Say yes to Xojo

I watched the Android teaser today.

<conspiracyTheory> The progressbar on the app shows 50% of the project is done,  still a long way to go until Xojo for Android is delivered </conspiracyTheory>

Android is no. 7 on the road map, I guess it will not be delivered this year :frowning:

I think it really depends on what Apple announces at WWDC and how long of a transition period it is. Seems like every year Apple announces some major change in June that get released in September and Xojo is always playing catchup.

I personally donā€™t expect Android to be released this year. Itā€™s their burden to prove me wrong.

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My thought is how many people are going to use it in anger and how few of them are willing to pay extra to compile it. Blehhhhhh.

Last night I found this review. Seems the people that reviewed it are satisfied.

https://www.g2.com/products/xojo/reviews#survey-response-1816843

Take these with a grain of salt

This is one where dana asked people on the forums to go post reviews

There are/were others where you got a 10% discount for a review :stuck_out_tongue:

And there are these reviews

Business partner of the vendor or vendorā€™s competitor, not included in G2 scores.

Oh I did, in fact with a big chunk of salt.

I usually create my own conspiracy theories and actually wondered if they were offered anything for writing the reviews.

I only looked at a couple of the posts where Dana asked people to post reviews & there was one with a 10% discount for writing one. Dont know if it had to be a favourable review or just any review

I was glad to read the positive reviews none the less. I really wish Xojo all the best.

Yeah, my review is on there. I didnā€™t leave my name.

So those are fair and honest reviews. Good to know

I think you have break the reviews between the politics of the app and the product itself. For example, I really do like the product, I just am not a fan of all the politics that go with it. If I am going to invest time in a creating an app and spending god knows how many hours making it, I am looking for confidence of the company to continue in the years to come.

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True. Perhaps this is the reason I have been looking for good knews, trying to keep the confidence in Xojo up.

Exactly
Xojo the tool vs Xojo the company

As someone who has developed in FileMaker for the past 10 years I am looking for a new tool to enhance my offering to customers. Xojo looked like a great fit for my needs - the licensing costs of FileMaker make it prohibitive for certain customers and I really hate the scripting element of FileMaker with context sensitive requirements.

Having read this forum though I detect a serious level of discontent with the company, more so than the product.

Before I invest my hard earned cash I would like to understand a little more of where these frustrations originate from - I see long term users like BKeeney, Tim Dietrich, Dave and others either leaving the platform entirely or looking to use new tools and it concerns me.

What is the problem exactly?

I came to Xojo from Filemaker too (last year)

The tool is excellent, itā€™s free to download and test so you can keep your hard earned cash in your bank until you need to deploy if you want.

There are always people that are not happy with things in life, itā€™s a constant no matter what the company, even companies like Apple have a percentage of detractors.

Download the free Xojo for your platform and take the plunge, youā€™ll love it, itā€™s a fantastic product with a great community behind it.

I donā€™t know others, but my claims are stability, completeness and usability of some features.

Some bugs takes months to be squashed, important feature requests takes years.

The intensity increased last year because the language changed a lot without real gains (mostly ā€œrenamingā€ methods) and people got frustrated because the ā€œbreakā€ of legacy code maintainability.

That made me go away? No. I even re-upgraded my license this year buying a new Pro license as I downgraded it last year buying a Desktop one. Weird, not?

You must play with the tool. Some people donā€™t even notice any problem. Specially newcomers starting with fresh new code without legacy code to maintain.

As for ā€œwatching other toolsā€ itā€™s the history of my life, I always did it, Iā€™ll always do it. Keep me or Iā€™ll leave. I also use other tools, but I still am a Xojo user.

Thanks Rod - Iā€™ve been having a play around for the past two weeks. I really like the product and prefer writing code to the scripting in FileMaker. Obviously not quite as straight forward to create a data bound solution but so far Iā€™m really loving it.

My concern is around the general feeling of discontent Iā€™ve detected and the fact that Xojo havenā€™t shipped a single update in 2020. I really like the look of Web2.0 - itā€™s definitely the deployment platform I see myself using over the next few years. Iā€™ve been looking for a tool to do web apps for quite some time have trialled many others

Paying users have access to the closed Test Group. The Web 2.0 is being developed and tested there. People there know why it wasnā€™t shipped yet, two words: huge changes.

Huge changes over Web1.0 or huge changes to the development they were expecting to deliver at the start of the project ?

The projects that I work with are mostly graphical and electronic on Windows and Unix. Problems with graphics on Windows and Xojo have been poor and have decreased. I can create a graphical program on C++, C#, javascript, or another language that is unoptimized on Windows and the program will always be slower with Xojo. Usually Xojo is approximately 100 x slower.

Xojo does not have access to DirectX, and modern OpenGL, or Vulkan, although it used to have DirectX and has version 1.3 of OpenGL from August 2001 (19 years old). The Xojo language or compiler, or something is highly hampered for graphics.

Xojo does have the ability to work with Linux, and again the language is hampered. Programming with the Xojo IDE is unoptomized and unstable, as it requires a frequent reboot at a rate of a couple of times per hour with Ubuntu.

Raspberry Pi was largely using wiringPi for electronic work, and graphics for Xojo are poor, as the controls are missing, or drawn incorrectly.

Yes, every one of these issues can have a plugin written to increase performance. When this is standard with other languages, and performance is much higher for a greatly lower price (often free), then users often see that Xojo is not growing.

Changing the language from Xojo API1 to API2 has also caused angst among members, as working programs and code for the last 15 years or so has become somewhat obsolete. Yes, you can rewrite 15 years of everyones code to make it work, and without automatically making changes, now most modifications are manually completed.

I have only had one minor call for porting an existing application from Windows to Apple in 30 years, so I canā€™t comment on this platform.

There is much more that can be said, and this is a good start. This is not to be construed as a rant, its just an accumulation of frustration amongst people who have left the Xojo platform. I would like to see Xojo do better, and will continue to use other tools until Xojo can determine the direction the corporation and language want to go.

More can be said, and has been said in the past, and I am just summarizing some of the points from dedicated Xojo followers to have moved to other platforms.