In my session at XDC 2023, I talked about ways to design your apps so you reuse code across platforms. In this series of blog posts, I will cover the sixteen sample projects I created for that session (JSONReader, Mastodon, DisplayDB, DrawCards, with separate versions for desktop, web, iOS and Android) in more detail. You can watch the presentation on YouTube: The accompanying hands-on session might also be interesting, where I show the projects running on Android: You can also download all the sample projects.  The first project is JSONReader, so let’s dive in. JSONReader This sample d ..read more

A long, long time ago (1989) one of the first apps I ever made was an app launcher for the Atari ST. I called it JumpSTART. I originally wrote it in GFA BASIC and then later re-implemented it in Pascal (OSS Personal Pascal, technically). When I got my first modem I went online with Genie and Delphi and uploaded JumpSTART as freeware. Even though it was freeware, I got a few checks in the mail from people that liked it. I was reminded of JumpSTART when I saw my dock getting crowed. I thought replicating JumpSTART in Xojo would be a good project for week 8 of #JustCode. Though let’s just ca ..read more

We’re starting a new thing! At the end of each month we’ll round up a few of our favorite things – from blog posts, announcements, technology, science and whatever other stuff the Xojo team thinks was noteworthy and I’ll post it. It’s the new Xojo Monthly Round Up! Our favorite Xojo Blog post in June was actually 3 posts: JSON Feed Web App, JSON Feed iOS App, and JSON Feed Desktop App. Paul got to talk server updates with John Gruber (he’s still talking about around the watercoolor). Sorry if no one replied to your email back on June 9th, we were reading the reviews on this Banana Sl ..read more

In a previous post I showed how easy it was to create a web app that displays the JSON Feed for Daring Fireball. In this post, I’ll show you how to make an iOS app to do it. Designing the User Interface To start, download Xojo for free, install and launch it. At the Project Chooser, select “iOS”, enter “JSONFeed” as the Application Name and click OK. You are now looking at the Layout Editor. You can drag controls from the Library on the right to create your user interface. For this example you’ll create an iPhone app, so we’ll focus on that layout. The iPhone app will consist of two “view ..read more

Want a quick and easy way to send notifications to your devices (iOS, Android and web browsers) from Xojo desktop and web apps? Perhaps you want to send a notification if a purchase is made, an error occurs or a long process has finished. If so, the free Pushover web service might be what you need! Pushover is actually two things: a web service you can call to send notifications and an app you install on your device to receive notifications. Using it is really easy, but I’ve made a class you can use to make it even easier: just drag it onto your layout to use. Here’s how to set things up ..read more

In Xojo 2022r4, we have updated our SQLite library to SQLite v3.39.4. Previously Xojo was using 3.36.0, and since there have been quite a few SQLite updates since then I thought I’d highlight a few notable features: STRICT tables PRAGMA table_list RIGHT and FULL OUTER JOIN Built-in JSON support More about each of these below. STRICT Tables One of SQLite’s most unusual capabilities is that it does not care about what data goes into a column. Although you could specify a type for a column, it was really more of a suggestion as other types of data could be put into the column. This behavior is ..read more

The first classes in the new Xojo Framework have been available for all project types since Xojo 2015 Release 2. Here are some of my favorite features. Text The new Text data type is a substitute for String and has the benefit of making encodings easier to work with. Essentially if you use Text, you don’t have to worry about the encoding. When you get data from an outside source (a file, a database or even a String), you specify the encoding so it can be stored as Text. Once it is in Text, you don’t worry about the encoding. When you need to send the Text to a file, DB or elsewhere, you conver ..read more

There is something that is even better than using Cell Renderers from third parties- building them yourself. In this second part, you will learn how to create your very own controls using Xojo’s WebSDK. In case you missed it, the previous article explains in detail what Cell Renderers are and how to use them. Anything you can imagine can be done inside your WebListView control cells. In order to do so, be prepared to write some JavaScript code. Today we will create a very basic example, a Custom Cell Renderer capable of showing Bootstrap Badges. If we think about it, in a nutshe ..read more

I want to show you how to retrieve the data of an API over a CURL connection and evaluate the JSON to build a weather station. In this example I work with a free key from the OpenWeather API. OpenWeather provides an API with weather data that you can access by an URL. The API returns a JSON text containing information such as current weather description, current temperature, pressure, humidity and many more. This is uses the CURL Plugin for the network query and Util plugin for JSON. The Layout  We want to take a closer look at this JSON together later. But first we want to build the layo ..read more

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a great text-based data format that can be used for files and web services data communication. The structure is simpler than XML which makes it much smaller and since it does not make use of all the tags you’ll find in XML, it is also significantly easier to read. However, if you open unformatted JSON in a text editor you’ll probably find it a bit dense. Here’s how to get around that. Here is a JSON file shown in bbEdit: You could apply formatting to it, but another option is to display it in a tree to get a better understanding of its structure and c ..read more