I thought I’d share:
Feedback 2021r2 eta 30 June 2021
Xojo 2021r2 eta 13 July 2021
Xojo 2021r3 eta 29 Sept 2021
These dates might change either because I’ve posted the dates (ooo the paradox) or due to late issues.
Some interesting projects on the go:
PDF Exporter/Viewer
iOS Notifications
More web framework stuff
Feedback Web 2.0
Newly added to the useless Xojo Roadmap. Windows 12 will probably be more realistic, given Xojo’s track record… 
#2 PDF support of iOS
THAT should be a no-brainer, since iOS (AppKit) already has a built in PDF engine
I converted code that drew on the screen to being able to output to PDF in about 10 lines of Swift code… so its not rocket science… but then we ARE talking about Xojo here aren’t we?
At least we have one now 
I think its good, at least we kind of know what the big ticket items are even if they jiggle around a bit
You’d think yeah, the reason Geoff gave for implementing PDF recently “because every OS now supported it” or some such spiel didn’t really sit well with me as from what I understand they just got in an existing xojo PDF lib that had been around for a number of years anyway and didn’t really extend its features, if at all.
We had this for years and it hasn’t done any good, except given people false hope. A roadmap without any indication of delivery is just a marketing thing. E.g. Talking about Windows 11 is quite popular now, so they’ve added and mention it everywhere in their campaigns and I bet (as with many others on this list) they don’t even have a plan yet.
A while back when I thought Xojo was viable I had a few calls with Geoff and he reconsidered not having a road map. He didn’t want dates at all. Since that was a show stopper, I suggested just having a list in approx order which is were it is today.
I’m not sure they are using the list fairly as the Delivered list is suspect. There are items in the list that are not completely delivered. Those items should still be in Upcoming. Seems sneaky that they are DELIVERED when still not complete. That just makes it look like the Upcoming list is shorter than it really is.
I’d imagine this will become even more off balance as items stagnate.
What the heck is that? Has there been a feedback web 1.0 ? That I know the last feedback was still the buggy platform specific one.
feedback MADE ON (Xojo’s) web 2.0 instead of Desktop.
THIS is the one that staggers me the most it takes so long. It is the type of project that can be done in weeks (a month tops) in other tools if it has anything like the functionalities the current desktop version has. We’ve created way bigger and more complex WebApps ourselves in far less time.
The only thing I can think of is that they are blocked in their development by the framework itself, just like we (the users) are if we want to make something in Web 2.0 (bugs, missing features in the framework, having to write workarounds in pure HTML/CSS/Javascript yourself etc.).
It could mean a future version of Web 2.0 will be better (in a couple of years) because they encountered the same showstoppers and shortcomings as we do. One can only hope…
Absolutely! But it is the only thing we can expect from this Xojo
After all, Hope is their Bussiness Model 
Got it. It is a marketing gimmick as opposed to an indication that the whole 1st full version was dumped and they moved on to the second full version. Or maybe is is their second full try and they are using the Web2 thing to cover it.
Wonder what the over/under in Vegas would be for such release.
They had to put something out there to stop all the whining. At least this shows the general direction of the ship, even if it stops at a few extra ports on the way at least you know where its going eventually.
I totally agree but they have to move them onto the bottom at some point in time, not everything in all projects are 100% black and white complete. Stuff generally works, but as with a lot of Xojo stuff, when you get past the shineys and peer into the depth of something you start to see the cracks. Like the PDF feature shouldn’t have been released only supporting a limited character set, it basically isn’t usable for anyone outside the roman alphabet. I actually think that things like that do more harm than good to Xojo’s perception.
I agree with you here. From the initial beta release of Web 2.0 I got the feeling that development on Feedback 2.0 hadn’t been running side by side that closely. One of the first bug reports I put in during the beta of Web 2.0 would have been instantly found if they had been using a selectable listbox like the desktop version of feedback. I guess they could be less thorough than me at testing though 
or busier, that’s not hard 
I just took a quick look back at the March 2020 XDC video which has some screenshots of Feedback 2.0 and Geoff saying that it would be release with the r1 testing cycle. Well that came and went and the only two options for the delay I can think of would be resources or a technical issue. Now I understand why they don’t like to give dates/timescales because when you get are a year out on a project like Feedback 2.0, that a pretty big miss.
I wonder how much of the company’s direction is dictated by the marketing department and how much is Geoff’s vision. I was reading a 10 year old ticket yesterday where Geoff was talking about the requirement for Xojo to pump out new features to ensure that marketing had enough shineys to capture headlines and eyes. I could understand that mindset in an era when press and a few websites would dominate what eyes landed on what information, but with the changing times since then I’m not sure it holds that much water now. These days, one person’s or one video’s reach on twitter/youtube can now be thousands of eyes who are probably already in the tech mindset by virtue of association with that person/video.
I think everyone understands that Xojo’s current direction is towards the citizen developer. The professional developer who would evangelize about the product to other like minded people and the companies that try to make a living from Xojo are the ever decreasing small percentage of the userbase. I’m wondering if Xojo has taken the wrong direction a number of years ago and seriously slowed/stalled it’s growth by sticking to its core marketing driven ethos, often and untested. The citizen developers who might find Xojo useful in their day to day job, for example to speed up a bit of mundane data entry or performing some batch task aren’t really going to go on to promote the tool as much or as widely as a professional developer could.
