I am very proud to announce the delivery of my first Xojo iOS app. Gardening by the Moon is a very simple application that helps you organize gardening tasks according to the position of the moon. I know there is no proof of the moon’s interaction with plants, but some people believe it. In any case, gardening with the moon can help the gardener to plan his tasks in a logical way.
For the moment the application is only available in English and French. There is a lot to do for more localization and more features. But I’m already working on it.
Why did I choose Xojo for this application? The first version of this application was made with XCode at the start of Swift. For my learning curve, Apple’s solution is going too fast. And it quickly became difficult to maintain the application with the updates of Swift to version 2 then SwiftUI… For version 2, I used Flutter. I had to learn a lot but with Flutter I was able to make an iOS and Android app at the same time! Flutter’s problem is dependencies and continuous updating. Whenever I wanted to update my application, there were a lot of updates: languages, ide, dependencies. This causes a lot of problems.
So I decided to go back to Xojo. I’ve already been using Xojo for some time for personal and professional desktop apps. There are two things I really like about Xojo:
1- You can follow a 10 years old youtube tutorial and easily use its code in the 2023 version of Xojo
2- The community: It’s a small community compared to that of Swift of Flutter. Very small. However it is an advantage. It seems like everyone knows everyone. And more than that, Xojo experts are easy to contact and they always respond even to a novice user.
I take advantage of this message to thank you all.
You can download my app here:
or
Your feedback will be greatly appreciated, but keep in mind that this is an early release, it’s a free app made by an amateur, and there’s a lot of work to be done.
You can also send me your email in MP if you want to be part of the list of testers of future versions
Please tell us about your experience. Compare emphasizing the way to develop in Xcode versus Xojo.
I understand from your initial writing that you had a bad experience with Swift and Flutter. But, it is interesting for me to be able to read the opinion of others and the feeling of writing code with those tools.
Congratulations Sébastien! And thank you for sharing your development experience with us. As Jose says, it’s very interesting to see your journey that led you to prefer Xojo. Especially compared to Flutter. If you have other experiences to share on this, don’t hesitate to share them with us, it will be much appreciated!
For my part, I had used the Titanium SDK / Alloy for mobile platforms a long time ago (Xojo didn’t support mobile platforms at that time), it was one of the very first tools (if not the first) to handle native controls with a javascript bridge. It was simple, powerful, elegant, and really fun to use! A beautiful startup! (dead now) With a nice community too. But there was also this “problem” of dependencies to manage, so it was better not to stay too long away from your code and libraries evolutions. Of course, there were tools to manage all this automatically, and the advantage was that you automatically benefited from the progress of the OS, as well as from the extraordinary work / progress of many JS communities, but it’s true that it was a stress to take into account.
Application maintenance is now my first criterion. In my experience, Xojo wins this battle for casual developers. You can open an old project (coded many years ago) and run it and it works! You can also easily download a previous version of Xojo just in case.
Free tip for Xcode: never download Xcode from the AppStore and manage your Xcode update yourself.
The worst frustration I’ve had with Flutter with my app happened this year. I didn’t want to change anything in my application. I just wanted to change the sqlite file included in it (with plant names, task list…). I spent hours just getting my app working in Android Sutdio: Updates, dependency issues, deprecated 3rd party plugins… Too much todo. Flutter’s very large community is also a problem. Many solutions are not up to date. A nightmare !
