First Commercial Plugins for Free!

8 years ago the Inc still used appropriate pictures for showing us that it is all only a big joke:

Source: XDC 2015 Session Video, Now Available for Sale – Xojo Programming Blog

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That I wanted to explain. See: the logic behind is always that the customer can’t check anything on it. That was going as an own world the last twenty years around. But today is not year 2003. We have 2023. And the internet is not helping to hold that world turning around. While the people can see and realize the alternatives they do exactly that. And so people would have to decide for their project: what fits my needs and where my learning curve is flat and where I get as result the most stable Software. That is, for sure, a hard piece of bread to chew for many people in their own world.

For me it says that I realized it long time before and that I took the right conclusions from that situation. There was no future for me inside that ecosystem while it was not only crashing all my functionality but also the entire Software I wrote. So I believe that I was right with the conclusions. And I know how to write Software in a professional environment so I also know how to react on that. Changethe environment and rewrite. and that I have done.

So all my tasks I described how they can change it and get the boat on the right direction again are something nobody will listen to. Not the CEO and at that point the story ends up.

A true gem. Thank you!

In my case that was not true… The functionality I needed that Xojo did not have at the time, was to be able to create PDFs, Zip files, and non trivial graphing. While Xojo has added some of those capabilities (I have not used them so I don’t know how well they are implemented) for years I needed to use plugins to do those things …
(though initially I used open source PDF classes to create my PDFs )

BTW if I was writing some of the apps I did in the past now, I might need a plugin to do email as these days you need things like OAUTH more and more…

-karen

It’s the bugs in Xojo. Then Xojo telling Pros to F off.

All self inflicted.

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By the one and only, not by the employees :frowning:

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In case of that I am happy that I have tons of libraries for OAuth and so on for Java. I would not want to write an App with OAuth and comparable while I need to pay then every year for it otherwise I can’t update to the latest OAuth for example. That I would not want to accept. For Java it is so that you have many Libraries and the most even free.

@Garry I am sorry to read this man.

I don’t know if it’s any consolation, demand of Xojo Add-ons has been slowly declining for some time. It seemed to accelerate with the introduction of “2.0 All The Things™”. Even App Wrapper sales have declined ~30% in the last 3 years (Only 7% decline last year).

I personally believe that this isn’t just because Xojo has experienced a number of departures over “2.0 ATT”. I also believe that its attributed to a unsustainable amount of new comers to the tool. The high entry cost (and high cost of the additional plugin that appears to be required), coupled with the general lack of public awareness, create barriers, when other tools are free, more well known and have decades of sample code / tutorials.

I removed the Ohanaware App Kit from sale for several reasons.

  1. The work required to support DesktopControls was significant. The work v.s. profit scale would already mean that I lose money to support “2.0 ATT”. Not to mention that I couldn’t use the DesktopControls version of OAK in my own products, so I’d have to maintain two repos.
  2. I created feature requests, lobbied for them and complained about the harshness of the transition. One FR was partially implemented, but it broke other things. The rest were ignored. It appeared that Xojo wasn’t going to support this project.
  3. Since OAK debuted with the Omegabundle, a certain plugin vendor tried to have it removed in favor of their plugin. They succeeded in 2022, which reduced potential profit on this project even further.
  4. Auto-closing bug reports and feature requests, coupled with the wasting of time over the new LR, showed that Xojo isn’t interested in supporting Xojo add-ons (at least from non MVPs).

I do hope that Xojo focuses on actual growth and Xojo add-ons, but I fear it may already be too late.

As I’ve said before, I don’t want to learn a new tool, I don’t want to spend significant time re-inventing the wheel, I want to work on improving my own apps. Alas, I am among the 20% vocal minority that Xojo is all too happy to take money from, but doesn’t want to support.

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We all look at the same thing. After start working with Xojo as a newcomer, it was a good experience for a few weeks. Then I stumbled over more and more things that did not work properly because of poor implementation and/or wrong and incomplete documentation. 2022r1 kicked the bottom out. At the time I concluded that I’d need a plug-in for the creation of apps with a decent UI, it became also clear that Xojo management wasn’t interested in changing their flawed process and building a codebase on Xojo would be a risky bet. So I dropped Xojo and never purchased a plug-in.
It became also clear that Xojo now is the vanity project of a single person and this alone is guarantee that the disaster we are witnessing will continue.
Xojo’s management made it abundantly clear that they don’t care at all about any damage their volatile product ‘strategy’ inflicts to customers and 3rd party vendors alike.
From this point on, whoever throws in time and money does so at their own risk and peril.

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That is exactly the reason why I occasionally formulate so sharply in other threads that I would welcome it if even more open source solutions would stir up this “market”. There may be vendors who think we end users have never noticed such “strategies”, but they are wrong.

