Reinvented Clippit — 30 years later

Xojo
21

What do you believe how I felt when my customer wanted xojo. The clunky IDE and this dark age language from last breakfast with the dinosaurs :t_rex: :sauropod: :t_rex:. It was a shock for me at all. What makes angry is that I was right with it.

22

I don’t agree with you. I actually love the way Xojo works.

Even after hundreds of hours of searching, I haven’t found anything that excites me the same way. In fact, I haven’t even found anything I enjoy using.

Xojo is the only IDE that gives me a truly beautiful WYSIWYG editor - and that’s absolutely essential to me. I get nauseous whenever I have to position visual controls purely in code. I expect my layout in the IDE to look exactly like the final window.

And with Xojo, you really can build almost anything (let’s leave iOS and Android aside - after about three minutes there, I usually run into high-voltage electric fences I can’t cross).

But once you’ve learned the language, you have to learn twice as many workarounds.

Then you realize that every feature they add is implemented in the worst possible way - from a developer’s perspective.

And here’s the funniest part: when you find a bug - and my colleagues who code in PHP, Ruby, or C++ are genuinely impressed that I manage to find bugs in an entire programming language (something that’s never happened to them) - I find at least one bug a day.

But when you report it, you often get dismissed with “not reproducible,” even when a half-blind rabbit could reproduce it.

Then one day, you find a bug that actually gets accepted. You start checking the ticket 5–6 times a day to see if someone’s working on it. After two weeks, you check once a day. And after four weeks, you just stop reporting bugs altogether.

6 Likes
23

So a small problem we can solve. JavaFX comes with SceneBuilder, a nice drag and drop UI builder. You cn set the UI with CSS like you want it. And you can code with it without any problem. It’s integrated in IntelliJ with the JavaFX helper Plugin. And you can use it. Simply. With: no upfront cost. If you want to build mobile Aoos you may need Gluon mobile. Costs 500 per year. Obly Desktop: feel free for free.

I don’t know if this is the problem you wanna solve. Which platforms you are delivering for?

24

I closed all the still open Android bugs I have reported over the past 2-3 years (ever since Android first shipped) as my client has moved on to something else as they got tired of waiting for Xojo to get their shit together on Android

Fortunately I’m working on that implementation as well and not touching Xojo for it

When the next release ships I’ll probably try the project in that but I expect, like every other one, I’ll find something fatal in the first 5-10 minutes
Its been that way for EVERY single release

2 Likes
25

Android in Xojo is something like a pre-alpha.

It’s for hobby developers who just want to play around with something until dinner is ready.

But I honestly don’t believe there will ever be a usable way to build Android apps with Xojo in my lifetime.

They thought they could create something like that, but it’s obvious they don’t even have the slightest idea how to actually make it work.

26

What a waste of resources. With their developer staff they should reduce the number of targets and try and be at least ‘decent’ on the ones they keep around. Desktop/Console and Web seem decent enough and could use a lot of love as well as the IDE in general.

3 Likes
27

I’ve not tested that

But css is web, not Desktop.

Web on FreeBSD, Konsole on FreeBSD, Windows, Mac

Mobile was planned, but Xojo’s timeline took so long that by the time they finally delivered the platform, I had already forgotten what I originally wanted to build.

28

For mine it is literally

Too little too late

and we’re using something else
perfect ? No
functional ? Yes
Fewer bugs ? definitely

https://tracker.xojo.com/xojoinc/xojo/-/issues/?sort=updated_desc&state=closed&author_username=normanpalardy&label_name[]=Android&first_page_size=100

1 Like
29

For console it depends what you do in this apps…Java or rust. Javafx for desktop uses css for gui, codenameone uses css for mobile. It is not web.

30

This week it will be 4 YEARS of Android in Beta

And the app, reasonably simple, that clients wanted to make still experiences issues on EVERY single release since

Thats why clients & I gave up

EDIT Still Beta After All These Years

5 Likes
31

Alyssa was angry because “confidential information must be talked in the Texter channel”.

She do not takes time to check that I am not there (but she was not alone, I had a bad comment because I disclosed a discovery about Xojo here).

She asked me to remove the emerald name (yes, the other green stone) entry from TOF, then told me they remove the entry: I read these mail some days after they were sent.

I could talk about this subject far longer, but it is better for my health to stop now.

Hint: the documentation is very poor. If this AI is built using the same thinking… poor users. (

1 Like
32 
Xojo Jade is an AI coding assistant feature introduced in Xojo 2025r3. It is designed to assist with coding in the Xojo IDE, helping developers write and improve code more efficiently. This feature was added as part of an update that included various bug fixes and new capabilities for the IDE and framework, making Xojo development more productive with AI assistance integrated directly into the environment.​

In addition, Xojo has recreated a Clippit-like assistant named "Jade," reminiscent of the old Microsoft Clippit agent from 1996, but updated for modern use. This shows that the Jade assistant not only provides coding help but has a playful design concept inspired by a well-known animated assistant from the past.​

Therefore, Xojo Jade primarily refers to an AI-powered coding assistant embedded in the Xojo IDE starting with the 2025r3 release, designed to enhance developer productivity by offering intelligent code suggestions and support directly within the development environment.

There you go folks, and not a DAMN thing Alyssa or Xojo can say about THIS posting!

3 Likes
33

I hope Alyssa is the next one to leave and I hope it’s about cash flow. Karma for her and Dana’s actions.

2 Likes
34

It’s mentioned on this public page: https://documentation.xojo.com/resources/release_notes/2025r3.html

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1 Like
35

WTF, they recreated the most hated part of that feature? :rofl: :rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:

2 Likes
36

nobody said they were smart now did they?

3 Likes
37

Honestly, I think this is a perfect name.

Without having a fully integrated Agent (i.e. VSCode and others, I’m sure) it’s going to pale in comparison. Could it be useful? I suppose, but not nearly as useful as telling the IDE to “Implement x, y, and z and then test for compile errors, create unit tests for edge cases, and then determine unit test coverage”. These are all things I’m doing daily with VSCode.

All the time they’ve spent dinking with Android they could have made serious incremental IDE upgrades that could have made this a much lighter ask. But then we get back to very old arguments.

5 Likes
38

ja as always, too late, too little and in most cases with errors and youhave to wait for v2 or v3

3 Likes
39

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2 Likes
40

To speak truths: the IDE of XoJo is crap. It is clunky. Old. The Code Completion is…not to think about. The AI integration…we will see but I guess that they will not reach CoPilot from Github or Jetbrains AI. The Sytem is odd and old. Their Idea of Software is dead. Their Idea of Support is..let’s not speak about. What shall I say? Did anybody is really waiting for the prfect world with a perfect XoJo??