Take it from me constantly being told you’re worthless or wrong or stuffed up isn’t going to help.
As a person who suffered the most horrendous abuse throughout their childhood and teenage years it doesn’t take very long of being told your worthless or useless before you start to believe it. And trust me that feeling never goes away.
Companies are the same, support staff stop wanting to provide support at the risk of being singled out on the forum, programmers are reluctant to make changes to avoid offending people, public relation staff don’t want to do press releases just in case, and in the worse cases owner and managers may just say enough is enough. Geoff may say well I bought Cross basic in 1996 and it’s been a good run but it’s time to call it a day. I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve seen him singled out, he obviously has broader shoulders than me. I’ve seen too many companies close from this. Think how the staff must feel sometimes with some of the comments.
Now if you find a bug sure report it and announce it on the forum as people need to know, and if you find something that doesn’t work the way you expect there is nothing stopping you writing your own replacement and sharing that on the forum or adding it as a possible example in a feedback case as a solution. There is also nothing stopping the forum from creating a library of open source routines to share until Xojo corrects the issue.
Now I realise that this post is going to offend some people and I apologise. I also expect to get banded from the forum because of it, but I just see a lot of me me me and not enough community.
I’ve been using Xojo from all the way back when it was called Real Basic and I even played with Cross Basic when it was still a shareware product owned by Andrew Barry. I’d hate to see it disappear.
If a product is off track then it is usually better to get the criticism than to have people just silently leave. Since that kills off a product very fast.
I know for me then I want to know if something is terribly wrong in my products.
Not passing any judgement though if some posts have been fair or helpful.
I agree, criticism is useful but not when it’s constantly repeated and repeated just to beat with. I think an updated list of known user found issues would be helpful.
I think an updated list of known user found issues would be helpful.
That would be the list in Feedback. The problem is, Feedback isn’t really appropriate for complaints of a general nature.
I agree with Björn Eiríksson that it’s better to have criticism than to have customers silently leave. But criticism should be constructive and should never leave Xojo staff feeling like they’ve been personally attacked.
I doubt it would be too hard to add a category to the forum where Xojo could list known issues and possible work arounds. I don’t use the feedback app myself.
The criticism is constantly repeated not because we want to abuse Geoff or Xojo or tell them they are worthless - they aren’t. The problem is that Xojo has become dysfunctional and stopped listening to their customers. We complain because nothing gets done. There are bugs that I have had open for nearly 10 years that aren’t fixed. Why should I not complain about that? Instead of fixing those bugs, Xojo spends time coming out with multiple new frameworks which then get deprecated just a few years into their use.
That’s the problem. I’ve had Geoff call me up and talk to me personally about stuff and spend an hour of his time on the phone with me. It was cool. I like Geoff. I think his overall vision is great. Problem is, it appears to me (and many others) that he and his team get sidetracked or can’t see the forest because of the trees. It’s not a desire to put down Xojo or hurt them. We point this stuff out because first of all it helps to vent our frustrations. Second, we want to make Xojo better.
I wonder if people have lost sight of what Xojo really is. Many people have said it but I not sure, it is a framework, sure it had high level frameworks like web1/2 and the like but it also has a low level framework of all the basic functions.
Unlike many languages it is uniquely extensible to create whatever you wish. I use it to write native assembly code which I doubt it was ever intended to do.
If a feature doesn’t exist then there’s nothing stopping you creating it, until Xojo adds it.
Now don’t get me wrong I fully agree there are some areas that need work, Api2 and Web2 seem hot topics.
Myself I prefer to code everything myself just using basic functions, and I’ve not had any issues with API2.
I’ve never said criticism was a bad thing but constantly repeating the same thing over and over can be tedious as others have commented.
We users have the luxury of using our forum preferences to “Ignore” or “Mute” specific users or threads (and what a wonderful thing that is!), but I don’t think employees of Xojo (or the MVP’s) are quite so lucky.
I wonder if it would be a useful metric to see within your own forum account: a count of the Ignores or Mutes they have against them? Maybe then people won’t be so surprised when their posts are flagged, removed or their accounts outright banned because of their unhelpful (and sometimes insulting) remarks.
Perhaps Xojo should pay an honorarium to open source developers who do this? Or offer free Pro-level licenses? Etc. After all, Xojo is a for-profit, closed-source product: its community consists of customers, not volunteers. I know getting a check in the mail for the open source libraries I’ve published would certainly sweeten my attitude.
I believe they did give away a Xojo iOS license to the author of an iOS library back in the day.
I am very grateful for your open source library wrappers and would one day love to be able to send you some kind of thanks. When I can comfortably afford to, I certainly plan to.
I’ve released open source libraries for Xojo that includes: libcurl, zlib, libssh2, libpcap, unrar, libvlc, libsodium, libarchive, an HTTP cookie engine for the URLConnection and HTTPSocket classes, a URL parser, an FTP client and server, and others.
Lol oh no not mocking you. Everyone is singing the same tune lately…we don’t want to work for free tirelessly with no reward in sight the colors.js and fakers.js gentleman took it to the extreme and went public. Someone needed to
let me just slip over to GitHub for a moment…
Everyone is singing the same tune lately…we don’t want to work for free tirelessly with no reward in sight 