I always thought that it was just arrogance, along the lines of “we know better”, meanwhile I have the impression that it is ignorance and simply an inability to do what the business really needs.

This is the only way I can explain the incomprehensible priorities and the lack of insight into what end users (our customers) need and want. It’s also probably based on ignorance that the Inc.'s way of maintaining and releasing software with all politeness is quite outdated and inefficient.

If you work differently than 90 percent of your customers (us developers) in 2023, then it is logical that both sides simply no longer understand each other. That’s why there’s only applause from customers who don’t want to change themselves. In all fairness, there is probably still a market for this group. But then you should concentrate transparently, strategically and honestly only on this group.

And that’s probably the bitter truth: many here have aged with Xojo. To be fair, the product has also continued to develop, and above all it has successfully circumnavigated many OS manufacturers’ pitfalls through no fault of their own. However, the “core” product has not been optimized, except for semantically questionable “improvements”. The developers’ work has not been optimized at all and over time we now have an inflexible product that is very difficult to measure against the competition and always seems too expensive compared to “free”.

If it weren’t for the layout manager, which suggests quick success for beginners, then there would probably be even fewer beginners. But since there is more and more competition here too, and the look and feel without plugins looks very outdated, I wonder how long this will remain a USP. It is still a selling point but definitely no longer unique.

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Even this one falls short when compared to SwiftUI. SwiftUI instantly changes the source code (called ‘single source of truth’) whenever a change to UI elements is made through the graphical (drag and drop) designer. Working with it is more transparent than Xojo’s UI designer and thus easier, especially for beginners.
Quite frankly, for a commercial product with Xojo’s price tag, it’s IDE is way behind Xcode and SwiftUI. Git integration in Xojo just falls short. The same may be true when compared to dev stacks for other platforms than macOS and iOS.

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Sure, the layout manager aged quite a bit too.

The layout is often not pixel perfect, or it’s pixel perfect where you don’t want it anymore in 2023, the output is outdated, the IDE clumsy. The MVC model is not fully implemented, at least not cleanly separated throughout.

With JavaFX you can use the SceneBuilder for example, or edit an FXML file and combine both approaches in a pleasant way. When developing an app with a lot of layout repetitions, the ability to edit a text file is always helpful.

A competing product, JFormDesigner, is in beta for JavaFX and since competition is always good, that’s nice. And that doesn’t mean JavaFx is dead either, even if the Inc. or developers want to convey it.

For web, there is Pinegrow if you want a layout designer that can simplify a lot, at least with complex layouts. However, it can only be combined with Xojo Web 2 in a roundabout way and with limitations, but of course with all other known web frameworks without any problems.

In this respect you are right, the layout manager can unfortunately only inspire beginners, the old hands know the showstopper there too.

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As one of the guys driving j-pro/fx to the market we know exactly: javafx is definitely not dead. It has around 150000 downloads per month and the amount of users is growing. With the javafx concept you can even choose the java virtual machine to use. Jformdesignerfx is coming definitely and as I was initiating the beginning of jfofmdesigner fx I know exactly why I was doing that.

By the way that is not a trivial task but at the end we will be able to design javafx with jformdesigner for all platforms including mobile and the web.

As that will be more comfortable than scebebuilder it will be the very best solution for Xojo users. Makes a soft landing in a new world.

At the end I will provide j-pro fx for web, desktop and mobile tutorials which will show how it can go. And that with upfront costs of just a few bucks per year.

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For the former and current Xojo users, less for the Inc. Interesting times ahead!

Constant dripping wears away the stone, this will be an eye opener for many.

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I thought JFormDesigner is for java swing and not for javafx

Swing:
https://www.formdev.com/jformdesigner/

JavaFX:
https://www.formdev.com/jformdesigner/javafx/

In January the development of jformdesigner for javafx started after I was asking Karl Tauber to do it while there is a need for it. Jformdesigner is an important component for the ecosystem of javafx.

thanks for the url… getting it now…

that is brilliant !!! so you are pretty powerful in java ecosystem

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Hello,

First of all thanks to @Garry for XUI Framework. I will download it and preserve it as currently I am not using Xojo for any commercial projects. And I don’t think I will use it in near future.

Anyways, I would like to bring to notice of all plugin developers and all other developers on this forum that there is an upcoming Basic IDE and compiler twinBasic which will give all Xojo plugin developers another opportunity to build powerful plugins and sell them commercially to tB community.

Of course it is a fresh product which is on verge of turning 1.0 and it is primarily for Windows. But in due course the developer is going to build and release cross platform version of tB which will run on all major platforms and also compile for all major platforms.

I would urge everyone to follow tB closely and do give it a try. It is very promising.

Just my 2 cents.

Yogi Yang