The more I read various post here.
The more I feel that most of us are idiomatically Flogging a dead horse called Xojo.
All of us (except a few who are still using it for building production/commercial apps) need to get out of this trend and concentrate on something which is more productive.
Just my 2 cents.
What are everyone’s view on this?
I agree, productivity is key. But it is important first flog out all the dead horses so we can point into directions where there is life and life abundantly. There is a place for the negativity but it should be used as pointer rather than a stick.
I fully agree with both of you. The negativity here is holding people back. I tried to mention that in another thread, but I am afraid the disappointments and frustrations are still too high.
Many people here made suggestions and advice and wanted to help Xojo. They were sent off with false promises or were ignored by the CEO of Xojo.
I want to be optimistic about Xojo, but after the message “Dana is leaving”, I think this is more than the beginning of the end. I fear Xojo is already past tense, but the future will tell.
I want to motivate the people here to be constructive. Work together with each other and build something beautiful with each other.
I hope there will be more happiness in this forum.
Thank you both for your optimistic messages.
Lots of what we read and share here are years of commitment in time and annual dollars. Sure we made some of our dollars back. We as a XOJO community put a lot of emotional effort into a product with such great promise. For some, it will be a time of mourning before they/we can move on. I already “left 4 years ago” but I still have a heart for the XOJO community and the people who worked 1000’s of hours on projects, plugins, documentation, and video content, bought plane tickets to visit the annual XOJO get-together, and now that rug is being pulled from under your feet. If you are young you can easily restart with another technology but if you invested so much time into training your muscle memory to where all the menu items are and where and how to read the documentation to solve a problem it becomes a huge undertaking to move on and change your habits into learning a new technology. Some of us will eventually just quit and give up because of our emotional commitment. Some will just stay here and just be happy to be among old friends and familiar names. Yet some will stand up and lead the way. Just give it time and stay positive but also don’t be afraid to face the negativity because it can happen to any new technology you embark on.
You keep saying it is “holding people back”… but all I see is people moving on (in some cases slowly, in others quite quickly). It is natural to lament something you have placed a huge investement in, and if you don’t like the content of this forum, you too can move on.
Note, this forum was created originally with the sole purpose of allowing the venting about Xojo without the censorship of TOF
I basically agree, but catharsis / closure is nice to have and this forum helps realize that. Xojo Inc should take the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth here as evidence that they once had very committed, loyal and knowledgeable customers who are literally grieving the need to (often reluctantly) turn to other platforms to realize their vision. And due to the learning curve and impact on their productivity combined with the complete needlessness of many of Xojo’s unforced errors, often they are (rightly) angry about it.
Facts, evidence and reality aren’t positive or negative, optimistic or pessimistic – they simply exist. Not getting legitimate feelings off your chest can hold you back, too.
I came to Xojo only a bit over a year ago (post-API 2) and I did so because I wanted a visual UI designer, am neither enthralled with nor biased against the Basic language, and initially believed (at least for desktop) the Xojo cross-platform value proposition and was impressed with the completeness of the language … the presence of advanced abstractions such as the Memory class and the fact that the language almost HAS to provide those abstractions to build a decent IDE in Xojo itself, plus the whole notion that the company dogfoods its own product like that suggested to me that I would not hit many brick walls with Xojo.
But as I’ve had some experience with the product and seen Xojo’s disdain for advanced devs and chronic wasting of (more limited than I imagined) resources trying to cover mobile and web and doing it poorly and in ways that serious mobile and web devs would not take seriously … I have decided that even for just desktop, Xojo is rapidly losing whatever technological lead it had vs. the competition. The expanding bug count doesn’t help either. Filing a couple of bug reports that just gather dust has also been a problem. Easy to fix bugs too.
Acknowledging all this isn’t “negative” of me, it is just the sort of objective assessments I need to make for all my dev tooling.
That was one purpose but not the sole purpose
Thank you both for your comments and explanations. They are precious and genuine.
However, it is a misunderstanding that I do not like this forum or what people are writing. On the contrary, I learned a lot, and I acknowledge that there are huge problems with Xojo. Problems are caused by ONE person: Geoff Perlman, the CEO.
I also ask myself the question: why is he not doing anything to rescue Xojo? Make a change which puts Xojo back on the rails. However, he will not do this. I cannot understand why an intelligent man like Geoff Perlman doesn’t see that his flagship is sinking.
I read enough threads/messages here to understand why people are angry or pessimistic. What I try to accomplish is to show people that positivity is so much stronger than negativity. But I realise that some people may take more time than others.
I do not want to offend anybody here. If I gave anybody this impression, please accept my apology. I respect each other’s opinions and ideas, even when I disagree entirely.
Wish you all a great day!
one word : EGO
he sees nothing wrong
While people take their time, they are also moving forward. Everyone here who still has a tie to Xojo (customer with Xojo codebase or own codebase) started working with other languages and IDEs. No one regrets moving away from Xojo since working with those new tools makes Xojo’s shortcomings even more obvious.
Have a great day, too!
Amen to that… Swift can do things that Xojo can only dream about
The first step in fixing a problem is recognizing that there is one
Geoff doesnt believe there is one - regardless of whatever evidence there might be
Why takes steps to fix a problem that doesnt exist ?
As Bertrand Russell said: The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people are so full of doubts.
One of the reasons people are carrying on so here is that they simply are good people who can’t get their brains around how someone like Geoff can be so cocksure of themselves and oblivious to the clear and present danger and jeopardy they put their own company into.
The subtext is probably that venting here may get through a little bit, if not to Geoff, then to his staff – but that is but a guttering candle of hope at best.
The sub-subtext is more useful: we are documenting the demise of a once promising company and product, for the record. Un-erasing Xojo’s erasures.
I don’t condone animal cruelty.
Xojo is a dead man walking, it is only a matter of time until it can’t go on any more.
Our complaints serve a positive purpose, they prepare prospective customers for a future with Xojo.
All the time Xojo does what you need, great. Otherwise you’re not one of Xojo’s target audience.
Xojo do not keep up with the industry, don’t expect 'em to do so.
Jobs for Xojo developers have dramatically disappeared since “2.0 All The Things™”.
If our experiences can save a handful of developers from facing the same crap we did, then this “negativity” has a positive outcome.
I was seeing it before “2.0 All The Things™”. I think it was a number of factors. Bugs, less focus on desktop, developers aging out, and more options in the cross-platform universe, web apps. To name a few. Death by a thousand cuts.
Sure, but with about an order of magnitude more complexity.
Complexity? not even… ObjC? sure complex… Swift not so much… different? yes,
Coming from a low code environment I tried Xojo and found it rather complicated with all the workarounds required, the bug-discovering and its poor documentation.
Swift surely requires some serious time invested in reading and trying out stuff, but is well-documented, with plenty of tutorials from Apple and 3rd parties available. There are frameworks like Vapor/Fluent, there is SwiftUI with its declarative syntax and and…
I did not invest more time in learning Swift than I would have in learning Xojo with all its quirks.
The Swift language makes progress every year, Xojo doesn’t.
And in some aspects of GUI-building, Xojo even falls behind FileMaker.
Last, but not least: Xcode has full Git integration. Xojo comes with a binary file format for the less expensive licenses…
and tons of written references
for instance 