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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Alwaysbusy's Corner 
No, say it ain’t so! I still use the ABCanvas for the card game I am working on and I routinely look at those tutorials for help and guidance. I still download them when I need a fresh copy and can’t fond the ones I downloaded. I’ve recently been reinvigorated to continue work on it and your ABCanvas has helped me immensely. Otherwise I would be forced to use over 50 separate canvases for each Window. I don’t have the mental capacity to learn C, C# or C++ (I’ve tried for over 20 years and still can’t understand the “Hello Word” example.)
Don’t worry 🙂 I make sure all articles will be available in probably pdf format with source code.
Have you uploaded the Canvas Tutorials anywhere yet? I need clean copies of them as I want to refactor some code but don’t have the clean copies I originally got here.
I’ve added a link to the RAW FTP dump of the RB/Xojo projects to the article.
Thank you so much. The code that I use from your stuff works just fine in Xojo 2018r2 except one piece of code in the show menu function that is being depreciated but it’s not a big deal as I don’t use that piece anyway. I really hope you come back to it at some time in the future as it really helped me out in the TCG game I’m making.
Hi Alain! I always enjoyed your REALbasic articles. Thanks for all you did. Markus
Thanks you for reading them Markus! I hope one day I can find the time to do some more as I love graphics related topics and RB/Xojo was a fun tool to explore them
Since you’ve deleted all the RealBasic Canvas Articles (or I can’t find them anymore), I can’t find the comment about why the move animation works on Windows but not on Mac when you right-click. There was a solution but I don’t remember what it was. Maybe you have the articles archived somewhere and can tell me the code I need to change.
I really hope you come back to Xojo, there’s been loads of changes/bugfixes/updates/etc. I’ve been using your ABCanvas to help me design my TCG game I’ve been working on.