Did you know that if you never update your operating system, the last version of your favorite applications, one day, will no longer be supported? Do you realize that this situation will become an uncomfortable impasse soon or later? and the more outdated you are the worse? Let’s have a look. The computer industry is in constant motion and evolution. As the time goes on, we usually purchase new hardware, we very likely update our operating system to enjoy all the new features and we try to get all our software up-to-date. But sometimes it is not that easy, mainly …
Month: November 2017
MaxBulk Mailer recipient lists no longer sorted alphabetically
All of a sudden, right after updating your system to macOS High Sierra you probably found out that all the recipient lists throughout the software were no longer sorted alphabetically. Well, I believe we were the first to find out and it took more than two weeks to actually receive the first complaints from MaxBulk Mailer users. We even received screenshots like this: So what happened? We believe it all has to do with the new APFS hard disk format that comes with the macOS 10.13 High Sierra operating system. It is a format exclusively used on SSD drives, for …
Variable naming conventions
Today I came across an old document I created in June 2004 probably from some text I found on the internet or maybe from an old Xojo Forum post, to say the truth I am not sure where it comes from. Anyway, the thing is that the document in question is some kind of variable naming conventions now I realize I fully adopted it after reading it. This is what it recommends when naming things you are declaring in your code depending on their nature. For you to understand better, it is a list of heading characters you have to …
Why is our software in the Apple App Store outdated?
It has been a long time since we last updated the software we have available for sale in the Apple App Store. People may wonder why the versions we have there are more than a year and an half old. There is an explanation for that, Apple rules. Indeed, when you post a new application or an update to the App Store, Apple performs an in-depth review of your submission. If you pass all filters and match all Apple guidelines, your application will be available for sale, otherwise you will get it rejected and you will receive some kind of …
iCash Currency Manager updating system is broken
After about a decade without a single issue, the iCash Currency Manager updating system has stopped working. Indeed, if you open the currency window and click on the ‘Update now’ button or you have activated the iCash ‘Document > Update Currency rates’ at startup preference, you will get the currency list filled with zeroes. So, what happened? Actually, iCash was fetching currency rates from Yahoo! services. It seems like Yahoo! has discontinued the (private, mostly-undocumented) Yahoo Finance API that many developers have been using for their currency data. All responses seem to be returning “violation of the Yahoo Terms” error. …
Xojo NthField() and CountFields() functions in PHP
In Xojo there is a handy function I use quite a lot for getting substrings between given delimiters from a piece of text, it is: NthField(text, delimiter, fieldnumber) Imagine you have the following text “1/2/3/4”, NthField( “1/2/3/4”, “/”, 3 ) will return 3, that is the third substring between the “/” delimiters. It is that simple! This function works great in Xojo as long as the text is not too big. A few years ago I was porting a Xojo function to PHP that used NthField() so I decided to port the whole function. This is the PHP equivalent: function …
Not all software should be ported to smartphones
During the last decade we have been witnessing the smartphone revolution. Mobile phones have become multi-purpose tools, they can do much more than handling calls. At the very beginning we were all filling our new toy with all kind of stuff and it was really funny. Smartphones are great and you can do lots of things with them. Actually there are tons of apps that can take advantage of the portability of such type of device. Some of those apps are the result of its success and would not have existed otherwise but I believe not everything can or should …
The reason why Maxprog software icons are now black and white
Sometimes people ask me why all those beautiful and colorful Maxprog software icons have suddenly been replaced with black and white icons: Actually I already posted a note about that a few months ago. It has to do with HiDPI (retina) support. Indeed as part of our commitment with our users we decided to give support to HiDPI displays. To do that, and among other things, we had to redesign all our icons since they were not ready for HiDPI at all. HiDPI needs two different sizes per icon, for example the toolbar now needs 64×64 icons in addition to …