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FEATURE
What's New in R3
Xojo 2013 Release 3 is worth the download
Issue: 11.6 (November/December 2013)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 4,171
Starting Page Number: 18
Article Number: 11604
Related Web Link(s):
http://www.xojo.com/download/
http://docs.xojo.com/index.php/Changes_2013r3
Excerpt of article text...
Sometimes "minor" updates aren't worth the trouble, but with the first releases of Xojo having some rough edges, the new Release 3 is definitely worth downloading.
Most significant are improvements to the user interface of the IDE. Granted, there still are issues, but the Navigator is definitely better. It doesn't switch your focus quite as often as before (where certain actions seemed to jump you to the top of the item list) and items opened in their own tabbed windows stay there better.
If you code on a laptop like me, the ability to hide the (giant) toolbar is worth the upgrade right there. Unfortunately, if you do this you lose access to the Back/Forward buttons, which have no menu item equivalents. Hiding the toolbar also forced me to learn the keyboard shortcuts to switch between the Library and the Inspector, which is a far better way to access those than the toolbar buttons anyway.
Speaking of the Library, it's been improved by moving the filter field to the top (closer to the position of the Navigator's filter field, which is more consistent for that type of feature). I'm not 100% of the ability to set the focus to the Library is new in R3, but I never noticed it until now and it's very handy: press the tab key to focus on the Library and then use the arrow keys to highlight the control you want and press return to add it to the current window.
Another big win is that when you Run your application a new Run tab is opened where you can access the debugger. In previous versions finding the currently running app was much more difficult. The new way works more like it used to in Real Studio.
Be Careful of Threading
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