No Xojo Meetups

General
1

If you go to meetup.com, and search on “Xojo” no meetup groups will come up - anywhere in the world. If you search on “Xamarin” tons of groups come up - and they are big. For example, the Xamarin group here in Miami has 241 members. How is it possible that something that didn’t even exist five years ago has rocketed past Xojo so fast? My guess: cross-platform support, which means iOS and Android these days. $82 million in venture capital doesn’t hurt either.

I don’t know what Geoff’s position on venture money is, but if Xojo announced an $82 million investment, I would find that very exciting. And this begs the question: does Xojo need venture money to keep from getting crushed by Xamarin?

2

Could it be possible that Xojo thinks small is beautiful, and prefers being a private company ?

3

As much as I understand your comment, the history of RB/Xojo shows that this company is something completely different. Fast growth is not everything. Most of the companies trying to compete with the big ones have failed at some point. Xojo has its market niche and I always thought that a big advantage. Personally I even think they should have been more puristic and stayed with desktop development only.

In addition Xojo is here to simplify programming, while with Xamarin you get the whole .NET API thrown at you, which is a bit more complex.

4

That can be repaired fairly easily. If needed.

5

The size of SIG’s isn’t everything…
A case in point… I used to belong to the Largest Custom Trike Association in the world…
yet in San Diego, we can only get 20-30 members, while California has the most members per state, Missouri has many more members per capita.

So perhaps with XOJO, the developers either don’t need/want a social aspect, and rely soley (mostly) on THIS forum instead?

6

[quote=216454:@Dave S]
So perhaps with XOJO, the developers either don’t need/want a social aspect, and rely soley (mostly) on THIS forum instead?[/quote]
This forum is one of Xojo’s best assets.

7

I believed XOJO made his own technology, yet undiscovered.

Same as undiscovered island, full of natural beauty.

8

Sorry guys, but this sounds too much like the fox who didn’t want the grapes because he couldn’t reach them anyway. So lets be a bit more realistic and honest about it.

I think we would all love a Xojo user group in our nearest city.

However Xamarin is C#. Is anybody surprised that C# is bigger than Xojo?

See, already looks very different. C, C#, C++, Objective C, Python, Java, and even the latest entry Swift … they all play in a different league to Xojo for one reason or another.

9

… and VB .NET (albeit it constantly lags behind in development).

10

Not really sure why this conversation is relevant…

If you weren’t a XOJO developer or someone with some level of interest in XOJO you wouldn’t be here.

If XOJO has more or less users than Xamarin is not important, what is important is the quality of the users that are involved.
Now of course XOJO as a company would want as many 'customers" as they can get. But to “us”, the current customer base, that number has little affect… Perhaps a positive one, if the quality of those “new users” raises the knowledge base of this forum, or a negative one if they are “newbies” that can’t read the documentation first :slight_smile: [not to say that education isn’t one of the tenents of this forum].

So more users DOES benefit XOJO as a company by increasing revenue, and MIGHT benefit the existing community, and as a developer I don’t care if Geoff drives a Ferrari or a Ford Fiesta, as long as he is content to keep moving forward :slight_smile:

11

We do have user groups worldwide, some much more active than others: http://xojo.com/resources/usergroups.php. Most use Google Groups, not Meetup.

12

maybe xojo groups are using other tools than meetup.com. I personally think that the meetup price structure is a little expensive, especially for what most groups use it for.

13

You have a broken link for the Seattle group. And many of the other groups have been dormant for years. I would retire them.

14

Meetup.com has a massive audience. The fact the Xojo has nearly zero mindshare there should be viewed with concern rather than denial. Because the same is true at other massive sites like Hacker News and Upwork: not a peep about Xojo.

I believe that adding Android support would go a long way to remedy this. I also have high hopes for Raspberry Pie because that is a hot technology.

15

Fact is, RealBasic and Real Studio had a real spontaneous recognition. A recent discussion about books lead me to discover there are much many more books about RealBasic still sold today on Amazon and probably elsewhere. Some of the most active groups happened at that time.

The change of name to Xojo probably happened for a reason, and I can understand the idea of parting from the Basic world. Unfortunately the side effect is that “Xojo” is notoriously unknown. So much so Google translate insists on translating Xojo to RealBasic, as if Xojo was a dialect.

Somehow, the 12+ years momentum of the RealBasic brand has been thwarted to nothing, and the tremendous culture it represented. Culture in the largest sense, which means recognition even from non users.

I know this is a sore point for Xojo marketing, but proof is in the pudding : where are the numerous authors who had glady promoted RealBasic ? Sure, we have our great Eugene Dakin, but where are the printed books ? There still are dozens of printed books about VB, same thing for C or Java, but abolutely none for Xojo. Not even by Xojo itself. So no presence at all in bookstores. I know the future is in tablets and electronic readers, but paper is far from being gone.

I agree. Denial is no way to address the confidential existence of Xojo. I am a definite fan, but precisely, I feel too much shadow is not good for my favorite development tool.

About Meetup.com, I have no opinion. Maybe Xojo being mostly used by individuals or small companies, all that means is that other languages are more common in bigger structures.

The Android thing is a different issue. At the risk of hearing the screams from geese of the Capitol once again, I maintain the Xojo culture is deeply rooted in Apple. Sure, there is some level of Windows support. But mostly on a folding seat.
All the rest is engrained in Apple technology. Heck, even Linux is somewhat related to the Unix underlaying structure of Mac OS X. iOS is a logical choice for a company that masters Mac OS X technology. After all, even if system calls have different names, they are often very close in syntax.

Android sitting on Java is a horse of a different color. The technology is quite different. That, plus the regularly presented objection that Java executables can be decompiled, is probably the best excuse for Xojo to stay away from something they probably fear not being able to succeed with. Amazingly, the request to support Android is solid second, just behind 64 bit that is currently in the pipeline and will be supported in 2015R3. That should give a hint to Xojo about the interest of exploring that venue. But by the same token, iOS has been a request for many years before it came to be. Well ; it is not even quite adult yet.

As I said above, I believe Xojo feels small is beautiful, and does not want to grow too much. I don’t mind at this time. Basic4Android works fine. Sure, it is not quite Xojo, but it is enough for me. But I do believe indeed that a company that presents itself as a champion of cross platform cannot for very long maintain that claim without supporting over 50% of all the computing devices combined.

16

AFAIK the first version of RB was called CrossBasic and compiled for the Java VM.

17

Java Applets
And that was dropped before it was RealBasic 1.0

18

As someone who’s never used Meetup.com and doesn’t plan on it, I could hardly care less.

I think there’s a large portion of the Xojo user base that are programmers who grew up with the internet. Things like Usenet and Archie and Gopher were what we used to get excited about. Fortran 77 and Turbo Pascal were what we cut our teeth on programming.

I would venture that most of us in the above 40 crowd really could care less about the “hip” social websites. If we want to organize a meeting, we will do it here…

19

I went to meetup.com in response to this thread and tried to start a meetup, but at $10/month, it’s not worth it.

20

[quote=216454:@Dave S]
So perhaps with XOJO, the developers either don’t need/want a social aspect, and rely soley (mostly) on THIS forum instead?[/quote]

It may sound odd, but this forum is one of the MAIN reasons I chose Xojo over other languages. It’s so helpful and people are willing to work with you here, rather than giving you the “RTFM” attitude that was fairly common with several other forums I went to.