Why more programmers are not an option? That was and is the solution if a team is to small. They have enough revenue and could even have more. And could do iOS, android, web, Linux, windows, Mac, command line. Two programmers per target would be nice plus one for quality assurance and a real, real good one for the job as the team leader and one engineer as a market analyzer for squeezing out what will be needed. On top for every market at least 2 testers are also needed and not the programmers. That was never working, will never work and is not working. For two other things also one well educated programmer is needed: the compiler urgently while thatâs needed to hold it up to date and an addendum guy to be able to work out a good api for plugins. After two years they will get in the point for a new releasing
Who knows how things happens? I never tested Web Edition before, as I donât use it. JSON engine was changed and bugs were risen during the tests and some engineering options were made from Xojo. The found issues passed simple tests and few days after, it was launched. New bugs were found when the product reached the community and a more specific use case found that something mutable became immutable and silently failing. It was like x=1 , x=x+7, print x, and you see 1.
So I decided this cycle to try the web edition, well⌠web 2 exists for a year now⌠It should be mature enough after several releases. And then I made few stupid tests already thinking in a limitation I have for a UI that I need. I need to know if a field ended with TAB or ENTER and also capture ESC presses. Such possibility was suppressed because Xojo removed the keystroke events, but Tim Hare gave me a good idea to try, that for a test I needed just a TextField, one Default Button and one Cancel Button⌠And just with such simple setup I could crash the app. A stupid test after creating a new component/class/function would show it. And those 2 BUGs I found in my simple and dumb page, survived many releases, until my first try. And that worries me.
There are much more of that kind of errors. Sometimes not nice
$$$⌠it would cut into the profit margins to spend money like thatâŚ
I wonât mention, that it takes money to make money⌠an investment that improves the product will increase sales, therefore increase profit, allow more developers to be hiredâŚ
How the heck do you think Woz and Jobs went from 2 guys in a garage, to one of the largest Tech companies on the planet? By skimping? not even.
Thatâs what i ment, I started byself in a Garage with production of PCB in 1987.
Some CEO think of success as to have a good product used by millions. Others more like âStill existing 25 years laterâ
So, as the saying goes, âInsanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.â⌠as having a crapy tool is part of the doing the same thing, maybe success for them is just that, and still existing is enough for themâŚ
Because the money just isnât there. Iâve agreed not to speak about the company financials, plus Iâve been out of the loop for a long while now, but they donât have the revenue to support that kind of a team. While they could take out a loan, if the increased staff doesnât help them increase income to continue paying the salaries, they are screwed. I understand the concept of spending money to make money. But thereâs not a high chance that expense would pay for itself. So they build up staff slowly once they are sure their budget can afford it.
So it seems the management decisions/priorities in the last 5+ years have not helped them to do that.
- Karen
I would guess they dont want to hire someone just to lay them off I revenue doesnt increase sufficiently to cover the hire. Maybe at this point theyd have to borrow $ to cover a hire (I dunno) and they dont want to do that
Dunno
Its not a new problem
The testers channel seemed a LOT quieter this round than previous ones
Maybe that played into what did / didnt get found ?
Staff levels havent changed much from when you and I joined
Stagnant would be my word
You can make money with software not under this conditions. If they want to make this business to a real business they need urgently to be nearly everybodyâs darling. To be that they need to bring up a real business Modell from it what is only possible if they fullfill what they have and for that they need teams and not single players working only in the same company . Coding is not falling from heaven at all. If you want to play Steve Jobs youâll need to play this game under exactly that conditions. Itâs not the starting in a garage but I believe that it helps much if you started poor with not really money in your pockets. Xojo is in the todayâs Form a never ending nightmare for many users and also the team.
To bring xojo on a new stage exactly that is needed while it otherwise will die
Well⌠To be true what I found were alpha level bugs, the internal teams should have squashed them before reaching beta testers. I never expected finding such things, maybe the number of users of the web edition is so small that they donât have enough users to criticize such bugs to cause the stress that it should on Xojo shoulders.
I know I personally put in absolutely no testing. My development isnât at a point testing is viable. Itâs nice when they line up, but they didnât in this cycle.
I believe this is sold over 25 years, in which are many renewals from the past now never in use anymore (we did that a for a couple of years in the early 2010âs and donât use it anymore but are still counted). Watching the little activity on TOF, the small number of attendees at their XDCs and (except a couple from their own employees and MVPs) lack of retweets and likes on their Twitter I would say a couple of ten-thousand is a safe bet. Insignificant in dev world.
The CEO still thinks he has this hip new start-up. Sometimes, it is actually sad to see his disconnection from reality. Something that dreamy kid in his garage may have had, not someone who barely survived with his company. They are long passed the chance to be the-next-big-thing by a couple of decades. No shame in this as many do not make it. Just donât act as if you still can. Leave it to the Elon Musks of this world.
Kicking many users from the testers (for not so clear reasons to me) was definitely not the smartest move, especially since they donât have the resources to do it themselves.
If only they kept with the Desktops instead of the failed Mobile (and at some level Web) experiments. From what we have seen from Android (after half a decade of development) is not promising at all. Even before launch, they are years behind anyone else. Money they donât have down the drain. Now they need marketing half-truths to lure in new customers. Something that always backfires and smells like a desperate move. That âlook how great this isâ thing only works for so long. At some point, it has to show. Now they are left with a mediocre product over all platforms, instead of having excelled in what they used to do great. A shame really when you think about itâŚ
Since Web 1 has no future and after seeing what Web 2 delivered (or better: NOT delivered) I am in the process of rewriting my 2 main Webapps since months (and will still continue for months). I tried to communicate my problems/concerns in TOF (without result) and of course I also read the answers Geoff gave on this subject, so I moved on (and stopped âwhiningâ). Instead of adding new features to my apps I am rewriting them from scratch in Java and Wicket (a framework with a quite steep learning curve which a have to learn as I go, so progress is sometimes slow). What an incredible waste of resources.
Guess what, I am behind the same process but not using wicket. I am using cuba platform for development. What a difference I got first when redeveloping: Java makes it possible that the result behaves like it should. âWhiningâ was not my theme. To let them come through the door with that kind of behavior and marketing Ideas behind I wanted to beware other from this process while it is a hard and ressource wasting process do develop two times.
Itâs nice to see others realizing the state of Xojo. I personally wasted about 4 years on Xojo Web. Now I donât use Xojo at all. I just canât trust Xojo anymore. 
Last time I tried to trust was when Geoff perlmann guaranteed that xojo 2019R3.2 is still under Support what was not true. After that action I was out of this discussion for ever. I will never come back to Xojo. Changed to Java Toolchain for Web, Desktop and Mobile and thatâs it. Cross platform at all and no discussions around