Thoughts on this web page

I found the API to dismount and/or eject external drives. However I really wanted to reproduce the problem locally as I have the same Mac as you. I even went as far as to buy a Samsung External SSD to test with. However no matter what I tried, I couldn’t reproduce it.

Well… I’m on the verge of replacing my ancient TBD, it died last week, but after 24 hours of no power, it came back alive. I’m looking at a Acer XR383 display. I’m a little nervous as I can’t find much information on Mac connectivity and we only get 7 days no-questions asked return window here in Taiwan (unless you buy from CostCo, which has 90 days but currently all they sell are some Samsung displays).

If I have problems with that display, I will certain look into what I can do, if anything… Don’t forget that iPhones which Macs now basically are, don’t need external displays…

At this point, I honestly don’t see anything changing. My honest to god guess is the CEO looks at the sales numbers and bases most decisions on that, until he get the bestest idea in the world, our customers would love to re-write their apps and those that don’t want to, will anyway.

Exactly and Xojo raising their prices can’t be helping them. IMHO, they really need to shift direction.

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Sadly SO many topics drift off into "omg xojo could have … " land and never come back :slight_smile:
I suppose thats circumstances and partially the audience we have BUT …

Let drag this back on topic shall we ?

TBH I bet that this might actually have helped me diagnose why my machine behaved the way it did
And in the process killed drives
It would wake & remount the drives
Some time later sleep & fail to dismount them

I do like the idea of a free trial :slight_smile:
Maybe 30 days to really “set the hook” so to speak ?
Once folks get used to having something (that seems to take a bit longer) then the willingness to pay for it goes up
At least for me it does.

I think I read system logs to see it sleep, wake, sleep, wake, etc
That was fugly

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Hold on a minute. There is a drive related issue that some MX owners experience, again, I’ve not been able to reproduce, but I wonder it that also contributed to your drive deaths. After a sleep, the drives would spin up, spin down, spin up, spin down over and over until you rebooted the Mac.

I did try to help a couple of customers as best I could, Sleep Aid can run shell scripts when the screen goes to sleep and again with the Mac wakes from sleep. So I tried to reset the drive spin down period to various intervals. Even disabling the spin down period, so the drive remains running, but nothing I could think of helped.

In this situation, I do think that both Apple and Xojo have the same problem. They’re not focused on the customer experience. Only profits.

My experience with that, since at least Mac OS Big Sur, is that this setting does nothing. I have 13 external disks sitting on my desk (various brands, models and capacities; all USB2 or USB3, some connected to different hubs); although my system setting has always been to not suspend hard disk when idle (one of the first settings I check when installing an OS), none of these disks honours the setting; they always spin down when idle and spin up again. And I fairly recall noticing this change of behaviour right after I installed a new OS version for the first time (although I don’t recall which one exactly).
There are several threads around the web about this issue.

My workaround: in one of my existing Xojo apps, which is designed to always run (using a launch agent), I added a function that writes an invisible file to selected disks every 30 seconds and flushes the file. Works fine.

4 posts were split to a new topic: Xojo developers

Uergh… Having to “workarounds” like these can’t be doing the drives any good.

Anyway, not to worry, Apple’s now focusing on creating a ChatGPT clone, that will solve all these problems right?

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It’s to avoid having them mechanically stressing because of sleeps/wakes. Many times a day, everyday, that’s no good either.
This setting is always discussed at various places and I’ve never seen a definitive answer. My “answer” is that I prefer them to keep running while they’re turned on.

I can’t wait… :sweat_smile:
Xojo: API2
Apple: ChatGPT2

:grin:

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Excellently executed on every level, I’d say.
Personal peeve (on every software product): The subscription model. Even though you make it clear that the product will still work after a year, I hate the idea. It’s why I jumped from LiveCode to Xojo, from QT to WX Widgets, from Adobe to Affinity.

It sounds like a very comprehensive, but necessarily narrow, product. For relatively little effort,(compared to what you put into it so far) you could throw in other system diagnostics like the usual CPU utilization, memory, hard drive space remaining, network connections, etc. I know Activity Monitor covers a lot of that, but the idea would be to expand its target demographic. It’s a great idea but it’s on the geeky end. The trouble is, the Mac handles these issues better by itself than Windows. If you could fix power and sleep management issues on the Windows side, I bet that would fill a bigger perceived need.

Speaking of perceived need, I would expand the scope to make it a power management solution rather than just a sleep app. I doesn’t sound like a Herculean effort (again, in comparison with what you’ve done so far), but it adds to the target demographic.

What you said about airportd sucking as much as 30% of the CPU during sleep was a real revelation to me. That might be worth highlighting. Maybe that means a lot to me because I’m a geek, but it was worth reading your initial message just to learn that.

