Read the rest

My departure

Originally published on my old blog March 12, 2019

After Joe Ranieri quit* & moved to a new job I think everyone felt stressed. I know I did. It felt like so much more was expected of an ever smaller group of developers.

By Dec of that year I’d had enough of the forums and some of the general dumping on Xojo as a product.… Read the rest