Exactly my observation also. Especially when checking out new tools/languages, you can see how they’re not even paying attention to industry trends. Declarative UI is gaining in popularity, while Xojo has gone t’other way, hard.
Indeed, that’s what made it even more sad is that a lot of us, were not doing this to hurt the CEO, we were doing this because we cared about the product, and often it seemed like we cared more than the actual CEO.
5.5.5, for me, was the high water mark. Subsequent releases had lots of great additions but they never seemed to quite make up for the subtractions.
Regardless of which of the many ways Xojo could have gone, I think ultimately GPT/LLM’s totally change the notion/expectations of citizen developers. There is probably nothing Xojo could do with the product they have today to appeal to a large market.
I never considered that, people would ask AI to write code for them and with Xojo, they’re going to have a big problem.
Apart from the CEO, there’s only one other person I’ve spoken to, who thinks API 2.0 / DesktopControls is a good thing. Not even the Xojo employees I’ve spoken with in private think it was a good idea.
But it is what it is.
After consulting with one of my coworkers (a former Xojo employee) I decided to publish this on my Substack blog. It’ll go live next Monday and I’ll put links on various social media.
Hopefully, Geoff will read it 5 times and do something about it.
But based on the past, nope.
Yeah, me neither. But it’s something that I feel needs to be said and then it’s in their hands to either ignore it or do something different. We’ve seen the same pattern over and over again so I doubt they’ll change anything.
You would be one of the more weighty and consequential people to weigh in on this; if they don’t heed you, they won’t heed anyone. And so that’s information, too.
It’s important that it be said. If nothing else it will help people avoid getting in bed with an essentially doomed product … for some given value of “doomed”. Whether that’s existentially doomed or just doomed to perpetual irrelevance, it doesn’t much matter.
There’s a thread running on TOF that summarises the problems pretty well. Let’s assume that the CEO will read that one.
https://forum.xojo.com/t/got-a-small-question-about-xojo-pricing/77771/69
I feel like he couldn’t have read that thread yet, otherwise it would have been deleted, locked, or made so you have to log in to see it.
Probably not
He hasn’t apparently logged in for 8 days
By making this information available, you are changing it already. The more people find your experience, mine and everyone else’s here, the less likely they are to commit to Xojo. This forces Xojo to adapt or die.
100% agree.
Ha ha… He’s probably already decided that everyone in that thread is a troll and it doesn’t need any attention.
That’s one way to keep calm is to NOT see the things that piss you off. Which is the #1 reason I don’t go there very often anymore.
As the CEO / Product Manager, you really should be on top of what your customers think. Oh, I forgot, you don’t need to because it’s the customers that are wrong, not you.
What’s missing from @bkeeney’s blog post is any mention of positives. Some people find Xojo meets their needs very well, and some people make a good living with it. There are many different use cases.
Agreed.
I had to leave due to so many bugs all over the place. Making a biz app was a nightmare. Then Web 1 was killed off.
But it works well for peeps like Tim D. But I think he doesn’t use it as a GUI app but more of an API backend. That exposes him the fewer bugs.
Granted but since its titled
Title: Why I Transitioned Away from Xojo - A Developer’s Perspective
Its about the reasons he left - not why he stayed
All the time I used xojo as an API backend I had to use several instances, load balancing and an extra desktop app to kill and restart the instances.
When moved to another tool, single instances running a self contained server that is multithreaded and it can run and run without restarting.
Maybe Tim D could suggest a stable way of doing things?
Well, I think the first paragraph explains the positives. For 20 years it served me well.
I run a suite of eight fairly complex desktop apps controlling production line test equipment and managing inventory and production. The product line is constantly changing, and Xojo’s RAD allows me to adapt quickly as necessary. I’ve never run across a show-stopping bug in the six years this project has been running, or in a similar project that ran 2011 - 2014.
The ease of Mac-Win xplat is key, as I write on Mac and deploy mostly for Windows. My clients couldn’t care less what language I use or how the apps look as long as the software works.
Web and mobile may well suck. The platform prefixing starting at 2021r2.2 sucks and I’m staying at 2021r2.1 until I can’t anymore. The IDE has many annoyances but what software doesn’t, including MacOS?