Well, I did see Ivan’s post (because it was emailed to me by the forum) and I was 100% sure it would be flagged and deleted. Even I would have flagged it - but that’s just me. I believe there is a fine line between leaving some things up and deleting others and I felt he clearly crossed the line. I didn’t think it contributed anything meaningful to the question.
I refuse to believe that everything Xojo (or the MVP’s) does is malicious or bad. It’s their sandbox and their rules and if I choose to play in it I abide by their rules. I still use Xojo (some) too so burning that bridge would do me no favors in case I ever need to ask a favor of them some day.
You are still a big name inside the Xojo community. I am sure Xojo knows banning you or Sam, will damage their reputation severely.
As for Sam also, your writings are fair and genuine. Banning the two of you for speaking the truth is like shooting in their own foot.
I wrote it before on the Xojo forum, they should hire Sam and yourself at the same time. I am sure, Xojo will be improved greatly. If I was Geoff Perlman, I would contacted you both a long time ago. But who am I?
It’s interesting as I was bitching about FileMaker years ago and it was a similar response. They act offended, yell at you, then hide and remain silent. @Torsten_B knows what I mean.
The thing to learn is that when that happens, the relationship is over. There’s no partnership. It’s shut up and take it or leave. Took me a while, but you just cannot risk your livelihood or reputation “partnering” with a company like that.
Geoff likes to talk about Xojo being around for a long time and there’s stability in that. Well, maybe Geoff is there and some staff are there, but it’s not the same product anymore. So Xojo is really a whole new steaming pile of crap that differs from the past.
Reality is the product is no longer around as it was. The product is radically different requiring more and more work for workarounds.
I concur. The most important skill of a Filemaker or Xojo developer is knowing how to work around the system’s limitations and bugs. Workarounds account for 50% of development time.
Hey Chris,
Thanks for the nice comments and I know I could really improve Xojo’s capabilities and maybe even remove some limitations, and I’m 100% certain I can improve their sales…
You may know, that several times I publicly said I wanted to help. Geoff did contact me once “Because Dana told him to do”, but he never followed me up, and shortly after Dana quit.
I think the real reason why Geoff won’t listen or take either Bob or myself on is because, he likes “Yes” people. I’ve heard from ex-employees and current employees, you do what he says if you wanna get paid. He doesn’t like being challenged, and I believe this is why he pushed us away, because we challenged his stupid idea, illustrated how stupid it was, and that’s not what he wants to hear.
API 2.0 was a monumental screw-up that keeps hurting the company, @einhugur just found that “DesktopControls” has increased your app size by 6 MB, and for what?
Realistically, there’s is nothing you, Bob or I can do to help Xojo, unless Geoff/Xojo wants help. The best thing you can do to help yourself and other developers, is to leave. The sooner Xojo stops coasting along, they either adapt or die.
There is probably more to it than just Desktop controls since PDF and Charts came at same time. But is equally bad. (and the increase over same period on Windows and Linux is 10 mb, so even more than on the macOS)
When I start to compare Xojo Desktop with Java Swing I can see and realize: it is not really comparable. The Xojo environment has nearly no Ecosystem and everything looks a bit like unprofessional. It is sad that they could not get to a better state with Xojo. They could have that.
Even API 2 I could understand while that could be the chance that every sourcecode would run for every platform. But. Too much differing dependencies between the platforms and so that is and will still be: a dream.
Stuffs like Office automation, Databases, even the OOP Ideas they had are nothing what I could explain rational. They adopted stuffs and got it barely stable running. That’s how it feels. It is nothing what I wqould say it is usable.
Xojo has a bunch of nice Ideas but also tons of no gos and show stoppers. I could not understand why they have done it in that way. Also I can not understand how comes that the Bugs are not getting fixed. One of the most important things.
And yes, that makes Xojo uninteresting for most programmers. I mean: why should a professional programmer switch to Xojo. He could use C# or Java instead and would have in both cases much better conditions. A better ecosystem. Less show stopping bugs.
One nice thing they realized in Xojo environment: Drag and drop user interface builder. But. That you have with Java Swing and also JavaFX also.
And the mobile platforms? Let me say IOS is far away from really usable. And Android is too early to start to discuss about uability.
Exactly that’s why this language is not known over the planet. It looks good in the first view. But as you need more functionality and more ecosystem you have a problem. Even I wrote a Java Bridge Plugin for Xojo so I can write stuffs in Java to have at least a chance to get out of many leaks.
And so we end up with the former VisualBasic programmers which could directly start using Xojo and with the users only learned a bit Basic language. Often that comes with sentences like “I dont like curly braces” or “I hate that semikolon stuffs”. What shall I say? They are in the right envioronment and they will be happy with it. No question. But when you need to generate your incomes with programming I believe that it isless complex to do that with Java or C++, C# and so on.
I completely agree with what you said. When thinking of what Xojo could be, it is very regretfully such a short sighted CEO is in place.
I am sure you will make it in the Swift world. While the Swift community is growing steadily, the Xojo community gets smaller. Perlman is not thinking on his employees, as long as the company last until his retirement, it is fine for him.
You made the correct choice by switching to Swift. I wish you every success in everything you do.
Maybe but it depends on how you define “plan” and who is the successor.
I had a client for 15 years run by a rich guy in his 80’s and he had a succession plan too … until a large company waved $12M under his nose, then it went out the window. My guess is his daughter would have taken over and that probably would have actually been a good thing. He lived to regret his decision, I’m told … he fantasizes about buying it back but that’s unlikely to happen now.
The difference is the client actually had a powerful and needed market solution in their vertical … until the large corporate cockroach bought them out mostly to get rid of them.
It’s always someone with way more money and vision than sense might buy Xojo for what Geoff is willing to sell it for but more likely it will just circle the drain, then go down it … and like you say, it’ll be a moot point.