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Eureka!

Tips and Tricks for the Xojo Developer

Issue: 12.1 (January/February 2014)
Author: Markus Winter
Author Bio: Markus is a Molecular Biologist who taught himself REALbasic programming in 2003 to let the computer deal with some exceedingly tedious lab tasks. Some call it lazy, he thinks it smart. He still thinks of himself as an advanced beginner at best.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 10,636
Starting Page Number: 78
Article Number: 12111
Resource File(s):

project12111.zip Updated: 2014-01-06 12:17:40

Related Web Link(s):

http://archive.org/web/
http://web.archive.org/web/20100127124559/http
http://jfly.iam.u-tokyo.ac.jp/color/
http://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/
(http://colororacle.org/
http://blog.tempel.org/
http://docs.xojo.com/index.php/Community_Resources

Excerpt of article text...

I wish I had some better news for you, but as sadly not a single submission (to tips@xdevmag.com) was received for the Tips&Tricks column you are stuck with what I can come up with myself. And as I'm not and never will be in the same league as Joe or Charles, don't expect anything fanciful—it is more like staple food than gourmet dinner that I can offer you.

But problems like this can be opportunities in disguise—it allows me to show you the width of what a tip could be and what I would like to see in this column, so this might be a somewhat unusual Tips&Tricks. My tips will also be heavily slanted towards those new to Xojo and might seem obvious to many of you—but that's just it, isn't it? What is obvious to one user could be a revelation to another user, especially as Xojo caters to users from all walks of life. So let's get started.

Tip 1

The first tip is so common sense it barely qualifies as a tip: don't battle on your own. Join the forums. Use the search engines. While we all like to think of ourselves as original thinkers, the sad truth is that most questions have already been asked and answered—it is just a question of finding them. Now, if you just recently started out with Xojo, then you might not be aware that this language used to be called REALbasic. And if you are a longtime user and your memory is as bad as mine then you might already have forgotten. But, if searching for "Xojo scrolling canvas" doesn't find the answer you are looking for then, maybe "REALbasic scrolling canvas" will work. Which brings us straight to...

Tip 2

Sadly the Internet is a fleeting place—a webpage can be here today and gone tomorrow, and many promising links end in a "404 not found" cul-de-sac. But that might not be the end of your search after all. The Internet is such a humongous place that many people don't imagine that a backup could exist. But that is indeed the case. The Internet Archive (http://archive.org/web/) is a non-profit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies and music, as well as 368 billion archived web pages. Best of all, you can search the archive using its own search engine, the appropriately named "wayback machine." So, unless the website you are looking for was inaccessible behind a paywall or password protected, there is a good chance you can still find it in the backup!

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