It’s a rather tight budget for “innovative.” 
Heh. What a joke. $1500 for a project like that? Some scam developer in India might take the project just to get a bit of $ out of this guy and maybe even deliver something that won’t work (but it will be exactly what he specifies). But by then the developer will be long gone and the owner will be out some money. Sadly, he’ll probably blame it on Xojo when it was really going to fail from the outset for being a cheapskate.
Can you tell I’ve dealt with these types of clients before?
My favorite one was an app that generated a 300 page sql query (when copied into a text document) and it was taking 2 hours to run the query (it was crazy there wasn’t that much data and no need to do it all in one query). I said we would rewrite it so it would be a lot faster (Mrs BKS has a DBA background) but it would do it in multiple queries. Gave a price. They said no - too expensive. Every 6 months they came back asking if the price was any better and we kept saying no. I’m sure they want through a couple of amateur consultants that couldn’t fix the ‘one big query’ problem and in the long run cost them more. I think they went out of business not long after.
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Why would any sane person write a query that long, even if worked OK… How could they possibly hope to maintain that code!!!
-Karen
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Yeah, never found out. I think the original developer was trying to be clever or something. It was simple survey data - maybe 60 questions with a few hundred responses per location. It was a stupid way of doing it and whomever sold it to them wasted their money. There was no way that SQL was ever going get faster considering it took about Xojo 20 minutes just to create the string (and they did that the slowest way possible too). IIRC this was a MySQL database and we were flabbergasted at how they went about it.
To be fair, with over 20 years of Xojo consulting we fixed A LOT of bad code. Xojo sold them on the ‘programming is easy’ bit and people (not so quickly) realized that writing a (working) app requires a bit of skill and knowledge that takes time to acquire. I almost always added the ‘necessary bits’ (like preferences, code signing, About Windows, icons, etc) into my proposals and spelled it out so that they’d ask the developer that underbid me by 50% if they were going to include that or not. Sometimes that tactic worked and other times it didn’t.
Other examples: Projects that had nothing but global variables. Projects with hundreds of windows with hundreds of controls each that used the default names. Projects with nothing but thousands of 1 letter variable names. Projects with all code in one method (the entire project!).
Certain consultants came up on a regular basis with projects to be fixed as well and we dreaded those because they had coded themselves into a box and the fixes were painful because they knew just enough to get it 80% there and that last 20% was where they went off the rails. I’m not claiming our code was perfect and someone else never had to fix our code after the fact but I think our reputation was pretty decent. We did a lot of projects from scratch in 20+ years in a lot of different industries.
Ah well. All water under the bridge and I don’t really miss the consulting side of things. Enjoying being a worker bee in a language that’s up and coming and gets better every year. Now to manage layoffs for a few years…
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Yeah I’ve encountered these from time to time as well. I just got lucky in that the were paying the original author wheelbarrows of $ so I just took the same wheelbarrow and quietly rewrote everything, tackling the biggest bugs / performance issues first so that they were feeling good about it. Sometimes what they don’t know won’t hurt them.
I never did work with a client who was trying to dictate a particular approach or style (one giant query, etc). I suppose those are typically involved in writing the original / first system and can’t let go. I had one of those clients once who hired me and the understanding was that the existing platform wouldn’t scale to do what they wanted. They paid me a lot of money to write a whole new system but then when it was time to cut over to it they couldn’t bring themselves to do it because they no longer understood what was going on. They ended up throwing it all away. But we had a clear understanding what I was being paid to do and that was their choice and not due to the system not working or anything like that.
pfff… marketing-voodoo…
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Karen, I see everyday tech depts of ppl who do exact the same crap… it’s sometimes so sad…
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‘Lower your expectations’ - excellent advise 
https://forum.xojo.com/t/xdc-wishes/75490/6
makes me wonder if thats not a typo
expect nothing
maybe be amazed when they announce something is shipping immediately
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I guess they gonna have a very tight grip on the attendees.
sigh like children having dreams and wishes… what I’ve read ChatGPT Debugger? Come on…
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I’ve been working on Xanadu for PHP for a while now. Recently I’ve been building an invoicing module. Displaying a record along with related records is super easy. But adding business logic is a little harder. I’ve been struggling with some of my design decisions.
The struggling is my own making which I can redesign.
But with Xojo I’d have to struggle with their nonsense too.
Even with some struggling, ditching Xojo is a win.
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We should take some bets on announcements at the Keynote in the morning. I’ll take some guesses:
- Attendees from 22 countries! yawn
- New users! New women users! The future is bright! yawn
- Shout out to attendee that’s attended the most conferences! yawn
- Shout out to the farthest away! yawn
- Look how long we’ve been around and look how many languages/tools are not! yawn
- Look at how much we’ve done on Web 2! yawn
- API2 it’s great! Adoption is awesome! yawn
- New documentation is best documentation ever! yawn
- Android to be released R2 in public beta. All attendees get the R2 beta today! yawn
- Mobile combing iOS and Android Q3! (but of what year?) yawn
- New Toolbar! Sidebar! Popover! yawn
- Xojo Libraries in 2023 yawn - too little too late since 3rd party market is tiny
- Modern UI for Windows. Okay, a little interesting. I expect a ‘proof of concept’ demo. 2024 at the earliest
- Grid Control I expect a demo that will show less than 1000 rows with very simple data. Probably 2023 but it will be at least a year before usable.
Nothing about the easy database connection class. Nothing about the Mac/iOS declare automation. Only because I think Geoff thinks these are ‘advanced topics’ that the audience is too dumb to care about.
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Brilliant!
But you forgot the new documentation (!!! double-yawn), and the spontaneous demise of the web version of the feedback app (triple-yawn). I expect there will be a minute’s silence and a few emotional words, maybe even a memorial speech from an MVP.
Not during the keynote. Geoff doesn’t share the stage with anyone.
Showing a demo with LOTS of halfbaked features, inconsistencies
and shorcommings but Way to late to make changes to the design… 
Merch you forgot Merch… T-Shirts, Cups, Stickers etc…
New XDC T-shirts. Progress never stops.
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Oh may be they announce Xojo Android in public Beta for Pro Users. And they may release Xojo Bugfixes, fixed more Bugs then ever before even the ones coming up with fixing another ones. And they may announce that Xojo Mobile as universal project coming soon. Oh, no, I guess coming soon they will not use anymore since 2016 or was it 18???
everything reminds me to Darth Putin, my favorite Parody Troll when he said couple of days ago:
15 months my 3 day war is 9 months of my 2 month battle to capture half of the 54th biggest town in Ukraine as a fraction of the 23rd year of my 5 year plan to get Russia off either of its knees. I remain a master strategist.
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