I tried to spur on outside interest in Xojo back in 2017 when I emailed them pleading for them to release the XDC videos knowing that additional traffic from youtube to certain hot topics could increase revenue more than the little they would get from those already in the ecosystem. Dana gave me some spiel about not diminishing the price of the XDC tickets and cut to the pandemic a few years later and they end up putting them up but with really bad thumbnails.
I get the feeling that the churn of citizen developers is a thing they rely on, new blood that finds an easy tool but doesn’t stick around when the tool starts creaking. I was the same when I first found Xojo, I had a play around with it, found it easy to use, quick to prototype, fun to play with and I pointed a few friends towards it. After using it on and off for the last five years I’m actually embarrassed that I recommended it to them because of the shortcomings of the product and the ever increasing bug list I have that just aren’t being addressed.
My pro license expired in May 2019, over two years ago. I did a little bit of work for someone on TOF and asked for a renewal in remuneration when it was on 20 to 30% discount but they have forgotten about that and I’m not in any rush to remind them about it because I don’t feel there’s been anything I need in that time. API2, meh, Dark mode for iOS, meh, PDF Support, too limited to use, Web Framework 2.0, every time I tried to do something I came up against bugs and missing features, Multicore, meh, I’m not going to pony up for a licence just to test that outside the debug build which doesn’t use it, Plugins for iOS, meh, New Desktop Controls, so incredibly broken on launch, meh, API2 for iOS, meh.
What I would have liked would have been some of my bugs fixed not because I reported them and they get on my nerves or are important to me but because they are fundamental issues that affect the quality of Xojo apps in windows and directly affect people’s perception of Xojo’s as a serious tool. I’m currently sitting at 810 feedback tickets in a little under three years of actual use, 199 of them are verified or reproducible, that’s just over 1/4 of all the bugs I’ve reported are still in there with the oldest dating back to April 2016, five years ago now, wow time flies.
I’m not sure where Xojo is going, they seem to be stumbling in the dark trying to find the light switch. They release a new forum then proceed to waste masses of time locking it down and stripping out functionality just on the off chance that someone might see how many users they actually have or some other piece of pointless information that no one really cares about in the grand scheme of things. They take actions that they don’t consider the future ramifications of and they seemingly love to design as they go even though it keeps biting them in the butt in the medium to long term. Meh, do I really care, its just a glorified crossword puzzle to me but it would be nice if it was more.
Or without a supporting decent format/resolution for printing embedded graphics as pictures such as needed for letterheads.
I never looked into that, could you not oversize the image then scale it down? I was doing that for nice rez html printing 15 years ago, admittedly you shouldn’t have to though yes I agree with you there.
Join the club
I’ve only been outside and a whole new bug reporter for 2 years and a couple months
I’m at 720 cases
172 reproducible, 30 more verified as bugs, > 50% of all my reports still sitting there open
JUST between you and I there are 1500+ reports and nearly 400 reproducible
How many others are in roughly the same boat ?
Its crazy isn’t it, those numbers alone should/would put off anyone taking Xojo seriously. It blows my mind.
While i have certainly used it for that type of simple stuff for use by myself and other people in my department, over the years I have also used Xojo other more varied things.
I am the manager of the analytical chemistry department and people use my xojo app to submit requests for testing.
I wrote another app that was used to reduce store and report results from experiments that where each processing condition generated several hundred varying chemical compounds and they did up to 8 different process variations in a a day!
After doing initial compound ID using an instrument I had to have the app query net Chemisty DBs to get the structural information for the compounds so the app could figure out class of compound as well as get specific chemical properties. All this was put into a local DB for each sample.
The app had to then compile a report that grouped all that compound information, figure relative amounts by class and make it meaningful using relavant tables and graphs that let the people doing the work to figure out if what they were doing/changing was getting them closer to what they needed.The PDF Reports produced could be 80+ pages per sample! (they also wanted a drawn chemical structure for each compound along with the teh summary data!)
Recently wrote another app that allowed convenient computer assisted interactive GUI processing of the data for a complex biological biochemical assay that has a LOT of raw data, and and produce a report summarizing it Lot’s of tables and graphs)
In a previous job I wrote a GUI app that produced recipes for a product formulation depending on what the raw materials we had in stock were (We needed specific average properties but the those properties were variable depending on the specific batches of the expensive raw material.)
That app was used by manufacturing.
Anyway over the years I have found a bunch of uses for Xojo as citizen developer…
That said from what I have seen I find that I wind up with a lot of the same frustrations with it as the pros…
But as I get to decide what projects I do (none of this in my job description) and my apps don’t need to be the best looking or have the most up to date UI, just be easy to use and most people internally like using them, I don’t have the same pressures or requirements that a consultant or someone producing apps for sale to the general public would have.
-Karen
On the TOF they said pics are stored in the PDF as 75DPI JPEGs regardless of the original format…
-Karen
