Up until last year, the install of Xojo would also install a fairly comprehensive manual in pdf format. Does not in 2019. Is there a link or some other means to get that? I could not find a link. There are still many places on Earth that the internet does not reach, and I travel to some of them frequently. The help facility within the app is good but not comprehensive.
I believe the PDFs have been retired, since the move back to MediaWiki. But, if you have an iOS device, you can download @Jeremie Leroy 's awesome Language Reference app from the App Store for free.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/language-reference-for-xojo/id1484982467
As Gavin said, with the move to MediaWiki we no longer generate doc PDFs.
However, you can generate PDF files for pages you want. Use the Printable Version link in the Tools section of the navigator on the left and then you can print to a PDF device to save the page content as PDF.
I’ve been waiting for a new edition of Matt Neuberg’s book to come out… my copy may be a bit out of date.
When that edition was released ?
Printing a page at a time to pdf might be time consuming, with 700+ pages…
I’ll check the iOS app, looks like it kind of duplicates Help in Xojo itself? The old pdf manual was a lot more…
I guess I could try something like SiteSucker to make a local copy of the web manual, but I think with all the cross references it may fail.
Emile: I recall having copies of the 1st and 2nd Edition of Matt Neuberg’s book: RealBasic, The definitive guide, with the 2nd edition published around 2001. For my part, I thought it was a pretty good book and may have been where I learned the most about RealBasic at the time. A few old-timers on the forum may agree.
Matt’s book is hopelessly out-of-date by now and I believe there are no plans to update it. I doubt that I have bought a “computer book” in the past 15 years since most manuals have gone electronic and on-line, but I might consider buying a modern equivalent if available.
Yep, Matt Neuberg’s book really cemented my REALbasic and OOP knowledge way back then. I had both editions of the book. Absolutely loved it. Bonus Trivia: he actually still quotes the RB book in his Swift books and even re-uses diagrams about OOP from it.
Me too, but because I had troubles learning somethin from them (I nr-earle know all they write 
or worst: bad book.)
That was the case for OS books, SQL (the reference book missed so many things)Â…
It seems that these writers are talking to in the knowledge persons, and far away from the bases / far away from everyday lifesÂ… WhoÂ’s working at the NASA ?
Gavin: that is what I felt when the book and its upgrade were released.
O’Reilly had no plans to update it even way back when
But I have asked and thats what I was told then
And I’m sure they have no others since Xojo has remained a niche tool and they simply cannot afford to publish full length books that have such limited appeal - which really strikes me odd since on-demand publishing should make this exact model viable
I hope you all subscribed to the Xojo Developer Magazine at least.
With a new issue every 2 months it’s much more up to date and if it saves you an hour a year, the subscription fee has well paid itself!
[quote=468276:@Paul Lefebvre]As Gavin said, with the move to MediaWiki we no longer generate doc PDFs.
However, you can generate PDF files for pages you want. Use the Printable Version link in the Tools section of the navigator on the left and then you can print to a PDF device to save the page content as PDF.[/quote]
Thanks for that tip.
I am one of those people that spends a lot of time in locations with no connection to the Internet so I am glad to learn about Leroy’s iOS app.
How does Leroy keep his iOS manual up to date? How did he do what he did?
And what is the advantage of printing out individual pages as per Lefebvre over just using the Leroy iOS project? (I can see that Leroy’s project can get at least slightly out of date) but in the main, it seems like an incredible resource for those of us oft away from Internet.
Please donÂ’t do that. WeÂ’ve been cracking down on users that do this because it makes the wiki unavailable or slow for other users when this is done and you may get temporarily or permanently banned from accessing it.
If you’re having to crack down on users doing this then obviously the demand for something local is there. I’ve installed the iOS app, but unless I’m missing something this is a copy of what is already there locally in the help file when running Xojo, and lacking all the other info in the manual. If there is no need for the manual then why have it at all?
How about making available a downloadable and locally referenced HTML snapshot of the wiki manual? It seems like that would be doable with a minimum amount of effort (and in fact what something like sitesucker does automatically). It could be opened locally in a browser without connectivity. I understand the motivation to go to something like the wiki based manual in terms of maintenance and currency, but it is of little use if it cannot be accessed.
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generating that sanpshot is then the issue
wikis dont generally do that and so they’d have to write something to walk EVERY page, cache it, and then retain all those
And they’d have to rewerite all hyperlinks to be local since they generally arent written that was
Its not a trivial task (I know as I wrote the original code that extracted what IS in the local language reference from the Wiki)
Its almost easier to just get a full db dump of the wiki and then run a wiki locally
While I never read any of his REALBasic books, I was interested when I saw you mention Swift… So I went and looked…
there is only one still in print for iOS12 and its $70.00!
Ah… there is a pair of iOS13 books out (or soon)… funny how his publisher didn’t list them, but Amazon did
A program like SiteSucker already does all of this - automatically. It walks all the pages, caches them, and changes the hyperlinks to local reference. It would do this on the existing wiki, would take a few hours and you’d be done. The only difficulty would be determining how deep to go, and eliminating the errant (out of subject) links. It’s not a single pushbutton but certainly not more than a couple of hours work. Once it is setup it is nearly a single pushbutton to redo. It could be done in the middle of the night without much impact on anyone. I’d give it a try myself but I guess it is frowned upon. I’m happy to accept another solution - just not happy about no solution at all.
you’d have to throttle site sucker to do it VERY slowly then as rapidly doing this and hammering the WIki will get you banned one way or the other
So I have been told. I’d much rather Xojo did it, and made the resulting file available for people in my situation. It would only need to be done once every quarter or so and could be used by everyone. It could result in less hammering of the wiki overall, if more than a few people used it instead of the live copy.
We live in a world where most of the people in high tech development have unlimited, constant, and fast access to the internet. I know, I was one of them. The users of this technology sometimes do not though.
I know
I’m one of them 