Sometimes good things have to come to an end

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… time to say goodbye publicly on my blog and thank you for the fish.

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This is a sad day for the community while you are one of the most active members there. Not anymore asI could read you where walking the same wayI had to walk.

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Thank you, but I don’t overestimate neither myself nor tools. And humans are replaceable as much as tools are. Not having used the new Xojo release for quite some time, I can anyhow now not contribute at all.

All I can contribute is that my last active Intranet Web 2 solution for one customer doesn’t compile with the latest releases. Funny enough year old Swift code still compiles with the latest XCode on Ventura. I had developed a Wordpress Plugin in php which I did not maintain for years, but still worked many wordpress releases later. Actually it stopped working when flickr was sold and changed the API :slight_smile:

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@Jeannot, your blog post is an excellent summary of the current situation.

Thank you for your contributions and effort to move things at Xojo!

I fully agree with your assessment: Xojo is in no way a low-code platform, whatever their marketing may spin about. It is not even RAD, considering all the workarounds necessary because of poor product quality.

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Thank you Thorsten.

The “funny” thing is, that in times where Xojo (or Realbasic) was RAD (at least more than today). I bet a user would have been reprimanded for putting Xojo in the “low-code” corner.

I made the mistake of watching too long and like so many hoped. But hope is a bad advisor.

The earth will keep turning, everyone makes mistakes, only stupid people always make the same mistakes.

I am sure that many users will still have fun creating small tools with Xojo, but now - in my opinion - the price is no longer right. There are just too many free alternatives out there. Unfortunately, I also believe that every passionate developer gets caught in a catch-22 situation at some point.

It’s human that it’s only at this point that one realizes what lip service and marketing is, and what serious collaboration is.

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I made a rough estimate and concluded that it will take me as much time to learn Swift as learning Xojo with investment in workarounds. Easy choice.
I would have been ok with paying a Xojo license every year, but NOT for what is delivered.

As a former low-code developer I am pretty sure their strategy won’t cut with those folks.

The jack-of-all-trades strategy is already hard to implement successfully and follow through for organisations with larger resources.

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Swift is wonderful, if you only need Apple, really wonderful.

I embraced it (privately) from day one. Unfortunately, I needed Windows (which I never really liked) for my customers.

Web was then the logical conclusion for me, as most of my apps can either run as a password protected internet solution or as an intranet solution. Web 1 never impressed me too much, as I didn’t like the concept of translating desktop 1:1 to web, when small screens were on the rise.

Web2 sounded promising, and it isn’t too bad. But the consistent ping pong “bug, bug solved, bug re-appears” is just not a sustainable way to build your business upon. The use of outdated libraries is certainly a big security concern to me. The lack of not being able to easily connect to tons of free libraries on the net is yet another downside. Why should I re-invent the wheel?

If I will need a complex desktop UI in future, I will most likely use JAVA. Personally I believe that the benefit of an often missing UI Designer in other languages is overestimated. It is very nice to have one (and you can have one for JAVA for instance), but not a show stopper at all, if you have to do it manually.

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olivierV posted an excellent summary of how Xojo’s operatives spun up their reality distortion field in order to abscond from responsibility:
https://forum.xojo.com/t/why-use-web-2-0/63239/82

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Geoff now wants a zoom call to talk peeps off the ledge blaming the text format that has exposed how he never planned to fix Web 1.0 bugs.

It would be good to get a transcript of what he says. Geoff will try using his Jedi mind trick to make everyone think all is well.

In addition he demands that you contact him to join the call instead of providing the link to minimize the audience…

Geoff seems to know what he’s done…

AND if folks are still unhappy he’ll just ban them.

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Also, I think I read that Web 1.0 development was put on hold to instead spend time on Web 2.0. So Web 1.0 was killed off welllllll before Web 2.0 shipped.

Geoff just killed Web 1.0 with no concern for customers. If he cared, there would be a way to migrate…

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Can one do it without a UI designer … back in the day I designed sort of GUI’s on a VT-100 terminal all in code …

But IMO it makes the actual UI design phase harder and takes (at least for me) at lot longer to get to testing and tweaking/optimizing end user usability…

In my experience, in many cases the UI is one of the most complex part of an app. For myself, coding desktop apps without a UI designer, while possible, is not practical.

  • Karen
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We will see what it does to the people. Many of them already left the Xojo World and will not come back. I think that is sign enough.

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I am not his target audience any longer, so I don’t feel addressed. I don’t take part in any calls without an agenda anyway, which is why I’ve never been seen attending a virtual Xojo meeting.

Unlike Geoff, I am a very big fan of written correspondence. Although it takes more time, it remains clear to posterity that a clear position has been taken and what position that was.

Geoff is one of those CEOs who are reluctant to commit themselves in writing. I can understand that too, because a virtual meeting or a phone call is simply safer if you have made contradictory statements in the past. Especially if you don’t plan to change your own behavior.

Above all, you can verbally manipulate and silence people in a much more subtle way. I know many who are just as dissatisfied, but keep their mouths shut, also out of sheer fear that, in the worst case, their old licenses would no longer work.

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could be happened that he will decide to do that but that could be followed by a trial. While he has to provide the license. And I don’t think he will really do that.

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Absolutely, it is always nice to have one. JAVA has many. Other languages, even experimental ones have some, or they have at least tools, to get you to easily create a boilerplate.

There are so many options out. All of the above tools are creating code, which you can change either in the tool, or in the code. But I agree that Xojo has for cross development on desktop still a helpful IDE for someone who wants to drag&drop controls. Not true for Xojo Web 2 though, as it is only close to WYSIWYG but not 100 percent accurate.

Edit for Java: I only mentioned one option of many.

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I said that a couple of times :thinking:

That was the original reason reason I didnt renew my PRO license and changed it for desktop. At least the last couple years of releases with web1 had almost no fixes or improvements at all.

So, yes, the working WEB1 was abandoned like 5 years ago in favor to the WEB2 that it is getting to its half baked state this year.

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Not to forget for JavaFX there is Scenebuiler which is for free and Netbeans has a Swing UI Designer for free implemented, Eclipse also

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yup, I could continue that list for quite a while.

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Really sad, this ‘let’s talk in private’ trick stinks.

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His ploy is Simple.

  1. Geoff : I want to clear the air with a Zoom call next Tuesday… contact me for an invite
  2. Everyone : nah, I’m not going to waste my time with his bullshit rhetoric…
  3. Geoff : Well I attempted to respond, but nobody contacted me. [I WIN!!!]
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