Looks like yesterday Xojo had a great day full of self back patting and even found a couple of people willing to publish a tweet or two (the Matrix gif of Neo dodging bullets was hilarious). But that is ok as it is how low-budget marketing works.
More concerning (but not surprising), it looks like the hungry Feedback Monster is going to be fed again the first new bug and crash reports and that is not good news. It just means it is business as usual and testing has suffered again under the pressure of having to roll out a new release. I was under the impression someone was tired that development expediency was prioritized over quality?
It will be interesting to see if further down the line that there’s some way to group controls from different platforms into a single “control group” that can be placed into a multitude of projects, maybe when they implement “Plugins made in Xojo” from the roadmap. Having a quick thick about this, it’s the only way I can think they will work around this issue now. Or maybe their plan is to just simplify things and don’t care about “advanced users” loss of features as its not their target market?
Control
UIControl
Button
DesktopButton
macOSButton
LinuxButton
WindowsButton
MobilButton
WebButton
would let you put common properties & methods in the button super class and yet still make the subclasses unique to their platform
And you could, in code, simply use #if Target and cast when necessary
BUT you could define a single x-platform extension method like
sub foo ( extends b as button)
#if TargetMacOS
// do mac os stuff
#elseif TargetWeb
// do web stuff
#else ... and so on
end sub
Which you CANNOT do in any way now since
the ONLY thing you COULD pass in is a variant or object so you cant extend the Button etc directly
you get NO compile time checking this way - its ALL runtime
There ARE other ways (MS is using a different mechanism with Maui)
Well, B4X does something like that, you have a B4XView to work with Desktop, Android and iOS. You can use it to write cross platform code and it encapsulates the differences for you, its great and most users preffer this.
But well, the CEO of xojo wrote a blog post with the usual “I KNOW” that no one will use this so we didnt make that change…
Probably not, but it fits into point #3 on the Xojo MVP page.
To act as an informal advisory committee. As we develop Xojo, we appreciate getting feedback in the early stages of a particular change we might be making, which is manageable with a small group. We are discussing our product planning with them and giving them very early access to features in development to get their feedback.
As a hobbyist programmer, I am unlikely to migrate from Xojo. I write code for my own use, exclusively on Windows. I don’t need iOS and certainly not Android or Web. So while I do look at other development environments but so far none have enticed me away from Xojo.
On the other hand, unless Xojo delivers something I really need, or fixes bugs I can’t work around, I will not be renewing my license when it expires later this month.