The Mac market for system utilities is different than on Windows (where there is much more of a perceived need because it behaves so inconsistently.

I would echo most of what the other contributors have said, except on the language translation side–as you pointed out about KIA–just about everything we write can mean something else in a different language that may be inappropriate or contain negative connotations. When we meet the Martians, nuclear war could start just because the wrapper on their first Big Mac looks exactly like their one-finger salute.

Good luck with this. It looks like a great app and your site is beautiful, the endless scroll aside (which, as has already been pointed out, is the convention these days).

fritz

Though Xojo is nothing but a disguised subscription model, as they won’t patch the smallest security issues :frowning: .

True enough. But Livecode is not Johnny-On-The-Spot in terms of fixes and updates either. And their multi-tiered subscription model makes Oracle’s look elementary. Overall, much greater cost, no performance benefits and they will upcharge you big time for a platform switch Xojo throws in for free (if you have the full package). Granted there are difficulties, but going from Python or Node between platforms is no walk in the part either, especially with database drivers involved. This is where Xojo offers an often large advantage.

Granted I don’t have a lot of Xojo experience, and judging by this forum I will run into roadblocks down the road, but for the simple stuff I’m doing it works well enough for most things and often shines in terms of simplicity of implementation. Besides, I miss VB6 so much this is just the shot of nostalgia I need sometimes.

Please let us know how you’re gonna faire with it.

I know the feeling. I fell for xojo just for that reason. It is a shame that Xojo fail miserably on offering a better product for the millions that liked the VB6 paradigm. And even worse, looking how they want to distance themselves from it with idiotic changes like Var instead of Dim

Yeah. No lie. Fortunately, I use Var in every other language, so what the heck, you get used to it.
Xojo is ‘better’ than VB6 in that I can create a product on Mac and Linux (theoretically on the web, but that seems not to be worth doing). On Windows, I would have rather just used VB6, but of course there is no more VB6, there’s only VB.Net, which, to my mind, is more of a divergence from VB6 (and common sense) than Xojo.

So it’s the better of both worlds, since the other world doesn’t actually exist any more.

I will. Despite the many drawbacks and false moves, it has a lot of potential.

If they would do the needed changes it could be much more successful and not only as VB6 Replacement but as an independent language for cross platform programming. But they dicided not to do that. And there ends it up. All the potential is worthless when you have no chance for reliability in your work.

I certainly think they could improve things immensely with a few changes–especially on the web side where they have real competition. When I think of the limitations, however, I also have to consider how long it’s taken Python to come up with a real compiler, how long it’s taken Electron to ditch the Chromium baggage (ditto NW,js). Imagine having a team of engineers who can easily fill a small room and just having to deal with the IOS changes for one year. That’s a career by itself. So I try to look at it from that side. I’ve only had a license for a year (I’m not renewing this year) so my perspective is not vast. Obviously, some of you guys are better able to judge how short the Xojo team has fallen over the last five or ten years.

Thank you.

I’m not particularly keen on that model either, but need to adapt or die. In reality the Mac software industry has tanked massively under Cook’s guidance. 50% of Mac users won’t download apps from outside the Mac App Store. To make it worse, is you need to use outside promotion to drive traffic to the App Store, and that’s if they’ll let your in. Neither App Wrapper or Sleep Aid are permitted in the App Store because they both require functionality that Apple prohibit. Not to mention that people expect App Store apps to be dirt cheap, and Apple push for actual subscriptions.

Simply focusing on improving Mac sleep, still has a long way to go. The process is undocumented, and TBH I’m considering re-writing my whole tracker as I can see flaws in my current design.

As for competing with other apps that do entire system management, there’s a couple of problems I have with that direction. The least is that I worked with a couple of developers who build apps to do this, to help refine some of the stuff in Sleep Aid. So I feel if I now compete with them, it feels wrong. However I do appreciate the suggestion to open it up to a wider audience.

Funny you should say this as Microsoft have a sleep diagnosis tool already, yeah, it’s just not well known at all. Apple on the other hand, keep the whole process a black box.

Thank you.
I might consider options for breaking it into multiple pages, but we’ll see. I am hoping to make it public this coming week.

That is part of the problem, they’ve pretty much ignored the macOS changes for the last decade (in some aspects two decades), iOS, Windows changes as well. It’s frustrating because it feels like they didn’t even try to keep up. There are so many things in their Mac framework which don’t work correctly anymore, the longer they leave it, the more it becomes useless.

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Yes, and because they’re hiding these facts, they’re now saying they’re doing “low code”. Their strategy is so obvious, but doesn’t make it any cleverer :frowning: .

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They’ve redefined “RAD” as “low code”, just to be buzzword-compliant. :slight_smile:

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