No offense to the Windows and Linux versions, but when running Xojo on OS X, it’s like a dream. Running Xojo on OS X is quite probably the best experience ever 
No lag, no sputtering, no slowness what so ever.
Thanks for making having a Mac worth it!
Can’t wait to upgrade my five year old Mac, though. (Waiting for PCIe storage for Mac Mini along with Iris graphics)
Perhaps (wait… while I put on my flame-retardant suit)… it is because (my opinion [shared by many] ) is that OSX is a superior operating system.
First time I ported an Xojo app from OSX to WIN7 I was flabbergasted at how many things I had to deal with special due to problems with Windows (flickering being the most annoying)
Uploading Maverick on my test laptop as we speak… Hoping the “Experience” has become even better 
[quote=41935:@Dave S]Perhaps (wait… while I put on my flame-retardant suit)… it is because (my opinion [shared by many] ) is that OSX is a superior operating system.
First time I ported an Xojo app from OSX to WIN7 I was flabbergasted at how many things I had to deal with special due to problems with Windows (flickering being the most annoying)
Uploading Maverick on my test laptop as we speak… Hoping the “Experience” has become even better :D[/quote]
That’s it exactly. OS X is a (flame-suit ready) superior OS. Mavericks works awesomely with Xojo, though I do experience a wee bit of lag. However, I’m putting that up due to the fact that my system is approaching the half-decade mark. Mavericks on the other hand, performs so much better than Lion and Mountain Lion which performed badly on the same system.
Also excited about the iPad Air. 1 pound and thinner than a pencil? (Watch the ad Apple released today to see what I’m talking about.) the iPad Air is my dream iPad come true.
Wearing an Apple t-shirt, I think I would agree with the previous two comments, OS X is superior to Windows in many ways, such as double buffered graphics (automagically for you) and GPU accelerated displays.
For instance, tapping into some cool stuff underneath, I was able to update a Retina display on a 15" MacBook Pro at 200+ fps, thats pushing 5 megapixels to the screen each time… Not technically true as the OS limits screen updates at 60 fps by default, but you get the idea.
Apple’s Cocoa framework is huge and so powerful, compared to Windows.
However if we look at from a different angle.
Windows is the #1 used OS in the world, it doesn’t have to implement technologies to excite and motivate developers. Developers will want to build for it as it has the largest audience.
Windows apps also need less updating and maintenance as Windows itself, changes very little between versions and still maintains backwards compatibility for apps that are 18 years old… Try running an 18 year old on a Mac, it ain’t going to happen!
Apple is #2 in the desktop OS market, and that forces them to bring new and exciting technologies to developers, it forces them to aim higher as they need to be better than Windows in order to have some advantages. Even though most people don’t care about technology underneath, just how a device looks.
While the Win32 APIs don’t automatically provide double buffered graphics, the .NET framework does. Windows Vista and higher has GPU acceleration in the window server / compositor via DWM.
I suspect that it wouldn’t be hard to push that many frames on Windows either.
[quote=41946:@Sam Rowlands]Windows apps also need less updating and maintenance as Windows itself, changes very little between versions and still maintains backwards compatibility for apps that are 18 years old… Try running an 18 year old on a Mac, it ain’t going to happen!
Apple is #2 in the desktop OS market, and that forces them to bring new and exciting technologies to developers, it forces them to aim higher as they need to be better than Windows in order to have some advantages. Even though most people don’t care about technology underneath, just how a device looks.[/quote]
The lack of backwards compatibility isn’t necessarily a good thing for users or for developers. Time spent making an application use the non-deprecated API de jour is time not spent adding features to your product that your users care about.
Indeed… For a developers perspective, an app requires less maintenance on Windows than it does on a Mac, allowing developers to spend more time on their app than worrying about making sure their app meets the latest set of changes.
Which just adds to confusion, and why some apps perform terribly. However I’m certain it’s to maintain backwards compatibility. Which is something that Apple just don’t worry about.
I’m sure it could be done, but with OS X, as a developer the toolbox is capable of handling this for you, taking advantage of the graphics hardware in clever ways to deliver this kind of performance without the developer having to worry so much… Although it can take time to figure out how to use this stuff.
I think it has a heck of a lot more to do with the fact that Xojo is a primarily a Mac shop, and Windows plays “Second Banana” around here. If the company was Windows-centric, you’d see the exact opposite. Just look at the flickering issue on Windows. It is due to the Windows Exes being built with Win32, has been mentioned several times here. It took 7 years from the first time Xojo announced it was going to support Cocoa until it finally came out of Beta. 7 years. Think Xojo would be willing to put anywhere close to 7 years into moving Xojo from Win32 to .NET?
