You are right.
When I buy a brand new car, it have everything in need built in.
In more than 40 years of been a driver, I never added anything to the car (unless a Radio, a Radio K7, a Radio CD player in the early years).
Even for (some) basic stuff, you need to add stuff to Xojo to get things done.
It is good for the plug-in creators (I love them), but not for my wallet / then for my productivity.
This recalls me when I get a Pentium IV laptop 10 ears ago:
I had to download a driver to remove “press the mouse pad is a click” feature (I was unable to adapt myself to that)
Search for a DVD player (software).
Note: because I was in anger about “press the mouse pad is a click”, I go out to buy food, I saw a DVD (Paul McCartney live at the Cavern *). Then, back home, when I wanted to watch it, I could not: nothing built in in that f Fujitsu-Siemens Windows XP powered.
I agree with this, though if I purchased a car and after a service it no longer had fourth gear I might be just a little upset. And that’s what this discussion is all about. A feature has been dropped, a feature the OP is relying on being supported, so he no longer requires service.
Imagine if your company was to purchase an accounting system and then the supplier dropped support of the Debtors ledger, this may be a similar impact on the OP.
Of course this may not have been a problem for the OP if Cocoa had been delivered earlier - he could have just let this slide until a solution was available, but don’t forget also he’s been funding the Cocoa build with his annual 50% upgrade fees - for how many years I don’t know.
There should be a commitment to the user base that might involve investing in a technology that doesn’t have a positive cash return in return for asking for commitment from the users in the form of annual fees that are paid in expectation of continued support.
People who write programs (professionals as well as hobbyists) are more akin to car fans who go under the hood, than consumers who simply drive. In many ways, coding comes from a taste for building things, or is it like the chicken and the egg, programming makes one more perfectionist. Now you have a nice piece of software that is Xojo, already full of goodies and features, but one reads something about C libraries, and all the sudden, cannot live without it. Another one hears about a new compiler, and decides Xojo is no longer any good until it uses that technology. And yet this one has decided that if he cannot understand how to achieve what he wants, it must be an intolerable bug that Xojo people should be chastised for.
Limitations and possibilities for DIY improvements are in my humble opinion the major enjoyment of Xojo. Just like in my youth I enjoyed taking apart the engine of my Renault Dauphine and put it back together. If everything was here I would not find enjoyment in discovering new declares, or creating a larger ProgressWheel, or programming hotspots in WE. If Xojo was perfect, we would not have any pleasure in seeking solutions, workarounds and achievements. We would probably sink into boring discussions about Byzantine aspects of notation _not that we don’t about i++ for instance.
All in all, I would not be interested if there was no hope for improvement. I would not care if there was no discoveries to be made. Christian would stop his wonderful plugin business. Mac OS Lib and Windows WFS would become uninteresting in the eyes of blasé users. Xojo imperfections are seeds of improvement and part of its charm. Even the long wait for iOS is candy for expectations. When it will finally get here, it will quit being the substance of dreams to become target for criticisme. Just like it happened with Cloud.
I have stopped upgrading RS at 2012 R1.2 when I felt I did not need the new versions. It can be perfectly legitimate. I did not throw out the baby with the bath water, though. I have enjoyed the language for over 12 years. I am not going to drop it out of a whim. Even if, like many other here, I sometimes enjoy coding in other languages. Mistresses are one thing, I always come back home to Xojo.
These days cars have more software than you think. Have you never been to a dealer to get the car flashed? And just wait until you get over-the-air updates and apps in the car.
So the car analogy isn’t really valid anymore.
[quote=84715:@Beatrix Willius]These days cars have more software than you think. Have you never been to a dealer to get the car flashed? And just wait until you get over-the-air updates and apps in the car.
So the car analogy isn’t really valid anymore.[/quote]
I would never drive a car under Windows 
when the AC in my cars breaks, I always use the WINDOWS in my car (I roll them down)
And yeah… I have needed to get my car reprogrammed when a thief stole the electronic keys…
Cost me (well the insurance company) $1000 (US) to rekey the locks, and reprogram the computer for the new keys
[quote=84051:@Sean Clancy]
Right now, I’m learning C and C++ which have many more libraries than Xojo has - and many of them are free![/quote]
“Free” depends on whether the hours it takes you to learn a new language are within your billed hours or not, this said by a person that enjoys learning new stuff.
In my case, it’s kind of upsetting to not have QuickTime move forward but it’s really not Xojo’s fault. I have an app that uses QT which I will keep with Xojo 2013 and with the other ones, I’ll start using 2014. Down the road, someone (MBS?) or something (SVG animations?) may come up with an alternative.
Ummm, no.
There are people who like to tinker, and that is great as a hobby. But most people want to get things done. Or as a former Prof of mine in 1988 or 1989 once said:“Markus, you have 20 min to explain to me everything I need to know to use the computer. I’m not a computer expert and don’t want to be, I’m a biologist and the computer is a tool to be used.”
Luckily it was the first Mac in the department, so 20 min was plenty, but her point is still valid today. I have an app to write. I don’t care much for bugs but they are a fact of life. But I expect functionality from my tool. A car without a roof that you can only drive in sunshine might be ok for some and unusable for others. Sure you could build a wooden roof, but you shouldn’t have to.
The car analogy is a rather poor one as any car has a fixed set of components which it MUST have to be a car, and is usable as a car without any of the extras.
Programming environments are somewhat different. According to the car analogy database usage is optional, and I didn’t use any database during over 10 years of programming with Xojo/RS - but how big would the outcry be if Xojo dropped database support? How pissed off would people feel if they get the same “advice” that the ones depending on EditableMoviePlayer or QuickTime are getting? They are not tinkering. Sean put years of work into an app that he wanted to sell commercially and just had the rug pulled from under him - i think he deserves a bit more than irritating analogies.
