Xojo isn’t in the Mac App Store, because, well Apple won’t allow it… Over 50% of Mac users prefer the Mac App Store, it doesn’t mean being on the App Store will double your sales!
Xojo could have built a Xojo Playgrounds using Xojo Script. Allowing developer wannabes to download something from somewhere they trust, and play with the language.
I downloaded it, was impressed, paid for a few years, then left silently. Lucky for me this time around I found some bouncers at the gate that warned me not to enter the club again 
A way better option with similar Basic Sintax: https://www.b4x.com/ ?
And now it is FREE
Also an excellent option. The only issue I had was that you cannot run the B4X IDE natively on a Mac. Not sure what the status of it is now.
Check out PureBasic.
The language is BASIC but it give a developer raw power to build anything that one would build in C/C++.
It is a pure compiler and it available on Mac App store also!
Coupled with a third party IDE called ICE it is a very powerful development environment.
And it is very reasonably priced!
Oh yes and its counterpart called Spiderbasic for Web, Android and iOS
Do you perhaps know if it can build services and commandline apps?
Example for Windows. I’m not sure about other platforms.
Also a lot of the underlying OS’s API is available to you without having to create your own declares, for example on Windows you can just call a function with a trailing underscore:
MoveWindow_(nHandle, x, y, w, h, #True)
And here’s an example of using gtk functions on Linux:
; import some functions you want
ImportC ""
gtk_window_move(*win, x, y)
gtk_window_resize(*win, w, h)
EndImport
; then you can call them in your code
gtk_window_move(nHandle, x, y)
Tbh I don’t know much about MAC but I’ve seen you can use Cocoa like this:
CocoaMessage(0, nHandle, "setFrame:@", @frame)
The problem with SpiderBasic is its UI widgets ( which are based on Dojo ) are artificially limited in order to be consistent with PureBasic’s which is a little frustrating.
Thanks for this +1
Thanks Ivan! I’m gonna give Desktop, B4J, a try!
Bummer there isn’t a Mac IDE, but I’ll try it out to see if I can stand Windows…
Yes, unfortunately not. I might run on one of the Windows emulators.
Unfortunately, Virtual Box did not want to run on my M1. Had any else had success running VBox on M1?
Try https://mac.getutm.app. Works like a charm here on M1 MacBook and M1 Mac Mini.
Marvelous, thanks… there is always that “other one” for a few hundred dollars per annum ;-)… If this works I don’t see te point of paying since UTM seems to be free.
Why punish your M1 that way ? 
Are you running an Intel version of Ubuntu ?
What is the performance like ?
UTM virtual systems must have the same architecture as the host system.
Thought I had read somewhere there was some support for running, in a low performance mode, an Intel binary on an Mx based system
Ubuntu 14 is slow, it runs but is very very slow I’ve found. It was preconfigured 512MB Memory. I increased it to 4GB but was still slow and unresponsive at times.
I started with Ubuntu way back when - kind of liked it
then they revamped seemingly everything to move to Wayland and their new UI set up and it seemed unstable and flakey - so I switched to Mint
Haven’t had need to run much in the way of Linux machines recently
And that reminds me that I’ll bet Wayland support in our favourite green product is still wanting
Seems … someone was starting branches to remove support in Linux
Now I need to go find that article
