welcome to the club…
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Geoff should step down too.
Since Xojo is a private company there’s zero chance that would happen.
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There are notes from a former Xojo Evangelist on here that refer to a serious shift in focus to new users
It was a shift that had gradually started some time before but was “official” later (about 2017 I believe)
And its persisted since then
And gotten worse
there really doesn’t have to be “all or nothing” with new users. It seems more grifty than a genuine pivot
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I agree. ALL users need stable dev tools.
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VB6 is a great example
Sure it got lots of newbies into software dev
And lots of crap got written
But LOTS of quite professional software did as well
And MS didnt sacrifice pro user capabilities to get more newbies
Nor sacrifice newbie capabilities for Pros
AND they had a HUGE vibrant add-on market
And then they decided to make VB a “pro tool” and moved it to .Net
The rest is history
They no longer really have a newbie oriented tool
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2 companies, 2 different stupid directions 
Well, to be fair, VB6 was showing its age and to modernize it probably would have been a completely rewrite anyway. VB6 had no inheritance, threading and concurrency was non-existent, and lacked a lot of modern language features. But it took beginners AND pro’s seriously and you could pretty much do whatever you needed given the huge ecosystem it had. And a lot of users that could, and would, help on various forums and websites.
Just the ability to properly protect add-ons and monetize them for the VB6 3rd party developers was huge for adoption. Early on I thought that was a huge opportunity for Xojo that’s been wasted. But then I don’t think Geoff really understood, or wanted, to have a big 3rd party ecosystem.
How many years have they kicked the Xojo Libraries project down the road? I’d have to say at least 10 years but time has no meaning since covid. And I’d lay good money down that they didn’t even think about a way to protect and monetize it for developers so that if you had a shop with 10 Xojo developers they’d need to buy 10 licenses. So it’ll be a half-assed solution that doesn’t enhance 3rd party developers investment. Might (maybe) help Xojo but not help add-on makers much (if at all).
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Oh sure
VB6 was definitely not perfect
But as you note it took beginners AND pro’s seriously
Wrote some huge systems in VB6
Which was when I learned what its limits were in terms of globals. method names, windows etc 
But we made it work reliably and won several awards for our apps
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One made an absolute SHIT TON of money and spawned huge industries
The other …
nuff said
Indeed. On the big accounting app I worked on we had to start refactoring at one point because we reached limit of items the project could create (32,768). That was a ‘fun’ project in my regards. That was 15+ years ago and Xojo still doesn’t have grids that could compete with what we used then.
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And therein lies one of my biggest issues with Xojo. They never took the pro’s seriously enough to address their needs in any meaningful way.
The reporting system was put in begrudgingly when enough people bitched about it and since then it’s barely been updated and certainly not improved in any meaningful/useful way. Hence why Shorts was created. Report preview. Dynamic reporting. Runtime report variables. Subreports, etc.
I can’t wait to see how bad the grid they’ve been working on for years works. I’m sure it will be slow with large numbers of rows or be hamstrung in some crucial way that’ll make it useless for pro use.
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the industry is full of examples how closed-source companies built something new and teared down all bridges behind them… xojo is not different… it will end up… maybe this is the sole intention by geoff: to keep the bait running till his retirement
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Just like DBKit.
I begged for a kick ass replacement for control binding to help bring FileMaker devs to Xojo. From what I read, it’s nothing like what I suggested.
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that’s everyones business plan now it seems.
It’s been a while since I looked at it but when I did I saw the flaws within a minute. It has no concept of record locking and when I brought that up I was told, by Geoff, the database plugins do that. After I pushed back that they, in fact, do not do that record locking became ‘an advanced topic’.
Nothing I’ve seen in the forums since makes me believe that DBKit will ever be anything other than a curiosity and time waster for beginners looking for a shortcut. Another wasted opportunity for Xojo that could boost their reputation and maybe get a few more users. But then Geoff still thinks his 4D training experience (from 20+ years ago) makes him a database expert.
Oh, but I did see that DBKit was going to get a rewrite. Just you wait! Two years from now DBKit2 will be released as a beta again only to wallow in buggy and useless code.
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And a huge chunk of it gets renamed so you cant actually move any code forward from DBKit1
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I thought Xojo was “Cross Platform” 
Desktop is as good as Xojo is at x-platform
But yes there are differences
The IDE itself is, or was and probably still is, littered with #if target because its not perfectly the same x-platform
Some of this is just that there are leaky abstractions and so platform differences leak out into the code people have to write
Something I believe is a result of using native controls and each platforms controls respond in slightly different order when an event happens
Not saying its right but its also not impossible to deal with
It just does contribute to a less than perfect cross platform situation
Could they do a better job ?
Possibly
Will they ?
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