Thank you, glad to hear it. Now maybe you can do something useful with all that wide open space in the Toolbar like putting the Bookmarks back in, adding some more icons, build an airstrip, plant some cotton… Yes, being a smart-■■■ but Norman, if anyone, can appreciate that.
And I would like to add something positive to say about Norman. At times his snarky replies can really wear on my nerves when I see users distressed with some problem, but he is very accessible and that is a fairly unusual thing in the software industry to get that much access to the developers. Same goes for the other developers, can’t say enough about how pleasing that aspect of Xojo is. I just hope they get some of these productivity issues resolved.
I think it’s rather early to be talking in such absolute terms.
For what it’s worth, to my astonishment, my 12,000+ lines are working just fine in Xojo, and although I’m barking my shins regularly in the new IDE, I like it. I also like the crisp cocoa rendering that seems to have appeared in my application.
My main project is north of 35,000 non-comment LOC and it is a bear to navigate. Plus I’m on Windows which never seems to help when you are talking about RS / Xojo.
Would love to give everyone a configurable toolbar.
Just we use the same toolbar everyone else does now (we didn’t used to it was a custom canvas) and while its native every where there is one its not as configurable. But we are working on it.
In the mean time - run 10.6 on OS X as the “Hide Toolbar” pill works and you get all that space back
Its become one of my favorite things in 10.6
Bookmarks are unlikely to make a return. Sorry.
Unless theres some real gate storming about them but so far they’ve been most quietly unmissed from feedback reports and other commentary.
The real usability hits we know are
locked tabs dont behave as they are intended to - once locked you should not be able to deliberately or accidentally navigate ANYWHERE else except within the item that was at the root of the tab when you locked it. ie/ if you lock a tab with a window as the root item then you can bounce around within the window, its methods, events, properties etc but can’t move to other parts of the project until the tab is unlocked. That would make locked tabs behave a lot like the old tabs in the old UI and should hep with the “getting lost feeling”. I know I’d like this one fixed sooner rather than later.
tighten up the spacing in the inspector
the inspector needs to be able to allow constants in nearly every field - we know that got lost along the way.
And we do have a plan - and it includes making the inspector more keyboard friendly.
need some means to display more information in the navigator about super class & implemented interfaces without cluttering it.
We’ve got some ideas but nothing that any of us really is enamored with
Sometimes I think I’m snarky because I get the impression that you guys don’t think I see the issues.
Trust me I really do.
I’ve been working with this UI for over a year.
I know the issues very well. We all do.
But the old UI had it’s own set of issues. There were many requests for the ability to “multi select” in lots of different areas that we simply could never have made work sensibly. And it also had it’s own share of “hey this change doesn’t stick when …” I know I fixed a pile of them when I first started and the IDE was already 4 years old at that time and there were a few that we’ could not fix.
We’re working as quickly as we can to fix these things - but we need to fix them right or there’s no point.
All that said there are things we need to prioritize.
There are people whose projects WON’T open in Xojo - or that get changed in subtle ways that can / could break them.
Those have to be dealt with sooner rather than later as they could wreck projects.
The productivity issues are probably what I’d say are “next” on the list. We’ve dealt with some and are working on others.
But, all this said, it wont get fixed in a single “point” release. I have no idea how many releases it will be to get some items “right”
We’ll probably tweak for many.
And FWIW the IDE code base is 200+ mb so “bear to navigate” is VERY familiar to me.
No, you’re not the only one, but you don’t speak for everyone or even most. Frankly, I haven’t seen you do anything but complain that someone moved your cheese. Have you asked anyone how they effectively straddle the two versions? It seems to me that might be a great interim solution for you until you’re more comfortable with the new IDE.
[quote=14474:@Melvyn Pate]And I would like to add something positive to say about Norman. At times his snarky replies can really wear on my nerves when I see users distressed with some problem,
[/quote]
I don’t think he is trying to be snarky… at least I don’t read his replies that way. (well I guess they are sometimes as he admits it! )
While I’m sure I sometimes annoy him, I am grateful for the time he puts in on the NUG and here.
[quote]
but he is very accessible and that is a fairly unusual thing in the software industry to get that much access to the developers. Same goes for the other developers, can’t say enough about how pleasing that aspect of Xojo is. I just hope they get some of these productivity issues resolved.[/quote]
While he is no longer a company employee, the engineer that helped me the most with his NUG posts back in the day was Joe Strout.
