XDC2019 Open Conversation - Day 1

Sitting in the Miami Marriott conference rooms waiting for @Geoff Perlman 's keynote to begin.

Welcome everyone!

Live chatting/reporting on discord: https://discord.gg/sTE6v9

I always really appreciate the yearly KemReport from XDC.

@Paul Lefebvre takes the stage to wild applause.

Geoff takes the stage…

He’s reviewing preliminary conference stuff right now, like how the sessions will be recorded. When posting about the conference, use the hashtag #XDC2019.

15% of conference attendees are new this year, and 40% from outside the US, to attendees 34 sessions + events…

The XDC 2019 iOS app is on the Apple App Store, if you’re interested. Android users can go through the web site.

https://xdcapp.xojo.com

Mentioning @Hal Gumbert and @Tim Dietrich, along with @Thomas Tempelmann , for their efforts in evangelizing Xojo. The former two are here, and Thomas might be at the MBS conference later this year.

Reviewing the demographics of the user base. The base is getting younger (under 35) and are now about 40% women.

The forum will be switching over to Flarum (flarum.org) and that’s in the testing phase right now. Sounds like they expect all the current content to make the switch.

Pet Peeves better move over successfully or I’m done here.

Recognizing apps for the Xojo design awards, Goldfish (desktop) and Snow Maps (iOS).

(Not meaning to slight the other apps/developers being mentioned, but I can’t keep up. I’m sure there will be a list soon, if not already.)

In the last 12 months, there have been almost 500 bug fixes. Supporting Dark Mode took quite a bit of effort that ate up a release cycle.

Talking now about what’s new.

  • Dark Mode.
  • iOS Table
  • Window labels are native and better text rendering
  • URLConnection
  • IDE’s layout editor is faster (showing a demo of the difference now)

Now turning to The Path Forward…

Xojo Cloud moving to 64-bit, named hosts, stand-alone apps, and load balancing.

Interops…

Better way of making OS API calls. The XDC App is using it now, and Geoff is showing an example of how they can substitute for Declares. It seems like they will turn OS calls into pseudo-native classes and include auto-complete. Will be used in Android (more later).

Turning attention to plugins. Will take a back seat to Android, so plan is to finish that, then circle back to allowing us to generate plugins.