DesktopControls are available only in the recent Xojo NEW projects…
So the target audience is new comers…
Yes - but newcomers will need some assistance - gained by Youtube or other online-sources. I don’t believe that I’m the only newcomer who is really puzzled by all those changes. I was almost at the point to give up. No chance to build a new, own application based on thing I’ve learned
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That’s the issue with all their changes. It costs you at least 15 minutes to produce a seriously good one minute movie. You only invest that time, if there will not be massive (breaking) changes every quarter of a year.
Those who do, are faced by the fact that their movies are outdated. Now you have people like @bkeeney who are conscious that all their hard work is now unfortunately more or less useless (I learned a lot of his movies) and they delete them.
Others are just upset and keep them online. A newbie, however, will now challenged with tons of contradicting content 
. I wrote quite a few blog posts on Web2. Not sure if they are still valid with the new releases, but I assume that some hints (which were workarounds) are now obsolete, as the bugs were corrected. Perhaps they might even break projects in new releases …
The big differences in other languages is that their documentation it top notch. Perhaps not understandable for a newbie, and that’s where tutorials (even outdated ones) might help you in better understanding the official documentation. In Xojo’s case the tutorials are IMHO often the replacement for the “missing manual”
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It would be nice if there would be no change or if they would have name spacing so both, the old one and the new one would be usable. But Xojo decided against namespacing and so this chance passed still away.
As they want to become more multi platform in their view they try to give all the objects and components the same name but came to the conclusion that this will not work so they came to the next conclusion that DesktopButton and MobileButton and WebButton are the best way. They could before but…nobody wanted. They became with this decisions less cross platform than ever before if somebody would ask me.
The next part is, that they are definitely try to build small versions. For example: you need plugins when IOS Buttons shall have a background. And for many, many other things. And as the next clue: with Android this will also not work. Anyway, they do what ever they want to. You can work two years on a Software and tomorrow morning you find that the version with the functionality you need is deprecated and the new version does not contain the needed Stuffs.
Further y<ou may then find out that the deprecated Version get’s no updates and security Updates anymore. They say: Xojo is anyhow always secure. Trust me. It is not really. No Software Development Kit is secure. Looking on Web the risk dramatically climbs is your JavaScript Libs you use are years old. Like the ones of Web 2.0.
Makes everything really complex and can result in an insecure or not working Software. Anyhow: for System changes like M1 CPU or newest MacOS Versions it can be from time to time that you need to change the Xojo Version while you are not able to compile or to run anymore. For IOS: no question for the new Versions you have to change.
So, at the end: it is dangerous to develop on this base. You can do it but your Code can be unusable tomorrow. That’s what really disturbed me with Xojo and why I fast went back to Java.
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There is a lot of complex poppycock here in this thread. However, if you follow this advice, it will bring you a long way:
Simplicity is beautiful… keep it simple.
Now you can continue your poppycock if that makes you feel good. Enjoy!
‘Complex poppycock’ is rather unspecific. Please let us know to what you specifically do refer and why you disagree/what your point of view is.
Scrolling always helps me on complex poppycock 
Sometimes one might need to first fix broken scrolling capabilities:
It has nothing to do with disagreeing. I have only limited programming knowledge compared to the people here.
What I actually want to say with my expression is that many times when something is not working or seems complex, it is better to see if you can simplify things.
The use of the word “poppycock” was more of an attention sign (nothing unrespectful). I heard that word for the first time in the “Father Brown” series.
Maybe I am infected by my spouse, who is a woman of very little (few?) words.
Simplification is difficult these days in programming, as the world becomes more complex day by day. But isn’t that a valid indicator how important solid, valid and feature complete documentation is a must? And good documentation lives from good processes, for instance letting the reader edit it when a mistake is found. I don’t want to send a separate email etc. Of course you will need moderator etc. for changes, but that’s not something Xojo endorses.
So here we are, many people frustrated, about the inaccurate documentation and many posts you have first to find, telling you how it really works (if you are lucky).
Back to the topic. If the question is what Xojo’s target audience is, then the current documentation doesn’t reflect that. Xojos says the target audience are no longer pros, but newbies won’t appreciate the current state of the documentation
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That is a very good idea; regretfully, it is impossible to share your idea on the Xojo forum without being locked.
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When I started with Xojo Web 2.0 the most complaints where about Bootstrap and now needed CSS. Sorry. As a JavaFX Programmer and also a Vaadin Web and Wicked Web Programmer I can say: normal Business since a decade. And exactly that makes it really complex to work with people having no Idea of programming. Leaning is on first stage. And even Xojo is at it’s end to help in that case.
While I can change the skin of my Applications like I want to, I can build native looks for every OS - if I want to. For JavaFX, Swing and html/javascript. Needed knowledge. And this world will become even more complex within the next years. Every decade we have a technology-growup which is really high level outside the Xojo World. And now this grows slowly into the Xojo-environment.
