Are these examples of crap apps or good ones?
Are you really asking if Fantastical, one of the best reviewed Mac apps in any category, is an example of a good or a bad app?
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Sure, other major companies can get away it, like Adobe hasnât made a Mac like interface for decades, but theyâre well established brands and people will buy them no matter how good or bad the UI is.
Weâve seen an increase in Electron based apps, which use web pages for their UI. Illustrating just how much Xojo fumbled the ball and someone else picked it up and has run with it.
For you, the rest is in the âdoesnât bother meâ, but modernizing the listbox has been in Xojoâs âdoesnât bother meâ category for a long long time.
That 20% of developers that can âsafelyâ be ignored, are the ones whoâre capable of elevating Xojoâs public status. IMHO (because Iâm one of the 20%) Xojo should not only listen to this segment, they should offer an affiliate program, whereby we promote we used Xojo with a link. Any downloads or sales that come from our sitess reward us with a small fee or a cut of the sale.
Apple used to offer affiliates for their App Store, this created a ton of sites, discussions, helped end users find new exciting apps and improved sales for 3rd party developers. When Apple took that away to boost their profit, a lot of 3rd party developers faded away.
However, I donât expect Xojo to change course, they donât appear to be interested in growth, only maintenance, which is a real shame.
Circling back to Electron, everytime an established brand switches to Electron, they tell the world about it, which instantly elevates peopleâs awareness of Electron. Imagine if Xojo had remained a customer focused company, that could be Xojo.
âIf no-one knows about it, no-one downloads and if no-one downloads, no-one knows about it.â
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Where should I begin?
Oh, I know, the bug I fought with yesterday. The âAre you sure youâre qualified to use a USB deviceâ dialog auto-closes, sometimes in under a second, sometimes a few seconds later. I have to position my cursor where I think the button will be, keep one hard ready and then plug in the device and tap, tap, tap on the trackpad in the hopes I actually click the button before the dialog disappears on me.
Utter garbage, especially as this dialog is ONLY needed if the USB device identifies itself as an input device. Otherwise it is simply scaremongering.
Edit: Norman (the ex-Xojo employee) has problems with external screens on his 16" MacBook Pro, they flicker on and off again with Ventura, heâs gone back to Catalina so he can carry on working. I would link to the video, but links to his site are blocked form this forum.
I wonder what the split is between those who use Xojo to make apps to sell or license and those who use Xojo to make apps for internal use. Of course I want my apps to look reasonably slick and professional, but it actually isnât important at all to the people who use them or to the people who pay me to write them - the apps just need to work. Improvements to the IDE are far more important to me than âmodernizingâ any controls, which over the past ten years has meant making them less obvious and less usable.
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It is not just âmodernizingâ things, it would be useful to have a UI that is consistent instead of half baked custom controls mixed with halfbaked implementations of native controls.
For example, in windows, The âTextAreaâ looks like windows 95.
xojo deprecated the native Msgbox and replaced it with a generic window not matching the Dialog theme, it looks awful compared with the native dialogs that you cant avoid.
The tooltip class is also a regular window with a random theme.
And many more examples. I made the feedback cases YEARS ago, but⊠the out of the box GUI your apps can have still sucks.
My guess would be that most of Xojoâs current customer base are building bespoke apps for either their own use of for specific clients.
Still doesnât mean Xojo should shun those whoâre building general public facing apps, especially if Xojo would like to increase awareness of itâs product.
I also get a feeling that there isnât a sense of pride at Xojo.
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While I have no data, I do believe that a great deal of customers are running the latest version of the macOS, and whatâs surprising is how few actually know about itâŠ
I added a check to Sleep Aid to notify the customer when their Mac updates, because Sleep Aid thought the Mac was crashing during sleep at night, in this case it wasnât, Apple just silently updated the customers Mac and re-launched all the apps that were running before.
I donât doubt that youâre correct, but my point is that neither my users nor my clients have ever mentioned or probably even noticed any of these things. They just donât matter in my use case.
Not that Iâm unsympathetic to those trying to make saleable consumer-facing apps (and Sam in particular has made some absolutely beautiful ones), but maybe Xojo has decided that thatâs not their primary market.
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It took me 3 years to develop version 1.0 of my cross platform healthcare Application (I am a MD with 30 years programming experience). About 40% of the time was spent on writing custom controls from the ground up, because of the problems raised by the author of the thread.
I use Dart / Flutter for iOS and Android and just like Xojo has an edge to those on Mac and Windows I dont understand why a 10 people team wants to maintain iOs / Android / Windows / Linux / MacOs product ⊠mac vs Windows is cross platform enough. Do that well, and grow from there 
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As far as I know Xojo is maintained by 5 developers ( I do not count in Geoff and his two daughters).
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There are 6 persons and Geoff around the table on the picture of the teamâs page.
I donât know for Xojo, but many times I saw people telling other how they should do and manage their compagny, they realized all the problems when they tried themselves.
I donât say youâre not true in what you say, I just guess there are others problems to manage that we donât imagine.
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I almost never read app reviews.
Thank you Julia.
I did read this several times ⊠but I really donât know what you are trying to explain here.
I suggest you take a moment to write it in your own language and have it translated by DeepL.
No offence meant.
Iâve been developing using realbasic and now Xojo since the beginning, and really donât understand why @Geoff_Perlman continue to not involve devolepers with a so great talent as @Sam_Rowlands to make Xojo better than ever.
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No Jeffrey, I write in English and I translate back in French with DeepL to verify.
I just try to explain that if it was obvious what to change in Xojo and in which domain put the ressource (say the Xojo developper to work on Mac or Window or iOS or Android etc. version) Geoff would do it.
Say in another way, do you think Xojo team donât follow Samâs (and other) advices because they canât or because they are not agree (they think they are bad advices)?
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Add @Sam_Rowlands and why not @Christian_Schmitz and some others to the team would increase the price.
If Xojo costs $400 with a team of 6 persons, it would cost $530 for 8. With the same count of customers, but we may hope there will bee more with a better product.
Iâm not disagree, and I can say I think I would continue to buy Xojo with an evolution like that.
What I try to explain with my (very) bad English is that thereâs no obvious solution.
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and ask for chapter 11âŠ
Comments like this arenât needed. Please donât dismiss anyoneâs contributions to the company.
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