There is a 3 Mac option and a 3 Mac, 3 Years of updates option.
Pricing has always been tricky for me. Back in 2000, you can easily sell shareware for $20. Now $20 is considered too high, yet the number of customers we can reach (thanks to the Scam App Store) has declined significantly. So I’ve been trying to find ways to strike a balance. $25 is considered too high, but like I say, I also know if I sell it for less, I am not going to shift more units. We recently participated in Bundlehunt, where it was really cheap, but we didn’t sell many more units than we normally do, just at way less profit.
App Wrapper at $50, has been unprofitable for many years. Realistically to make enough money for the time and effort I put into it, it needs to sell at least 4x more units or be priced at $200. I see people already complain that App Wrapper at $50 is way too expensive after spending $800 on Xojo and $500 on plugins.
I’m also trying a different approach with this new page and that’s simply to encourage people to download the free trial. As others have said, I’m trying to be proactive. In fact this new direction is also potentially shaping how I report things as I’m working on the angle of improving your energy usage. Save the environment
I was reading about compatibility with Macs and 49" ultra wide monitors. Nearly everything I saw, basically said, if you can, get a PC. Apple’s external monitor support is absolute garbage. Failing that, use HDMI.
To be honest, that makes sense, Apple have no need to care about 3rd party monitors when they sell their own overpriced displays.
Well IF you EVER feel so inclined to spend time looking into monitor madness like I mentioned I’m in !
I wish I had ANY kind of clue why this physical config worked fein under Catalina and Ventura just makes me waste 10 minutes every time I wake it up
I CAN say the ONLY sleep issue I ever had was that macOS would not dismount drives before sleeping the USB bus
And that results in drives being “unplugged” basically
And over time that ruins externals
I’ve replaced a few drives that became unrepairable after that happened many times
Now I use Jettison which ejects whatever disk I need / want before sleep and no more ruined disks !
Thats the problem with forums, reading to much out a little tiny sentence. Dont assume such things because of a sentence. And no need to be woke on theese forums either…
If the software hits my price limit and I discover that I have to pay a premium for another computer, I often lose interest. When I desire something and am negatively “surprised” by the price, it reassures me that I can t least use the software on all of my devices, but at least on two macs and I’ll pay the price.
To me, it’s like purchasing coffee capsules that could only be used in one machine.
I don’t think Xojo is doing itself a favor either with that politics. I had many customers, many installations on virtual machine. Having to activate Xojo each and everytime just sucked.
This was my experience with ARGen and Shorts. This is why the Xojo ecosystem is in ruins. The users that Xojo is attracting (the citizen/hobby developers) are generally using it for themselves not for their company. The company will gladly pay $200 for something that saves them time and effort - it’s a no brainer. But most Xojo users $50 is a BIG deal.
When I did a couple of years of VB6 work we were spending $2k per developer every year for libraries and controls. But then MS understood the importance of keeping 3rd party developers happy (and rich) and incorporated security and licensing into the product to help developers protect their investment. Xojo, after 20 years, has none of those features.
I wish a certain CEO would get it through his thick skull that the developers, the money, the press, and the ecosystem come from business users. You get those and the casual developers will come along for free.
Very true! Especially as many hobby devs will likely never recover the 99 USD/EUR for the App Store. It took them probably a while to invest that money (after they bought Xojo) only to recognise that they have to spend more money for App Wrapper, because w/o the wonderful help of App Wrapper they will probably fail … plus plugins … etc. Xojo’s ecosystem is not cheap for hobbyist … especially not these days where other ecosystems are for free …
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.
Sadly SO many topics drift off into "omg xojo could have … " land and never come back
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
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
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.
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