RB/Xojo: Goodbye, you old dinosaur…

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And I mean this in an very friendly way, referring to one of their latest campaigns 🙂

I was doing some early spring cleaning on the dusty attic of this blog and came across some old projects I did.

Some of you long time followers of my blog may remember I wrote several posts programming in Xojo (previously RealStudio or even RealBasic before that).  When I first started this blog, I was a huge fan of RB.  The familiar VB6 syntax was what me attracted to it in the first place. I had a VB6 background, and with Microsoft abandoning it, RB was a nice alternative.  I really didn’t care much for it being able to cross compile back then as Windows was my thing.  But it was nice that it could.

Back then, many years ago, I used this place to write articles mainly on the Canvas (an 11 episode series!) and vintage games.

But also some frameworks like ABXVision that had OpenCV like capabilities (Augmented Reality in its early stages!) and a full blown physics engine ABPE.

The robotics series was a very fun project to do.  I was doing a course on Artificial Intelligence at the time and I could use this new knowledge in the tutorials.

But because of Xojos decision a couple of years ago to start using a new syntax framework, most of these projects won’t work anymore without a major overhaul.  So I feel it is time to let them go. I recently noticed Xojo had removed this blog from their resource list too, so they must’ve had the same feeling. Honestly, no hard feelings about that! I would too when a blog doesn’t write anything on me anymore.

But what is there currently to write about Xojo? The Web part hasn’t changed in many years and still looks like it is 1995. iOS still feels like it is only partly finished and is missing to many out-of-the-box features to be useful (will the new upcoming android suffer from the same problem?).  Should I write about the many bugs and workarounds one has to do?

It must be said many of this remarks have to do with Xojo being a small team, and some stuff (like 64bit or Apples decisions) has been forced upon them.  Luckily they have a small but enthusiastic community which is willing to take over the many shortcomings by writing frameworks like Aloe or iOSKit.

So, time to put those fond memories into a box and leave memory lane.  Back to the real harsh world ;-).

I will leave the RB/Xojo projects on this blog until the end of the month (March).  Maybe, one day, I will find the time to revamp them in Xojo or put them all up on GitHub and they will reappear.

Until then, this blog will mainly report on B4X and my own framework ABMaterial.

Godspeed old friend(s). Until we meet again…

UPDATE: I was planning to make a separate blog section for my old RB/Xojo projects, but I just can’t find the time to do so. I created a raw FTP dump of everything RB/Xojo related today that you can download from here. It is a bit messy so you will have to browse through it yourself. A lot of it will probably be outdated (the main reason I removed everything from my blog) and will need some re-work, but some of it may still be useful for someone.

Download RAW FTP Dump of RB/Xojo projects

Alwaysbusy

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Xojo: THE Canvas reference book

Program the Canvas Control with Xojo Desktop
Program the Canvas Control with Xojo Desktop

I Wish I Knew How To… Program the Canvas Control with Xojo Desktop is the latest book of Eugene Dakin in his excellent I Wish I Knew How To… series.

If you ever wondered how stuff is done with the canvas control in Xojo, this is the book you need to have on your virtual shelf. In his well known swift (no pun intended) style, Eugene has written the reference manual for you. Alwaysbusy’s Corner did some humble contributions to the more advanced topics.

For the novice Xojo user, you quickly can get started and learn about the basics of graphics. Step by step you learn more and more when you move through the more advanced topics. This 400 page volume covers a lot of interesting chapters and includes a lot of useful examples with source code:

Topics included in the book:

Text
Chart Fundamentals
Objects
2D Objects
Graphics
Blurring
Cropping
Gaussian Blur
Building basic controls
Animation
and there are two games with step-by-step code explanations to help you build your own.

So head over to Eugene’s Personal Website and get your copy. Also check out his other books in the series on topics like SQLite, XML, PostgreSQL, Office etc…

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