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Issue 19.3 ('Black Hole')
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Xojo 2021R1

Xojo thoughts, news and tips

Issue: 19.3 (May/June 2021)
Author: Paul Lefebvre
Author Bio: Paul Lefebvre is a Xojo engineer. He has been using Xojo and its prior versions since 2001.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 7,482
Starting Page Number: 82
Article Number: 19309
Related Web Link(s):

http://docs.xojo.com/Resources

Excerpt of article text...

Available at the end of March, Xojo 2021 Release 1 adds much more Apple Silicon support. In fact, the IDE itself is now Universal and runs native on M1 Macs. The only notable part of Xojo that is not yet native on Apple Silicon is the linker, but we are working on that. The good news is that even though the linker is not native, it runs even faster on Apple Silicon than it does on Intel!

In other Apple Silicon news, XojoScript now works in ARM builds and Worker Helpers apps can now be built as ARM.

Previously Xojo used the macOS 11 SDK for ARM builds and an earlier SDK for Intel builds. Starting with 2021 Release 1, the macOS 11 SDK is used for all Mac builds.

And speaking of SDK updates, Xojo now uses the latest iOS 14 SDK when building iOS apps. This is important because starting in April 2021, Apple requires that your iOS apps use the iOS 14 SDK in order to submit to the App Store.

If you are using macOS Big Sur, you'll notice that Xojo uses the more modern outline icons you often see there. These icons are actually part of Apple's SF Symbols collection. Although some do not like this design trend from Apple, there are benefits to using SF Symbols for icons. First, you don't have to design your own icons which can be a significant cost. Then you have to consider dark mode. Full-color icons don't usually translate well to dark mode so you may find you'd need an alternative set of icons, at more cost. Retina mode is another concern, as normal icons are bitmaps so do not scale well, so you would need icons in various sizes. With SF Symbols, there are hundreds of icons to choose from and the icons can be tinted for light/dark mode (and other things)and scale as needed. Given these benefits, I expect you'll see more and more Mac apps starting to use SF Symbols for their icons.

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