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FEATURE

xDev Tools

Exploring some custom Xojo tools we use at xDev Magazine

Issue: 19.4 (July/August 2021)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 32,285
Starting Page Number: 20
Article Number: 19403
Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

Last summer I had an idea. Here at xDev Magazine, while we sell back issues of the publication, we also publish older articles individually on our sister site, xDev Library (https://xdevlibrary.com). However, that doesn't include columns that appear in the magazine.

Columns are generally focused on one topic, tend to be shorter than a feature article, and span multiple issues. That makes them awkward to sell individually—but what about combining many into one book?

That's how the xDev Beginner's Collection book—a grouping of all the beginner's columns published in xDev—came together (see Figure 1). The 700-page ebook proved to be very popular and so this summer I've created the Xojo Database Collection. It contains almost 100 database columns published in xDev over the past 18 years.

You might think this is an easy undertaking to simply group previously published material and stick it in a PDF, but there are definite challenges involved. Most importantly, I am lazy and want to automate as much of the project as I can!

As I was working on the new book, I realized that to make it all happen, I am using many custom programs I wrote with Xojo.

Then I thought xDev readers might find it interesting to see the process. While obviously everything I'm doing is specific to me and my unique needs, the concepts are universal and it may give you ideas and inspire you to write tools to automate your own workflows.

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