Is it really safer to buy from a big name? (Xojo Blog)

Xojo
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“Xojo has been around since 1998 and has outlived many other development tools and platforms. Some of which come to mind are: Visual Basic 6, Metrowerks CodeWarrior, and (now) Microsoft Visual Studio for Mac.”

WTF?

VB6 had MANY years of extended support, fixing bugs for the IDE with service packs for YEARS. The runtime is still under support more than 2 decades later with compatibility with windows 11.

But they are “better” than this by KILING Web1

  • Without warning
  • Without any kind of extended support (BUG FIXES)
  • Without a real way to open a proyect in web 2 and just work
  • Releasing web 2 halfbaked and filled with bugs

Are they serious??? :unamused:

Changing the printing sistem, the graphics on windows, API2. How can they brag to be “the same” tool if the users need to REWRITE their apps now and then just because xojo is unable to mantain a real framework and do the changes internally?

Barelly existing seems to be enough for a mediocre CEO…

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  1. VS was FREE not 89, not 299, not 399, not 799, not 1999
    100% FREE

  2. it IS open source so MS is NOT the only vendor of .Net tools for macOS

  3. yeah the shitty announcement say “use VS on a Windows VM on your Mac” … bleach but they’re far from the only tool vendor that suggests this
    I think its a strange thing to say “we have a cross platform framework but you have to work on Windows to create for all platforms”

my quick 2 cents on Xojo’s post
https://www.great-white-software.com/blog/2023/08/31/c-on-the-mac/

Clearly, they have the resources so this is a decision about Microsoft’s focus and priorities, things that Big Companies change all the time.

Api 1, Xojo framework, Web 1, API 2 … seems VERY similar here

Google drops products (or drastically changes them) often.

Web 1 dropped with no possible support etc …

In the development world, Apple killed off their Carbon OS framework in favor of Cocoa after years of telling developers the two would co-exist.

After nearly a DECADE of telling them “we changed our mind you should move to Cocoa”

A small company like Xojo focuses entirely on their product. It gets all their attention.

This doesnt make it immune to random changes that force you to rewrite/revise everything
Web 1 for instance

I only bring these up to point out that, even with the big names, there are still risks.

Several risk that dont exist with a well known tool, language, company

  • where can I find people who know this tool/language ?
  • is this company viable or are they going to go out of business ?
  • are there any books & references about it ?

So what can Xojo do for you? Xojo’s goal is to make programming easier, allowing you to get software made faster. Xojo saves you time and money.

Except yo0u need many plugins, come as expensive as Xojo itself, in order to make up for ALL the things Xojo doesnt support
Professional Graphs ? PDF’s ? Ability to read and write MS Office documents ?
The list of things Xojo doesnt do, or has serious flaws in, is sufficiently large

Xojo lets you do All The Things without having to deal with a bunch of different complex tools and technologies. Xojo can give you the speed and power of low-code tools without all the limitations.

This claim is just marketing BS
Once you get beyond a basic app you need to hack JS & CSS for web apps, need to use declares to access proper OS level functionality, or just to use many basic things in the case of iOS, or add several plugins to do things users expect

Forcing these tools to go through an overworked IT department is slow and expensive.

This has NOTHING to do with WHICH tool you use
This is an organizational issue
I HAVE worked in several companies that did not centralize all IT and had a ton of flexibility to quickly design & deliver tools for the business
Encouraging “skunk works” can, in some cases, be MUCH more expensive
I worked in one where excel was used to develop a tool that then, because of a lack of auditability, resulted in the company losing millions in a single month

We’ve made our share of mistakes, such as our transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 which was not as smooth as we had hoped it would be

Transition ? There was NO transition. It was “Web 1 is dead all Hal web 2” with NO ability to transition a project from Web 1 to web 2

You can try Xojo for free today. Licensing is available for as low as $399 per user (even lower when purchased in bulk).

Get Rider, and EVERY JetBrains IDE for every language etc + a pile of other useful tools for less

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Vscode and jetbrains rider are still around and that amputated visual studio was not more than vscode so no alarm needed.

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A few months ago I started rewriting my stuff in C# and used Visual Studio for Mac for a bit, but as soon as I tried Rider I couldn’t believe how much better it was. On a side note, every time I have to go back to do a bug fix in Xojo I can’t believe how childlike that IDE is.

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Xojo behaves like a scavenger. Web1, API1?
Shameless marketing that exposes Xojo Inc’s desperation.

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I bothers me they understate the type & nature of the issues they’ve imposed on their users

Web 1 to Web 2 wasnt a “transition”
It was an abrupt HALT of all support for Web 1
And NO assistance moving projects from Web 1 to Web 2
Thats not a transition
MS did that “transition” better with at least some tools to move VB 6 to VB.Net
That still sucked but at least there was some effort to transition

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German saying: ist der Ruf erst ruiniert, lebt es sich gänzlich ungeniert.

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Literally so much wrong with their blog post I don’t know where to start… :rofl:

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Just think about their post in terms of ANY other product

Cars ? Want one from a company that is so small they can’t afford proper insurance institute testing or engineers to design it ? And cant produce proper documentation for mechanics to fix it ?

Would you hire some 2 person company to build your brand new house* ?
And let them handle all plumbing, electrical, design & construction “in house” ? (and I dont mean just acting as general contractor - I mean literally THEY do all the plumbing, wiring, HVAC, etc)
Whats the chances they are expert in all those areas ?
Or any of them ?

