“It coulda been a contender. It coulda been something, instead of a mess, which is what it is.”
And I do believe with the right leadership and vision back then it could have gotten a good market share… That is why I bought at REALBAsic V3… It seemed so full of potential!
Hope springs eternal, lol. It is what makes us human.
I spent a lot of my early career in the world of xBase. dBase was a nice idea, poorly and clunkily implemented, and a professor and his grad students saw opportunity and made a clone that was a couple of orders of magnitude faster, much more stable, yet fully backward compatible. FoxBase became FoxBase Plus became FoxPro and fast forward to around 1992 when Microsoft Access 1.0 was a disaster and they were looking for better DB technology. They bought Fox, assured us devs (I was tech editor at FoxTalk Magazine at the time) to our faces that the Mac and Xenix versions would continue alongside the Windows version, then reneged on that. They dropped FoxPro for Windows from Visual Studio when .NET came out. At least it was still a pretty damn good product when it was murdered. And its local cursor engine and SQL optimizer live on in Sql Server and parts of System.Data to this day. But even that rubbed me the wrong way. Fox’s bones were picked clean, the value extracted, the fantastic dev community abandoned. At least Dave Fulton got a lot of money to spend his twilight years collecting Stradivarius violins (Stradivarii?).
Xojo is even worse, in that it’s not put down mercifully, but is left to bleed out from a thousand wounds. very, VERY slowly. And its devotees suffer the same fate along with it. I was lucky in that I only got about one serious app deep into it before I pulled the plug. The utter disrespect for people who devoted much of their career to it in some way or other, is just a terrible thing to contemplate. Folks like Bob and Norm of course landed on their feet but the astronomical loss to Xojo seems to be perceived not at all.
I had that same experience of being discarded like a dirty rag when I moved on from Fox. On one level “it’s just business” and there’s a lot to life besides your dev environment of choice but on another level – WTAF. Such un-forced errors. Capitalism ultimately makes people Stoopid, I think.
TBH that IS weird but not totally surprising
All self-inflicted I might add.
Might be so but makes no change: time passed by cause it is a dead horse in the meantime. Amount of users is tending to zero if you ask me. A few years and we will see the end. Until somebody has a solution which is cross platform and provides a drag and drop UI Designer.
Okay, let’s look in the future. ObJo uses the capabilities of C# so it is a small part to manage to have Web and mobile also as platforms. If this would be combines with an import converter for XoJo it could be a real good Idea. Even web (importer for Web 1 and Web ) and also Desktop (API1 and API2) could be realized and help the users. Then there would not be a need to have the XoJo maintained. And the ObJo license could cost a little bit more. That would be the only chance for the people. Cause one day XoJo will end up. And then it would be the exact end point cause nobody will buy such software for millions. It is not such a big deal in times of AI to build up the needed toolchain to have a basic syntax on languages like Kotlin (something I tested and it works well) or C# what garry did. And I really, really hope he will habe success with this and it will be a complete replacement. With a better technological beckground and a modern ecosystem behind it. Bad for many plugin vendors, good for all the users around.
In principle sure it is doable, but the devil is in the details, and one of the things that sunk Xojo was biting off more than they could chew trying to target everything before even getting their original core targets solidly right.
That doesn’t mean a one man show can’t run circles around the Xojo’s team, not at all – in fact, he already is. Good grief – Objo is entirely usable already, and in the past 3 days he’s implemented several small fixes and suggested improvements just from me alone. Meanwhile I have been seeing tickets I filed, followed or participated in regarding Xojo quietly closed out over the past 3 years or so, not a one of them substantively addressed.
Like you, I’d like to see Objo target the web at some point. But I’d be delighted if it just did Windows/MacOS/Linux with excellence, too. And there’s plenty that can be done – support more DBs, external / add-on libs or plugins, .NET interop, unit test framework, just off the top of my head. At this early stage, targeting web would probably be a distraction.
And it already has things Xojo doesn’t like an actual modern Async / Await implementation and Tasks.
I don’t even have much of an immediate use case for Objo but went ahead and bought a license anyway because I want to support this kind of thing – I feel resonance with Garry’s quest and love to support products that some corporate raider hasn’t enshittified. I think I will use it for personal cross platform things if nothing else. And there’s something stimulating about having a fresh perspective from a different platform, too – I ported some C# extension methods and found a subtle / obscure bug in the original implementation of one method that I had missed. It’s all good!
For me, the unique solution are MonkeyBread buy Xojo when the CEO is retiring.
May be a dream… 
I don’t think so while you’ve have to pay much money with low revenue. Nobody will do that. For what? If the plugin business would run like in old times it would be a good idea. Last time I spoke with him he said it’s not like it was. It is shrinking. So why should he buy an American business? In times AI is breaking all existing rules? I guess he will not.
as I said many times… Xojo will end like Powerbasic once did…
sad but I guess you are right. I remember 90th when Kirschbaum Software was distributor for PowerBasic in germany
sigh a Retro flashback is comin’ again…
The PB IDE was fast and neat, esp. the Debugger and Watcher. You could set breakpoints for value changes in your Variables (e.g. break when i=5). Never seen this again in any Basic Dialect. And its handling was in par with Turbo-Pascal, my 2nd language of choice back in that time. At least with Turbo-Pascal 5.5 until Turbo-Pascal brought 6.0 and Turbo-Vision and you started to see the gap. And then Visual Basic for DOS with its TUI Visual Editor came along and boom… everything was on the Visual-Hype. It was the time when Microsoft started to dominate and deliver really good dev stuff for ar least one decade. They lost me in 2007… here is my story with Microsoft
FunFact: TUI Kits like ncurses are getting somewhat popular today 'cause everybody from the blinkly shiny Windows World is coming to GNU/Linux
We came a long way…
@Garry Isn’t this is the ultimate Master-Quest at God-Level: If you manage to put a visual TUI in Objo for Crossplatform console apps? An TUI for Avalonia? Man I really would go down on my knees, say “take my money” and start to praise you
okay, I have strange daydreams, sorry for my intervention…
Let’s continue with… eh… xojo… and our great genius CEO…
Added debugger watchpoints to the roadmap: Feature #399 - Objo
Added a TUI editor to the roadmap: Feature #400 - Objo
It’s better to put feature requests and bug reports specifically on the official Objo Forum (https://forum.objo.dev) as I pick them up quicker over there 
wow… #400 only in case you’ve really nothing else to do
Only 17 not completed though…
Is it weird? If I sold you a piece of s**t car, the last thing I’m going to do when I see you don’t have it any more is ask how come
When all is done new Ideas will come. My motto when devloping software. But like I said before: I whish you much success with this product. Good Idea!
You might
Xojo doesn’t ask that follow up with people that I know of
When I was there I often asked if they ever followed up with people who didn’t renew
And maybe got some insight into why people didn’t renew
I don’t know they ever did this
Their loss
Well, you the seller, might not but that’s why Consumer Reports and JD Powers send out surveys to new/used car owners. That neutral 3rd party feedback should help inform decisions on changes to the product.
Going back in the Wayback Machine the ARBP (Association of REALbasic Professionals) tried to be that mechanism - even if we weren’t all that neutral. We tried doing some yearly surveys on how the community felt and what we wanted most but mostly we got ignored by the powers that be.
I have zero doubt that if they had listened to us the dev environment would be much better than it is today. Alas, I’m not sure anyone but a few people from ARBP days is even still a Xojo developer. I guess technically I’m still a Xojo user (but barely) and Norman still is but I’m not sure who else is still around.
That makes me hoping that Garry can take a better way. And - as we all can see - he is really fast forwarding all he wants to build. As it is c# he can also provide ways to build for iOS and Android in far future or not so far future. We will see. But one thing I really know by heart: he can be a XoJo successor without any problems. If I would still have XoJo Desktop Apps I would rethink about XoJo and invest my time to redevelop on ObJo cause this will go on with much less headache. And as the toolkit behind is much more flexible and has a really bigger ecosystem we can wait until further functionalities coming. And that even without the third party plugin deliverers.
