and not as “OMG did you see the bone headed thing Xojo did …”
They really need a LOT more people saying NICE things about them
And no saying “oh what a great product” while under their breath they curse & swear
They need “evangelists”
But they need a product that warrants evangelism
And, as Bob said, I dont think they know how to go from where they are to a product that gets evangelized
I have my own thoughts but Geoff seems quite impervious to outside advice
It was really easy 5 years ago, but you tell them that the current path is doomed and you became “a troll” ROFL.
“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.” — Daniel Kahneman
A smart guy listens and can change his mind. An Idiot thinks that “he knows better”
guru troll 
Didn’t Geoff say that evangelists are Not their target audience?
Absolutely.
That’s the thing, he completely ignores others who WANT to help them. It is like he’s afraid that someone else might have a better idea.
And this is why Xojo is slowly committing suicide, and I’m not going to be there to watch anymore.
I shoulda said, I believe if Xojo does these things that I think will help, they might just help. However I don’t know how to get it through to Xojo that dismissing customers and insisting that things are exactly as they should, IS THE PROBLEM.
Every business has to adapt or die, as Norman put it, they’re simply rearranging the deck chairs after the Titanic has hit the ice berg.
I’ve heard several references made like “4D didn’t need that”, which makes me conclude that his mindset of what makes a development tool is stuck in the 80s and 90s and he still uses 4D as a benchmark. If that’s true, it is no wonder they’re taking on water quicker than they can bail it out.
I’m only a short way into SwiftUI, but you can use live data in the GUI preview, which is phenomenal, and slow, but hey. It is quicker than building the app, getting to the right position, finding something doesn’t align or text is clipped, etc etc, then making changes and testing again.
I’m currently in a love/hate relationship with SwiftUI, because it’s like HTML & CSS.
I think it was more “the people who are part of the beta program arent our target” meaning that, in many cases, their most enthusiastic, experienced, and probably expert users arent their target audience
Or something to that effect
As for subset of the beta program I’d say BS
You HAVE to be able to sign in to the forum to download the beta
From what I can see MOST betas have fewer than a couple hundred participants
One that far exceeded that was Android
It was obviously highly anticipated
But even then the participation rate seemed to plummet off a cliff
Not sure that doing more of the same is working swimmingly
Possibly a change of course is warranted
But that might be taken as an admission they were wrong - and that wont happen IMHO
And now she is leaving 
Yeah, that one fairly floored me.
Xojo manages to never miss their target, because they don’t have one
Wow. Reading through the comments from nearly 4 years ago you can appreciate how little has changed.
Xojo and Claris could team up for writing the ultimate ‘how to insult a customer’ guide.
OMG.
I thought Xojo could rock as an FM replacement but nope. So much wasted time…
I’d go back to FileMaker if the licensing was reasonable and WebDirect was pretty good.
Nope. They spent the last eight years building products no one asked for, no one wants. FileMaker itself did not get any love. It is a dinosaur with technology from the 1990s at its core. Too many shortcomings and limitations. A huge pile of technical debt, just like Xojo.
P.S. Claris has no clue how to fix FileMaker. They still think the marketing department can do product management.
Its sad that some of the things from your old blog posts STILL haunt them years later
Almost like you might actually have had a clue what your were talking about way back then
Interesting to read the 2019 blog post and reactions to it. It is spot on.
Funny coincidence: the same year Claris made it clear that they wanted to get rid of indie developers and eat their lunch.
I just re-read @bkeeney blog article and as everyone says, nothing changed in a positive way.
What I do feel changed is the tolerance before the CEO starting arguing, dismissing and even belittling customers, customers that Xojo NEEDS.
In all honesty, I fully expect the CEO to be behind Dana’s leaving. There’s three points that stick in my mind. One time, Geoff stated that Dana likes there to be some data behind everything they do, but there wasn’t any with API 2.0.
There was also a time when Geoff said that Dana had asked him to stop posting in the forums, but what he had to say was far more important.
Then there’s me. 3 times I offered to help and on the third time I got an e-mail from the CEO saying that Dana had asked him to contact me, to which he then NEVER followed up on my replies.
These points make me feel like Dana was battling the CEO and I suspect that in itself has taken a hefty toll, just like it has done with other former employees, AND CUSTOMERS!
and here we are again… spinning around the same issues. I hope everybody of us already jumped off the train heading straight to the cliff…
Honestly I see only one solution: Open Source everything on GitHub (though on Codeberg I would more like but this is a minor issue).
Eh, it’s not really that simple. For desktop multi-os development, it’s still an excellent choice in spite of its aging language. Windows UI could use some modernization too, but that’s being pursued.
For desktop single-os, it’s far less clear. Investing time into that platform’s native tools is probably a better choice.
But if you also need web and/or mobile, it’s absolutely clear. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that if these platforms are a priority for you, Xojo is a poor choice. The dated language and immature frameworks on those platforms are just not worth putting up with. There’s no benefit since you’ll still need 4 separate projects if your goal is desktop, web, and mobile. One code base my ass.
There’s plenty of things I should have done differently with Web Edition, but requiring a separate project is probably the biggest mistake. If that were figured out and solved back then, iOS and Android would have followed suit, and cross platform would be practical. You’d still have Xojo’s other issues, but Xojo would be much closer to the “one once deploy anywhere” goal.
Web Edition was REALLY cool. In my case it was about the bugs not being fixed. That’s not on you though…
Web 2 is a whole other issue which was enough for me to GTFO of Xojo world.
I didn’t say it wasn’t. I think it was pretty cutting edge for the time. I said there are things I wish had been done differently. Hindsight is 20/20, but I wish we had foreseen the consequences of separating the projects. I also wish more of its design involved the rest of the team. I lacked the experience to notice that it had become Geoff and I’s pet project. Had that been different, it’s possible that the WE would have used the new xojo framework, since that launched not too long after. Things like WebListBox.AddRow taking a ParamArray for the columns sounds great on paper, but it made the class different from the desktop version and that’s something maybe somebody else would have noticed and objected to. Maybe we should have introduced class interfaces to make the web and desktop controls conform wherever possible. It absolutely would have slowed things down, but we should have had better processes in place for its development, because WE really defined how Xojo would handle other platforms.
As for its ongoing development, some of that was on me. There were things we wanted to do with WE that the Real Studio IDE just wasn’t going to handle. The Xojo IDE wasn’t 100% motivated by WE… maybe something like 30%… but we knew that WE’s communication back and forth to the server was an issue. So we wanted to introduce new low-code options that we could build JavaScript from. Think of things like formatting / styling text fields for errors, or an animation panel for the WebAnimator. So a chunk of the Xojo IDE was about laying the foundation for future WE improvements. But that also took me off of WE itself. I had originally set a goal for a new control every release, again in the pursuit of cutting down traffic. A slideshow would perform much better if it we had developed it to run client side, rather than having to get all the instructions for the server. But besides a new control every release being unrealistic, it just didn’t happen at all.