What do you love?

There’s a lot of threads on this forum talking about the things they don’t like about Xojo or the way that the company runs things, so for the sake of balance I thought I’d start this thread.

What do you love about Xojo?

GO!

Simple IDE to understand esp when compared to VS, Xcode etc and their gazillion options.
Fairly powerful language. Is it assembler or C++ no but its suitable for a LOT of stuff.
It’s NOT C++ :P. I can write that stuff but prefer NOT to.
Extensible with my own classes or plugins.

Building is simple. Push go and it spits out an executable for your desired platform. No worrying about what version of .net or java is installed.

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OH !!!

That syntactically you can easily switch between a simple property, computed property and get/set method pair without having to rewrite all the code that used that property

I love the simplicity of it.

No command line tools to update and arcane system commands to alter environments.

Just double click and start coding.

The event driven paradigm of clicking the control you want to do something with is so intuitive.

  • Highly readable English syntax, without useless C-like semicolons, cryptic operators, and curly braces.
  • Compartmentalization of methods in the IDE (as opposed to say, Swift, where you can have a single page with many methods).
  • True write-once x-platform capability between Mac and Win in most cases; even when there are differences they’re usually easily accommodated with a few conditional blocks.
  • Pretty good documentation.
  • Tight, knowledgeable, and helpful user community concentrated in just a few places.

This is what I meant on the Say yes to Xojo thread.

  • The IDE although it is a listtle slow at times.

  • I like the languate syntax. Not having to type curly braces is a plus for me.

  • RAD enough for me.

  • In the Web edition the ability to design the layout graphically

  • No need to NPM 25 libraries for each project. Yes, plugins are necessary for some projects but still no NPM :wink:

Very quick to use to Prototype an idea.

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That thread also has a list of things people like about the tool.
But it does also have comments about shortcomings.
Frustration seems to focus NOT on the tool but the processes around it.

True, and most negative comments seem to gravitate around a certain individual. Most of the comments have merit too.

Personally I love the tool, I too have been on the not so excited camp at times but overall I like what Xojo offers and what I can do with it.

I got excited too early about some promised features mainly because I had been away from Xojo -development in general- and did not recall that soon has a different meaning around Xojo :wink:

The IDE could be good with a couple of changes.
The language is good (insert curse-word at API 2).
The abstraction level is excellent. What little I know about Objective C horrifies me because it requires so much more work.
The plugins are life-savers. Without Christian my app wouldn’t be possible.
Build and be done.

Build and be done should be their tag line.

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Xojo DOES have a really great niche in the tools market
They really do

But they just seem to have difficulty taking advantage of that niche which is what I’m sure we would all LOVE to see them do

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Overall I like the simplicity of the IDE and the fact that I don’t have to think about which runtime library is installed on the end user’s computer (be it .NET, Java, etc). It’s hands down the best integrated UI designer out there.

Like @npalardy says, it’s fast enough for most things. I do think this is one of its limitations though. If you do a lot of console-based stuff there are certainly better tools out there (RemObjects Elements being my favourite) that generate much faster code, even when you factor out how badly written it is by the programmer!

Cross platform UI was always a plus.