Both Xojo and Apple seem intent on ignoring their experienced customers.
For instance, every year, I read dozens of posts from long time Mac users hoping that this year will be the year Apple does a “Snow Leopard” release, or brings back something they took away that made life easier.
I too wish that they’d take a chill pill and slow the fudge down. It would be nice if they’d just put attention on stability, reliable and not have Macs in a constant beta OS state. But it’s been over a decade now and I simply don’t see that changing until there is new leadership.
I participate in other forums and I also see several posts “I’ve owned an iPhone for years, got my first Mac, I love how it’s like my iPhone”, which after a short while turn into posts “How do I do this?”
“Apple removed that ability in version N of macOS”
“Why doesn’t this work?”
“It’s been broken for a several year, try sacrificing a goat and using the Mac upside down for 13 seconds, then close the lid, sing she’ll be coming round the mountain and then reboot it, while biting your tongue.”
“Does anyone at Apple test anything?”
“No, you pay to be QA tester, you’re supposed to file feedback with Apple for them to ignore”
“Why does my Mac keep getting this message?”
"You need to buy another brand new Mac and this time, spend the extra $200 to get $13 dollar worth of memory.
Basically I watch newbies enter with excitement, only to become disappointed and frustrated. Apple is a well established, household brand, they can get away with fleecing customers, because there’s enough of them to keep doing it for a long time. No-one knows about Xojo, therefore Xojo doesn’t have that luxury, at best, Xojo may be able to sustain their model for a few more years or decades, but until they change, they’re not going to grow and will always be at risk of disappearing.
There are also enough users who just don’t know what’s possible and don’t tax the OS. They turn the thing on and run their 1 or 2 apps, probably a browser and maybe Pages or Word or something to turn out a 1 page letter once or twice a year. Everything is saved on their desktop so they don’t use Finder to speak of. My 77 year old brother is a perfect example. I got him a MacBook Air a few years ago and all his perceived issues are with his ISP. I notice a bazillion things he would never register, such as how file sizes reported generally have nothing to do with the actual size, lol.
The reply that most irritates me is “Apple doesn’t read this forum. You should file a feedback. It’s not worth telling your issue here.”, as if the person who answers was proud that Apple doesn’t read the forum, when it could actually help if they did.
If I left the impression it had dropped to 0 then thats on me
Its not
But as you noted its way way way less than it was before
That really seemed to take hold when they created the MVP program as if the MVP’s would somehow fill that gap
Which hasn’t happened for whatever reasons
Having fewer pro’s using Xojo and willing to give back to the community after many years of our complaints not getting addressed, Web 2, API 2, being told we weren’t representative of the Xojo user base, etc, etc. The MVP program was a bandaid, IMO, after the limb was cut off.
The whole MVP program was probably 10 years too late to have any significant gain. Oh wait, that was around the ARBP timeframe. Wasted time and effort by everyone involved.
Enrolling users as alpha tester CAN work IF you incentivize people to do so
I’ve participated in a couple - got a free copy of the finished product for doing so AND reporting issues & bugs
But the Alpha was very closely managed by product managers who constantly asked about things that were supposed to be tested & commented on
Very well done IMHO
If you just say “Hey sign up and try it” without guidance or and incentive folks will just try out the things that matter to them and many areas wont ever get looked at
And some just wont because “Whats in it for me ?” comes up and if the answer is “You get to be part of the beta!” then the incentive is of no value
Xojo could extend people licenses by 3 months for being active issues reporters and by more closely managing their betas
But they dont
I hated the “Hey, we went live”, just in parallel of noticing that the test channel was closed but you exactly did know that you still discussed some issue a few hours earlier.
I’ve said for years that asking that ‘everything’ be tested is pretty much, “we don’t care what you test.” The only reason I joined the beta program was I got tired of new features not working as advertised - as in even the demo projects didn’t work. Also I found that many new ‘features’ were so crippled as to be useless to normal developers.
At least I could affect some change in the beta program - or so I thought. But 15 years of doing that and seeing the same crap in release after release. Not all releases were bad…but you know what I mean. After a while it’s just too much.
If they’d just set the “ship date” another week out, cut off fixes/tweaks/etc, and shipped that very LAST beta build as “the release” that wouldnt have been necessary
And NO ONE outside the beta group would have ever known the difference
It would have given that very last beta time to be reviewed & tested before “Hey look its live !”
yes, we (and billions of users) could test for eternity and there will be still bugs. But they could have said: okay folks, we need to pay the bills now and we think we are now in a good enough shape. so please concentrate now for 1-2 weeks on the following few topics only, this and that will not yet make it into the final release, etc, etc. But I never had the feeling there was a 2-way-trust in this programme. In contrary, I often thought that devs felt offended by some one finding a new bug