[quote=84733:@Dave S]when the AC in my cars breaks, I always use the WINDOWS in my car (I roll them down)
And yeah… I have needed to get my car reprogrammed when a thief stole the electronic keys…
Cost me (well the insurance company) $1000 (US) to rekey the locks, and reprogram the computer for the new keys[/quote]
Not so smart “Thief” as they should have taken your car also 
Reminds me of my situation with my truck keys … Um … a thief took those also… Or they are laying somewhere else in the country because I dropped them
The car analogy is totally faulty.
GM doesn’t come & rip out or replace components in your car while its parked in your driveway.
OS vendors do make changes and as you update versions things change.
Quicktime & its cross platform nature was one of those victims along the way.
Apple doesn’t even use it for iTunes on Windows any more.
And before anyone says “oh but you guys should wrap AV kit on OS X and Windows Media on Windows (and something on Linux) in a way we can just use the same objects as before so we don’t lose functionality” - sure - it might be theoretically possible.
Given the number of other things on our plates already its just not something we can take on and do with all the other work we already have.
Sean can continue to use the versions he has - nothing stopping that.
They stole the wifes purse which had her key to our CRV in it… as well as a brand-new replace key she’d had made earlier that day.
The wheels and axles on the CRV were chained together until I could get the insurance to approve the re-key
[quote=84797:@Dave S]They stole the wifes purse which had her key to our CRV in it… as well as a brand-new replace key she’d had made earlier that day.
The wheels and axles on the CRV were chained together until I could get the insurance to approve the re-key[/quote]
Oh no! 
[quote=84793:@Norman Palardy]The car analogy is totally faulty.
[/quote]
My point in using it was just that the minimum expected feature set is not static but increases over time.
Sure but in a car things that were features at one time get removed in newer models just like in software.
Anyone recall the old fins on Cadillacs which are now long gone - totally non-functional but were a design feature.
You don’t usually “update” your car while you own it (i.e. get a totally new engine, transmission, brakes etc) but you often do get new underpinnings for your chosen OS when you update versions.
It’d be like trying to update a yugos engine & transmission to that from a ferrari yet keeping that familiar yugo look & feel.
Never mind the bitching & swearing that the mechanic is going to engage in trying to fit that into the yugo and all the frame upgrades he’s likely to have install to make it so your poor yugo doesn’t rip itself apart when you hit the gas pedal.
Hence why I say the analogy is faulty from a number of perspectives
Calm down. I was just pointing out that people who program seldom limit themselves to what is in the manual. It is intended as a rather flattering statement. Without tinkerers, we woud probably still inhabit grottos.
Analogies are often used to distance the debate. If now you are crying wolf over the car image, and consider any statement as a lack of consideration for the OP, you may want to take anything written in this forum with a grain of salt. If not with a hint of humour sometimes. It is done amongst civilized people.
We all work hard and long hours at designing the best programs. When Apple pulls the rug, we all shrug. Stuff happens. One must adapt.
Depending on what is needed, mpv may be a better option when they get their library out.
I have used mplayer heavily for several projects and it’s fantastic. From the mplayer2 fork eventually mpv came up, which seems to be a clean break but strive for the same efficiency.
I’m currently tracking this ticket from the mpv community, which is the last bit missing to have the mpv library ready. It only works as a replacement for players and media analyzers but when you have those needs and also need to understand almost every video format out there, it’s worth it.
It’s a different option, but might be worth keeping an eye for, depending on your needs.
I decided to avoid Quicktime a long, long time ago, unless I needed quicktime-specific functionality, due to the problems in cross-platform and expectations on end-user installations.
As a player mplayer might suffice
But Quicktime gave us a lot of editing capabilities as well - thats whats got folks upset is the loss of editable movie etc
[quote=84997:@Norman Palardy]As a player mplayer might suffice
But Quicktime gave us a lot of editing capabilities as well - thats whats got folks upset is the loss of editable movie etc[/quote]
Sure. I tried to make it clear mpv (or mplayer/mplayer2 in slave mode, before it, and VLC as well) work if you just need a player.
Sean Clancy here… nice to see me being used as a case study 
My program works great - the bummer is that when it runs the first time, the user has to install a few things.
Windows - QuickTime, Java and Open AL
Mac - Open AL and Java.
I bent myself over backwards to incorporate the ABCMusic library for cool music notation. That took easily a year.
I sell the program and people love it. It’s a little bit of Pocket Money.
A few notes about MoviePlayer.
I built a cocoa version and the rate version still works (XoJo 2013v4). Of course it crashed when any whiff of QuickTime code came into play.
I did muck around with AVToolsMBS. This worked considerably well - but Christian has it designed so that you can’t just buy the license for the AVTools, you have to bu a couple of other plugins as well. Simply $$ I don’t have.
Right now I have it in Mac(Carbon) and Windows.
My big deal is recording (tricky), playback (easy), editing audio(cutting it, pasting it), displaying waveforms (I can do this with Quicktime - I paid Christian $50 to write some code that did this).
My software is pretty much the pinnacle in training software for Bass and Windows (Guitar SightReader Toolbox). I just wish it was easier to do this for Cocoa (then I might be able to sell it through the app store?)
Pretty much everything in the software is stuff I hadn’t seen in Xojo - only in my imagination…Check it out and tell me what you think?)
Anyway, I am limited to using Xojo r4.1 as anything later doesn’t fly properly!
Sean