XDC videos 'for FREE' advert

I never made enough direct money on the videos to justify them. For every minute of video there’s at least 10 minutes of research, recording, and editing. I think my final count was over 215 videos at about 65 hours of total length. Between the changes to iOS, Web 2.0 and API 2.0 and even to the IDE made everything obsolete. Even if API 2.0 hadn’t been implemented there were many videos that had to be redone.

The happy coincidence with the training videos is we’d get someone sign up, go through 20 hours of video, realize that Xojo isn’t as simple as they think, and then contact us to do their project for them. So in the long run it made us money on the consulting side. So I looked at it as a way of easy marketing and since we were pretty much the only training around we got a lot of traffic.

We’ve done our Go training through Arden Labs and they go so far as putting a consulting plug in the training material. It’s just a static page between videos but I’m guessing they get a ton of consulting requests. They also have a jobs board.

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The problem with this is that many of the users Xojo attracts aren’t in a business with a lot of cash flow. I’d say a vast majority of our consulting clients were of the small business variety. Big businesses (with an IT department) won’t touch Xojo or sanction it.

The so called ‘citizen developer’, in my experience, wants easy and cheap and doesn’t like paying for stuff. I think many of us that buy plugins do so because it’s cheaper and faster than doing the development ourselves but I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen over the years that refuse to buy a plugin due to cost or general principle.

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Not worth it unless you want to get into consulting. You’re doing all the hard work and Xojo gets all the benefits. I had approached them at one point to see if they wanted to help seed the initial development costs with some funding and they declined.

Now that I think about it more, Geoff requested that I delay doing any videos until something was completed. He said it was only going to be 6 months and it turned out to be 2 years. In that time I put up many hours of video.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that you’ll get no help from Xojo and their constant change makes some training material obsolete overnight in some cases. Might be better now that API 2 is (mostly) finalized but they’ve already said that mobile will merge Android and iOS as some point and Web 2 is, well, still changing to actually be usable.

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If I go back to my “corporate days” when I was in the group that decided on what tools were / were not to be used by ALL developers in the company, what computers we could buy, etc I can see why its a tough sell.
We’d often look at things like third party options for add-ons and the market for Xojo is small
We’d assess options for training from the company, and third parties - again this has always been a very small market
And we’d do our best due diligence to assess the overall stability of the vendor - financial, staff, etc ( it was extremely thorough since we had the $ to do it very well)

On many of these fronts Xojo wouldn’t pass muster then, or now, so its not surprising that Corporate IT balks at buying it for a internal use development tool

The other thing we would do is assess software we were buying & installing
We did brutal compatibility testing
Products created with Xojo may have passed muster that way

This is not the target audience of xojo. ASnd it looks like this kind of customer is more and more scarce

Their marketing has, over time, said their target audience is professional users and citizen developers
And people who want to write apps

Its not very focused IMHO

Could you name a few things, that you miss in the documentation?
Maybe I could mention this in the next MVP meeting?

Search the issues tracker for “Documentation” and you’ll see what everyone else is finding. Not to mention the way they have proven that there is no consistency in design so there’s no way to know whether the documentation will get updated or your code will have to change.

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https://tracker.xojo.com/xojoinc/xojo/-/issues/?sort=created_date&state=opened&label_name[]=Documentation&first_page_size=100

there’s 80 there

EDIT : here’s one I filed based on a question that ISN’T easily found by looking at the docs for DesktopWindow
Implicit instance ISNT mentioned at all on the page
So unless you already knew what to call this ability you probably wouldn’t ever stumble on it by reading the doc page

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I think it’s a good idea to get a varied sample of responses, you’re mainly going to get pessimistic responses here, we’ve all been burned by Xojo.

I agree with both @Tim and @bkeeney in that creating Xojo resources should be considered something you want to do to pass the time, rather than a business venture.

None of us here (except the MVP) trust Xojo to care about our interests, and that’s really sad. Because we were all advocates of the product at one time, helping in our own ways to improve Xojo’s recognition, helping new customers get upto speed with the product quicker and of course helping ourselves in the process.

In closing, unless you’re an MVP, I wouldn’t recommend it.

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The reason I’m not answering in this topic is because I’m just not interested in videos for learning; I prefer reading than hearing, that’s just me.

I’ve not yet been burned by Xojo directly (fingers crossed), but their changes for the sake of change are still very unpleasant.

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This might be the best response I’ve ever seen. Sums it up perfectly - at least in my case.

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