Of course they will. What utter nonsense. Perlman ain’t stupid.
Win32 API is simply not state of the art - .Net is what modern Windows apps are built on. And Xojo is simply not up-to-date here. It is not Windows which is responsible for the flicker here, but Xojo which makes use of an outdated API on Windows.
Which, on the other hand, shows a strength of Microsoft: The mere fact that Xojo still can do that - rely on the availability of Win32 - demonstrates how sincerely Microsoft is protecting investments of their clients. The experience with Microsoft until now was, that once one had written a program for Windows, one could use it for a very long time - compared to Apple.
Said that, after being a Microsoft partner since 1989, I anyway have switched to OSX and Apple products, some years back. In my experience their line of products is just better.
i had to write a small app in vb.net last week because the data access component was a .net dll.
i was struck by how nice an environment the FREE vs2012 was.
in the past (when i found RS) the .net framework was just coming out and most pc’s needed a huge download, but its pretty much everywhere now, including OSX and Linux it seems (mono).
i’m definitely considering doing some stuff in .net for my next project just to get a feel for it.
yes. In general, I found that many of the weaknesses of the development tools I used (xojo, 4D …) had its origin in the Mac world. 
I put a lot of time to notice it because I love the Mac world.
These vendors have spent considerable resources to just adapt to Apple (68000 → powerpc, OS9 → OSX, carbon → Cocoa, etc.), but also carry the tool on Windows …
Windows side, the development tools businesses have benefited from a much larger market and a remarkable stability. Saved years of development.
Example: two tools for rapid development: 4D (Mac) and Windev (Windows). Initially, these tools are quite similar. But today Windev is much more advanced. When 4D trying to survive (at a time when Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy), to carry the tool on Windows, to adapt to all the technological changes of Apple, Windev focused on new features.
(but this is all the more remarkable that Xojo or 4D come to develop interesting products)
So clumsy and inefficient as the new Xojo IDE is, that cann’t be a Windows or Linux product, that only fits to OSX.
I hope this wasn’t directed at my comment. Because I’ve been dealing with ridiculous Windows transparency and flickering issues for years and years (and if you poke through the old forum other programmers have been dealing with it for years and years before I started using RS) and that hasn’t seem to have been enough to get them to do anything about it.
Ignoring the OS differences and speculation about who is Xojo’s favorite son, my reason for viewing the Mac as a superior development machine has to do with the ability to run Parallels. I can test my app across several platforms (versions) easily on one machine. That makes whatever “apple tax” there is, (if there is indeed one) totally worth it.
My guess is we would see a Parallels for Windows if Apple wasn’t so restrictive with the OS X licensing.
My idea is that Xojo inc. also uses vm’s to test the Windows and Linux IDE and that that is the reason they don’t see how bad it functions on real systems. Especially on Linux the IDE is totally unusable.
Xojo gives the best experience on OS X because its principally designed by OS X users for OS X and on OS X.
Flickering, slowness, etc. in the Windows IDE are a direct consequence of the same framework bugs that plague every Xojo/Win32 application.
If you write a non-trivial Win32 application in Xojo on a different platform, your application will perform like the Windows IDE does.
Xojo gives the best experience on OS X because OS X doubles double buffering for you.
You have to work really really really hard to make OS X flicker.
Win 32 apps flicker regardless of the tool used (heck I can get Excel to flicker on Windows, or IE or Wordpad).
.Net applications also do double buffering so they have a nicer feel and flicker less (and their control set is a lot more capable)
Rather than doing 2 large frameworks (Cocoa & .Net) at the same time we chose to do Cocoa as it was a “must do” - Win32 is a nice to do but MS isn’t removing Win32 API’s - Apple has actively deprecated & is removing some older API’s so our OS X code HAD to be updated sooner or risk breaking outright.
I expect we’ll do a .Net framework - but its another big job - possibly as big or bigger than Cocoa since it’s not just updating existing code but an entirely new framework from scratch.
We have Windows & linux users on our team as well and we’ve debated priorities - and those are what we landed on.
Xojo apps are the only apps that flicker on my Windows 7 machine. Excel, Wordpad, Visual Studio, IE, etc. do not flicker. Neither do cross-platform apps like Thunderbird, Firefox, X-Chat or Clementine.
Microsoft only offers backwards compatibility, they don’t guarantee it will look nice. As a consequence Xojo doesn’t look nice on modern Windows: it’s merely compatible.
I tried Xojo on OSX and went back to Windows. While both have their foibles I know the Windows ones and am used to them. Learning to cope with the OSX Xojo issues required a new learning curve which I can’t afford at the moment.