I’m not poo pooing “small” companies but there is a size where it’s not something you or I would likely rely on.
Sure start ups are tiny when they start - but they grow quickly out of that
Xojo’s a 25+ year old “startup”
Or a flower boutique where several artists come in & work sort of on “company priorities”, perhaps the huge wedding coming up in a few days, but they’re all just doing their own thing in reality.

*locally most construction firms are general contractors and do only some aspects of the overall work
They sub contract out to experts those things they do not have in house talent for
No idea how it is in the USA

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Makes it hard to justify using Xojo at all in a business setting…

  • Karen
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I dont entirely disagree with using it to prototype something

But I’ll put on my “IT gatekeepers” hat here
IF its business critical it better be auditable for correctness (excel sucks at this and I did work at a company that lost $40 million one month because of it)

And if its HARD to justify it then maybe its NOT the right tool

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And there is yet another player in here too

so the fact that C#, etc are open sourced helps

there may yet be others

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Yeah I read the announcement of MSFT discontinuing VS Mac with incredulity today. It was just getting on parity with the Windows version, they’ve been investing in it heavily, many of us prefer Visual Studio to VS Code … and now this. I think it just boils down to they don’t have Mac expertise and see it as a money hole. Some pointy-haired one figured why have 2 Mac IDEs?

I saw this coming from miles away though. I gave up on the old version of VS Mac and went to JetBrains Ryder a couple of years ago. I figured I’d look at Visual Studio Mac again if they ever got their shit together; they never did.

As for Xojo’s ridiculous assertions … I’m not even going to bother, lol.

I think probably for my personal projects I’ll standardize on Ryder for both Mac and (if I need it) Windows, going forward. All that’s on hold for now anyway.

As an aside, professionally I am working on a Windows Server 2022 VM at Azure, using Visual Studio 2022 … I wanted to do a simple thing: add a private Git repository for the VM’s Visual Studio instance to push to – preferably all under my client’s account. Appears to be no way to do it so I signed up for a free 30 day trial on my own personal M$FT account … it then took me 2 hours of trial and error to get it working with the VM and Visual Studio. Something involving Oauth between Azure Pipelines and Git, generating a password and entering it in a window hiding behind another window, etc, etc … as usual I was doing 4 things at once and not sure which one(s) actually worked but I pushed the last 6 months of commits to the new repo in the end and now I can have a 2nd person working with me.

Things should not be this much of a struggle, regardless if it’s MSFT or Xojo. I’m not convinced any of them understand that. It certainly doesn’t embarrass them! I even called the support # at devops.azure.com and they had no answers, requested that someone on the VM team call me and they never did. And just as well because it looks like it was just a 3rd party sales company anyway that also would probably not know what they were talking about.

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Amen to that. While I can’t say I’m a huge fan of VSCode it is light years ahead of Xojo in terms of usability, expandability and reliability (I’ve never had it crash on me and it’s never compiled obsolete code). And we have some developers using GoLand and like it even more.

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That is a complete and utter lie. If this was the 90s and the alternative for the Mac was CodeWarrior I’d agree, but this isn’t and in many cases making Mac apps is quicker and easier in Swift than in Xojo. Not to mention that Xcode is FREE.

Are you fucking kidding me? This is another downright lie.

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At least one individual at the green company has a loooooooooong nose.

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Just had time read Xojo’s blog post in full. Lies and falsehoods galore.

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799 per year and limited capabilities for Java Programmers. It is not the most intelligent way. We can already share all code between all platforms in Java for example. And also in C#, C++ and so on. There is a capability set of IDE’s from Jetbrains, Netbeans and Co. No need for a new 799 IDE on the market. It is far away from a market correct pricing with telling the people of “wow” capabilities which all others have for free. I guess it is worth to take a look on an All Products Pack of Jetbrans, VsCode and so on. Only my opinion.

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Sometimes I believe he wants to tease. I haven’t to bother with any platform stuffs when programming in java I can release on macOS, Windows, Linux, IOS, Android, Rios on MCU and can reuse in the most cases all my code without any fuzzy stuff like Xojo provides for XPLAT programming. I am sorry but reading this makes me a bit nervous. Do I have the capabilities really or did I missed some points where I have learned over the time that Xojo especially hasn’t even one of this features in real and always only half of this? May be that I am too crazy but I can see what is going on. I haven’t the time for Workaround even over simplest stuffs like I have to with Xjo every day when working with it.

And no, Xojo can’t give you more power of low code tools. To learn Xojo costs the same amount of work learning Java, C++ or C#. I can’t get this argumentation. It is another fact which catches: the people believed in the simpleness while they got a system what decides how a Page is shown and while it is so they did not have to learn in the beginning. They had to do that later while learning that it was the wrong way like explicit instance pages. But the people having the Idea: oh yea that is simple while everybody said it is simple. I have a small news: it is not. It is the same way complex but in another wise. Not having to bother with Bugs, workarounds and stuffs and with a not available ecosystem is the one and only situation.

And there is one more: if they quit Business your License will die. It is a yearly license running up their license Server, it is not owned by you but the company. Gives the chance that all of it will die. Same with Xojo at the end while you can’t really transfer licenses. Look on the issue with offline license handling when using 2019R32 and 2023R1. Have fun to anylyze how often that switching works fully offline without internet connection.

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Those quotes make it look like I said that :stuck_out_tongue: