I didnt renew last year so, I aplied what Dave said, I didnt pay Xojo for something that isnt worth the upgrade, so I cant use 2019r3, It was a release focused on iOS anyway, so not missing much.
8 months by now whitout paying and I really feel that it was the best desition, 2020r1 will be focussed on web, and (as any other new feature) first release will not be production ready.
If I had paid, now I would feel like a whole year wasted.
Obviously
I stopped paying Xojo with 2019r1.1 (well actually I qualified for 2.1, but think its a POS)… but no matter… .I can honestly say I haven’t really fired up any version of Xojo for nearly a month now… but have been spending most days immersed in learning Swift for macOS (am pretty comfortable with Swift for iOS now).
So Xojo is going to have to do something REALLY dramatic in order to get any more of my $$$… (and I’m not holding my breath that will ever happen)
As I wrote in another thread:
Basically Xojo is living off their “inheritance” (the things that still work), but instead of doing proper maintenance and upkeep (sockets, movie player, HTML viewer, RTF, etc) they go for risky investments in the hope of landing a big win (iOS, Android) … while the family business stagnates and crumbles, and worse, their reputation goes down the drain with it (just look at how many long term users have gone in the last two years - a certain attrition is expected, but what happened lately is unprecedented)
sadly Markus, with a very heavy heart, I have to agree with you, the current phase is going to cull the long term problem customers who actually expect some return on their investment, what will be left is the new users who are not using the product to make a living.
Some where the company must have an income stream, it obviously is not aligned with those users in this thread, there must be a much bigger number of subscribers to the Xojo coffers we are not aware of (not that, we as users, have any right to know that) who are completely unaware of the forum or do not even know that there is a user base out there other than their closed system.
in business, as many users know, there is a point where a promise is no longer enough, confidence is lost, hope for the future is still high, but the trust that has kept a generation of users engaged no longer has any meaning.
I want to believe in the product, I want to pay for it, I want to support it, just not now and not for probably 3 years until the current non release has matured.
My pittance of a subscription is not going to concern any one at Xojo towers, but 20, 50 100 others who are well known in the community and respected across the industry, perhaps that might just get the guy at the top of the tree to consider there might be an issue to address, it may well be that what the current user base would like to see as updates and bug fixes is seen as unimportant, ok, can we buy 19r1 and fork it out into what many people might like to see as a version of the compiler? an ego would stop that possibility for sure, money would not, I suspect there are plenty of users who would buy into a 19r1 fork.
Unfortunately (and it was me expressing this opinion that got me banned from “that other forum)”… Geoff is (my opinion) too egotistical and arrogant for the good of Xojo.
He has in the past basically responded to various emails by essentially saying “Its MY way or the highway” (One I read stated “Its my company, so don’t tell me how to run it”)…
But given that option… I’m taking the highway… but unlike others, I can afford to “hitchhike” until some comes along.
I have pretty much lost any confidence in Xojo, tired of promised not kept, resources squanders (read API2) , and always chasing that next shiny bauble (iOS/Android) instead of shoring up the products that customers are USING…
Actually I am making a donation when I’m sending money for something for which I’m not getting any value in return.
He has post just that in the forum, not only in mails.
No, but you won’t get autocomplete, syntax help or easy help docs lookups for any deprecated API items.
No autocomplete but I do get syntax help if I right click.
Ahhh just realized what you mean, my bad. Yes you are right
I’ll confess that I cant recall ever seeing or hearing Geoff actually saying such a thing
I think there is a group of people for whom the lost of trust/confidence in Xojo is an significant issue.
I’d say that the xojo.core.* and xojo.io.* attempt was a waste of resources, but not so much API2. Changing the event names ended up being egg-on-face, but I’m less bothered about most of the other name changes. Adding new methods to String was a good idea, and clearly, they couldn’t change string.Mid to be zero-based and had to add new ones there.
Most of my changes for API2 ended up being a simple Find/Replace exercise. API2 also allowed me to complete my dumping of Text to use String throughout.
But generally I agree that there is not enough listening being done.
Hi Clothears,
you mention ‘Text’ and Xojo.core, when I saw all that starting and the reasons behind It I have to say my immediate thought was, really? what a waste of time, I don’t know how many other people actually never wrote a line of Xojo.core but I never did, I did not get the reasoning of that project and I had the same feeling about API2 and event name changes, not that makes me any wise man but I just simply did not get the reasoning for such massive changes when there is a great core of a product already that seems to me not to require hacking about for the sake of it.
no question I might be completely wrong, just to date there have not seemingly been enough facts thrown in the air to support it, just ‘its going to make iOS great, you will get android, web 2 will be amazing, look> PDF and workers, nice shiny stuff…’ all of which is vapour at the moment and is likely to remain so for a long time.
We are past summer solstice, the last release was 19r3, I updated just before 19r2 was released, and that was a waste of time, my licence runs out on December first, anyone want to bet what state a release might be at that point and convince me I got value from my subscription.
this is where I am angry, paying a lot of money and receiving no apparent benefit, even if for instance there is an android release that is not half baked in the next 6 months, does anyone expect it to be included in their current PRO licence, I have a thought its going to be an extra!
