Today Xojo Inc. released the new version of Xojo, their forth release for this year. Let's check what is new.

Release notes - Download

New is support for Windows ARM 64-bit for XojoScript. We waited years for this feature, because it enables Xojo Inc. to make an ARM version of the IDE for Window in the future. That would be great since developers like me use a Macbook with Apple Silicon and use Windows 11 in a VM. Running the Intel version on an ARM chip slows the IDE down a bit. There may be in the future the possibility to also do a Linux ARM IDE version. Then Xojo Inc. may do an universal installer which brings both variants and installs the right one.

Apple asked many years ago to sign applications. Later added notarization to make sure applications are not modified between the developer packaging them and users installing them. While it sometimes causes a bit of hassle for developers, I think this is a great enhancements to prevent a lot of malware. For the last 12 years could get everything done properly with the AppWrapper application or do similar things with a script in Terminal. Xojo 2024r4 has its own settings to do similar things for macOS. While we appreciate to have something finally, I expect a lot of people will still use App Wrapper for more options. And since you also need to sign applications on Windows, you may need to look for something similar for the Windows side.

The new preemptive thread feature in 2024r3 was great, but not perfect. Real world usage of this feature showed a few bottlenecks and Xojo Inc. improved the locking mechanisms to make things run faster.

If you use the IDE for coding you probably enabled things like applying standard case and standardize format options. New in this release is the option to highlight the current row and display matching selections. Basically if you select one variable name, the IDE will highlight other places where these appear. In the background the IDE does a word search for the same text.

If you use SSLSocket, you may like to see the upgrade to TLS v1.3, which helps with newer servers, that require the newer version. And the URLConnection class can now follow redirects, which is convenient as you don't need to code this yourself.

For MBS Xojo Plugins, please use version 24.x with Xojo 2024r2. They work fine together as far as we see.

You find more details in the Xojo 2024r4 Release Notes.