Hello! New to these forums, it’s nice to see an additional discussion forum for Xojo and other languages.
Pasting this from my post on the official forums, if anyone is interested in some paid Xojo work and has experience writing declares for Mac & Windows, please drop me a message. Thanks!
Looking for someone to create a cross-platform Xojo API for a third-party library. This will require writing declares and wrapper methods. I just don’t have time to get into the weeds of the library itself but need its high-level functionality for other projects. It’s the BASS library by Un4Seen.
If anyone is interested in working on this please reply here or shoot me a private message. My timeline is early 2024 but I need to put a budget together so I’m looking for interested parties and price quotes at the moment.
Not a very helpful comment, I know. However have you considered the possibility of doing this in a different tool?
The main reason is that you may have an easier time finding someone with the skills needed to do what you want. Most of the people who’re capable of doing this in Xojo were told they’re not wanted by the Xojo CEO. Myself included.
Thanks Sam. I’ve certainly considered it. However I’m working with a rather large project that already is written in Xojo, and I’m unhappy with the performance of the audio handling by MBS. I just need a more performant audio engine, and BASS is it. If I can get that ported to Xojo, I can easily drop it in as a replacement for the wealth of code that is already written in Xojo.
I am curious as to what you and others were told and what the rationale is behind it. Alienating the most knowledgeable portion of your user base? That seems nuts to me (I’m not doubting you of course, just surprised to hear it).
First of all, you should doubt me. I won’t take it offensively.
The rational was never explained to me, my guess is that Xojo’s been tanking for some time and API 2.0 was an idea that the CEO honestly believed was going to save the company, given their limited resources.
When people started to show that it was in fact a terrible decision on an epic scale, it was taken personally and that created resentment.
Which has lead to a project 1/3 of Xojo’s customer base walking.
I made multiple attempts to get them to take me on to fix problems with their Mac framework and bring their product up to date.
Finally I was told that Xojo is doing just fine without my help.
The CEO has confirmed that API 2.0 was a decision made without any data to support it.
Xojo employees (past and present) have confirmed their objections and illustration of the damage that API 2.0 would cause, was ignored.
There was no feasibility study or formal investigation into the impact it would have.
The only metric I can see as to why you would dump your most capable customers. As they progress, the bugs they find and features they request, become more complex, which requires more skilled employees, which come at a higher cost. Most of Xojo’s development staff are jack of all trades.
So looking at just that metric alone, it seems reasonable that abandoning capable customers and focusing on acquiring new customers, seems to be a winner.
The reason I didn’t doubt you is that you are a respected developer in the Xojo community and beyond, I personally am a customer of yours and your work is top notch, furthermore I recall many extremely helpful posts from you on the Xojo forums over the years. You’re someone who has shown their expertise and trustworthiness time and time again.
In regards to Xojo’s decisions, it’s interesting to hear how that all has played out. I have used RB/Xojo off-and-on over the last decade or so, and the switch to API 2 happened while I was away from the language, so I missed most of the apparent drama that surrounded it. When I returned to Xojo in a more serious capacity a couple of years ago, most of the painful changes were already done and learning the new syntax took the same effort that refreshing myself on the older syntax would have, so I made the migration relatively smoothly.
I can see how that would sour a lot of the long-term power users on the language though, and it seems as though it’s viewed as an illogical, emotional decision rather than one that was based on feedback or technical necessity.
As for your rebuffed offer to help, I’m sorry that didn’t work out. Especially for personal reasons, since I genuinely enjoy the language, I’d like to see it move in the right directions. However for your own sake perhaps it’s for the best. If all these things are true, then you may have found yourself stonewalled or otherwise left frustrated with changes you felt were necessary but were overruled by the powers that be.
Unfortunately it seems this is one of those “it is what it is” situations. Personally I still find value in the language even though it’s far from perfect. There are other tools that could probably get the job done with less frustrations, and in a field with so much viable competition Xojo will either right the ship or sink. I’m hoping for the former, but time will tell.
It may be worth evaluating if moving to another IDE and language will be a better solution on the long run (as a project manager I think risk management), instead of investing in wrappers and workarounds for Xojo.
I’ve actually worked in the past on music/pro audio projects of my own for many years in both XOJO and C++ so certainly have the kind of experience needed. One of the past APIs I integrated into XOJO - but by writing a XOJO plugin in fact as opposed to just doing API calls via declares - was for the ZPlane time/pitch stretch algorithms. I might be able to do this albeit with certain caveats time wise.
PM me to discuss more. I’ll also PM you with my email,
Hi Christian,
If you are still on the lookout to hire someone, I would be glad to help you out as I have worked extensively with Xojo in the past.
You can reach out to me on my email here
Colin