And here is CSS only one thing. There are many more things. For example Delegates and so on. We use them since years now in CodernameOne (before there was a Xojo IOS.) But we also have learned: we have to abstract them to be able to use the same on Android. While there is no Delegate but Android functionality. So it is more and more complex when going Cross platform. And that process Xojo is stuck in. Looking on IOS I can see: you can’t even control the look and feel of your App: Xojo has by self not the functionality for.
And so I come to the conclusion: it is made for people with less knowledge but with a help-environment and Docs which are not helping for that situation. While Java has tons of docs for all Java Versions still online, Xojo Docs are always only for the newest Version online. And the Forum? TOF is not sorting between Desktop 2022R3 and 2018R1. Desktop. And so: if it is not written in the thread exactly a newbie can’t get out and find out how to do stuffs correctly. I don’t want to be in that situation.
I posted it a few times and I am not blocked (at least not at my knowledge 
), not sure if those posts survived, but at the time of writing there was indeed no appetite to let the community make changes. What works quite well for wikipedia, should work for a small tool as well ;-). And in a good system, no big harm can be done anyways, as you always have the possibility to revert back and the community will anyhow discover such wrong behaviours immediately.
Perhaps I am naive, but I think that even people ranting and moaning about a tool, would never (or rarely) do that on a documentation, but the forums. Thousand if not millions of open source projects, including wikipedia are showing that day by day.
I like and prefer var and use it. But I did not consider Dim to be some kind of problem to be solved either. VB.NET still uses Dim. One gets used to it. It’s there for historical reasons. Beginners have been learning Dim for a couple of generations now without it being some kind of significant obstacle to understanding. If it had been Fubar or Blargh instead of Dim they would have been using that.
In the end, the value of adding var, such as it is, is probably more to make the language a little more like other more popular languages. Which would only be of (misplaced) interest to more experienced developers.
As a side note I think it’s laughable that in many places in their sales pitch they say that “the Xojo language” is “very similar” to [insert language they are comparing it to here]. Java for example. I mean to say that a BASIC dialect is just like a C-family dialect is just not an assertion anyone would take seriously.
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There have been cases in Wikipedia where content was created/altered by bad-intentioned contributors. However, the system allows for tracking that and take appropriate measures, if necessary.
Now, Xojo adopted a different platform and I don’t know how it caters to collaborative editing.
Besides, Xojo’s documentation is a mix of marketing material, tutorials, IDE and language documentation. The language reference would need to be separated from the rest, for a start.
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It’s true that Xojo is not as well known as C#, Java, JavaScript, Swift or VB, but that concern is usually centered around finding qualified software developers to build and maintain a project. There are hundreds of thousands of Xojo developers scattered across the globe. With users on every continent it’s not difficult to find Xojo developers.
Hundreds of thousands of Xojo developers scattered across the globe… 
Help me: how many people attended the ‘Developer Retreat’?
The millions minus the 30 something who attended and survived, fell asleep at the airport waiting for their show stoppers to be fixed.
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Those marketing statements could easily fuel the improbability drive of Zaphod Beeblebrox’s spaceship 
That was one reason a wiki was used way back when
And community editors were permitted
I dont even call why that got turned off but that was a few years before I departed
Javascript was specifically mentioned
30 or so
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Exactly, that’s what I meant. It is okay if changes won’t appear immediately but need to undergo some review. But one of the best things of Realbasic / Xojo was always the collaboration aspect and the seniority of most users. I am convinced many committed users would have volunteered to give a helping hand. I mean why does INN exists? Most left but are still somehow “engaged”.
Some believe it’s a platform for haters only. But then the platform would have a different name and function differently. Most here still believe that Xojo might somehow find the right path. The only thing most here want is for it to be clearly defined (this will hurt some, please some), but it’s kind of clear that the status quo is suboptimal, as the last release unfortunately shows again.
Of course it’s their business. I can also understand that they don’t want to hear critical voices on “their” forum, but in the 21st century things are then discussed elsewhere. However, if they really had hundreds of thousands of active users or even a million, then there probably wasn’t just INN, but rather its own open source documentation. They are probably too small to fail, but as well too small (and expensive) to build your business upon.
If you take a tight bend in a bus at 120 miles an hour and you suspect a concrete wall behind it, then you just jump off. Yes, that hurts, unfortunately nobody got away from them without pain
But back to the topic. who is now the audience. Android devs? Will they really wait? Web devs, do they still have hope? Desktop? People are still relatively happy, but need their bugs to get fixed. I have little hope that new controls will optimize the current status quo. new junior devs? Won’t they just google a bit around and bump into millions of flutter, dart, go, rust,nodejs, C#, python etc. tutorials and realize all those are free?
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Like this where its pretty explicit
https://www.reddit.com/r/xojohaters/
INN exists because Xojo wont permit any discussion thats critical of their practices, business, tool to happen on their forum. They’ve basically stuck their fingers in their ears to stop listening.
Hope might be a better word than believe
Doing the same thing over & over and expecting a different outcome …
Thats really disappointing
And the latest release does indeed show exactly how much they’ve quit listening to their own users even during their beta release period
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