I started using Xojo soon after the new framework and Text came in, so all the advice everywhere was to use it. I followed this until it became clear that too much was missing, many methods missing or available for String only. For some, I ended up writing my own versions (such as DecodeQP). To my mind, a lot of API2 is what they ought to have been doing instead of the new framework, five years or so ago.
in no particular order
there were other less reasons for it but none quite as significant
ok, so why did it fail? that all sounds reasonable when you bullet point it.
I just did not get the TEXT thing, maybe due to my embedded background where a bucket of bytes is just that and there are no the complexities of encodings as such.
did it need more investment that thought originally perhaps? (no I am not expecting you to answer with any privileged info).
is it potentially another case of the guy with the tiller saw another avenue to steer the ship.
and really, its not important now as that boat has sunk and there is a new one to sail.
I hope beyond hope that they do a MONSTER release, where WEB2 just works, PDF is not useless and a whole boat load of existing bugs are killed off and we can all get on the happy side of things.
This I what I would love to see before the year end and that would make me shut the feck up about what is not seemingly happening and make my current subscription have some value.
it needed to expand really rapidly beyond what it had and that didnt happen (other priorities simply needed more attentions and … ) 
The motivations for it were bang on - heck it would have let Xojo have the classic controls and a bunch in the Xojo namespace that were the new ones and had no API renaming events issues
But … thats all water under the bridge now
Yeha bytes are bytes are bytes
But not when you start dealing with “textual data” and where “ü” etc and appear on screen and looks the same but can actually be composed of different runs of bytes etc
Text is way more complex than it seems (hence why there is an entire consortium - ICU - for dealing with it)
Not really more investment just sustained investment
Not really - more what other f*ing emergency did apple cause for us NOW ???
There was a period of time where Apple seemed to cause us to have to deal with “yet another urgent thing” every few months
It seriously hampers efforts to move in a specific direction
Some we knew about but Apple altered the timeline
And some where a “drop the ball we HAVE to fix this NOW!”
None are good for making steady progress
Agreed - it is what it is and hopefully they can lift some of the best parts of that effort into existing classes & types
That _would be really nice
DaveS 22h Unfortunately (and it was me expressing this opinion that got me banned from “that other forum)”… Geoff is (my opinion) too egotistical and arrogant for the good of Xojo.
Geoff is actually a really nice guy. Not sure if you have met him or engaged with him but he will absolutely hear you out. He will happily disagree with you but he doesn’t do it in an arrogant or egotistical way.
I disagree with many of his decisions but I don’t think you are correct here.
The challenge is we are all operating under assumptions because we don’t have the real data. We love this tool that has been built by many developers we admire/respect with their hard efforts. Yet, now many of them have now moved on (or been fired/banned) and we are left with a team who may be no less passionate but perhaps not as capable at platform/api/language design and engineering. That is a very specific skill set and I’m not sure Xojo possesses them or API 2.0 would not have happened.
Xojo is in a weird spot because they are between major releases (Android, Xojo Web 2.0) and still reeling from major shifts in their platform team (Joe, Norman, etc). These events occurred awhile ago but you can still feel the shift away from stability and longer platform cycles as they lost a compiler engineer and long term IDE engineer. I suspect a great deal of effort is placed on just making the IDE render the Android / Web 2.0 controls the way they need and somehow gluing that together with everything else.
All of this just reinforces that a closed language/platform is not optimal for long term users. You may disagree and be perfectly fine with closed source but you have to admire “may the best solution win” in which case API 2.0 would have never made it out of RFC.
Yes I have met him in person, and had dinner with him here in San Diego a few years back… and yes in Person he is a “nice guy”… But don’t ever disagree with him, because he (like Trump) is always right, even when he is not.
You yourself said “now many of them have moved on (or been fired/banned)” … Gee I wonder what might have caused that? Ask any of those that have been fired or banned, and I bet they somewhat if not totally agree with me.
“Left with a team no less passionate”… Ok, I’ll buy that one… problem is that remaining team doesn’t have the resources or proper skill set (no compiler engineer from what I hear) to properly maintain let alone move forward.
Not to mention (my opinion) they wasted a year (or more) on that API2 debacle.
This combined with a lack of understanding in relation to the market (iOS/Android is too little and way too late, but at the expense of the products they did have a hold on)
So in my opinion is Geoff arrogant and egotistcal? yeah… and it has and will cost him in the long run
There is an extension of the restaurant analogy, which is that sometimes I’m really unsatisfied with an experience at a local place, but I’ll give it another try maybe a year later. In many cases, it’s gotten much better! I was totally put off and baffled by the xojo.core stuff, but I found that I could just ignore it and carry on with the things I do use. Again with the API 2.0 debacle, I stayed away, but after they walked back the event renaming stuff I gave 2019.3.r1a try, and was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to move my existing code over, while benefitting from whatever enhancements they’d made (however small). Again, I’m encouraged by the progress and like what I see in the roadmap, and plan to continue with my “donations” 