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Issue 11.5 ('Weeds')
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FEATURE

Tips to Help You Like the Navigator

Many developers dislike the new Xojo Navigator. Here are some tips to help you like it more.

Issue: 11.5 (September/October 2013)
Author: Brad Hutchings
Author Bio: Brad has been developing commercial software for more than 25 years. Highlights include: ham radio control and logging software; OpenDoc part editors; enterprise software connecting the first Palm OS phones to an Oracle database; relational database server and middleware; software helping kids write, print, and share picture books; plugins and libraries for Real Studio and Xojo; Xojo web applications targeting secure file distribution. You can find his Xojo products at StudioStable.com.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 9,356
Starting Page Number: 39
Article Number: 11507
Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

With the introduction of Xojo, we have a radically different Integrated Development Environment (IDE) from what we had with Real Studio. The Project Navigator area (Navigator) at the left of the IDE window has been a target of scorn for many long-time developers. In this article, I want to help you like it.

Accept It. It's not Going Away.

Some developers need a reality check. The Navigator is not going away. It's not going to be ripped out and replaced by the old Real Studio Project tab. Xojo (the company) has a great deal of money, time, and blood invested in the Navigator. Despite your negative assessments of the Navigator, there are significant numbers of long-time users who feel it is a promising improvement and the right direction to go. Future customers with no prior Real Studio experience will just see the Navigator as "the way Xojo works." Given that Xojo isn't going to please everyone, you just might be one of the people they won't please if you develop or maintain a mental block against the Navigator.

That's not to say that the Navigator is perfect. In both 2013r1 and 2013r2 releases of Xojo, the Navigator is buggy and quite quirky. A slew of rough edges have been polished for 2013r3, but expect the Navigator to continue to have some issues and expect to see incremental improvement over the next several scheduled releases of Xojo. At the time this article is printed, Xojo will have demonstrated that they are staying the course with the Navigator.

Recognize the Trade-Off

With Real Studio, it was very easy to get lost horizontally, especially on smaller laptop screens. I use a 15" MacBook Pro, and when I work on projects in Real Studio, the tabs quickly get too small to read titles, and they overflow off the right of my fully expanded windows. Additionally, switching between layout and code requires a full context shift and two tabs for a window. Real Studio is far from perfect for editing things.

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