As for the New IDE… I’m hoping that future updates somehow make the navigator more productive, and screen real estate gets used more efficiently , and the library can show subclasses, and we can enter colors without the picker in the inspector again and… well you know
Quite frankly I still don’t understand why some of the biggest usabilities issues did not get caught pre-Alpha in the design stage… But we are where we are and the only path is forward…
I wasn’t expecting this happen overnight and I’m willing to wait an dgive it another go. This thread / convestation got started because I knew it was going to take time, so I suggested a couple of patches in RS to tide us over until Xojo is workable. I didn’t mean for my comments to come off the way some perceived, I would LOVE for Xojo to succeed and I continue to plop my $500 a year down for Enterprise / Pro access. And I appreciate the hard work you guys have put into this release, I know you have put in a ton of hours.
I was meerly making an observation that there are a lot of programmers here that are having trouble being productive in the current version and a lot of us still have to make a living and are likely going to need to do it in RS for the near future.
I know bookmarks are not getting much traction in the feedback, and I have no idea why. Do you guys just search for your code every time you restart Xojo? Because the tabs don’t seem to work well in this regard (retains the form, not the code between sessions). And another thing, when you hit a runtime error while debugging, it is very helpful to put a bookmark at the line before terminating the debugger. Then you can find it much easier.
I get that - you asked [quote=14111:@Melvyn Pate]What are the odds of a Real Studio “classic” release for bug fixes? [/quote]
And the answer I gave was (and still is precise)
Zero.
IF we were even entertaining the idea (which we’re not as far as I know) the VERY best we’d could fix might IDE bugs - but that isn’t where the issues really lay in 2012r2 and 2.1. Framework fixes are 100% not gonna happen there on any of the frameworks and that is, I assume, where you’d like some fixes. (Maybe I’m wrong?)
[quote=14493:@Melvyn Pate] I didn’t mean for my comments to come off the way some perceived, I would LOVE for Xojo to succeed and I continue to plop my $500 a year down for Enterprise / Pro access. And I appreciate the hard work you guys have put into this release, I know you have put in a ton of hours.
I was meerly making an observation that there are a lot of programmers here that are having trouble being productive in the current version and a lot of us still have to make a living and are likely going to need to do it in RS for the near future.
[/quote]
You didn’t happen to be a user when the 5.5 to 2005 shift was made ?
I was. I honestly thought Geoff & team were gonna get lynched. The reaction was MUCH more outspokenly “OMG WTF Have you done”
I know as I WAS that guy (ask Geoff)
And yes it took a long time to get as productive in that new UI as I was in the old one.
So I really do get where you’re coming from.
In all the years of using the IDE I don’t think I used them once. Ever. For anything.
And I know I’m not alone - they just weren’t that widely used as far as we could determine.
In the debugger if there was an issue I just hit “edit” & went to the code & fixed it right then & there
But different strokes for different folks.
I’m not saying they wont ever come back but they’re not on the drawing board at this time.
Dude you don’t get it. I’m not speaking for anyone but myself. I’m making an observation not a proclaimation. If doesn’t fit with your thoughts on Xojo fine, but quit speaking for me. 4 months is long enough, I’m not comfortable with it. No amount working with it is going to make my mouse index finger any less sore or make the navigator work any better. It’s a sea of events, methods, and properties and I get lost in 35K LOC project. I spend an inordinate amount of time searching and looking for things. Things need to change (and I think they will), but if not, I can’t use it in the state it is in. That is all I am saying.
Norman, I’ve given up on the RS bug fixes about 40 post backs. I know its not happening, it was just a suggestion.
Frankly I don’t know how anyone codes without bookmarks. They are in many IDEs including Visual Studio. I just fire up RS and the 4-8 code locations that are related to the problem I am working on are are instantly accessible. No searching, no digging through the History, they are just right in front of me ready go. Removing them really suprised me, because the space is there in the toolbar and how hard could it be? Same logic as breakpoints, you need to make and retain the location of a line of code.
Let’s drop this conversation, I’m tired, you have work to do, and other users are irritating me.
I was a user back then too… and while the layout took some getting used to (and i was probably vocal), IMO the real problems was the extreme bugginess and THAT was what almost got Geoff lynched!
IMO Xojo is MUCH less buggy than 2005 was at the same stage … the issue here IMO is more basic being the design decisions - and I think that is harder to fix than bugs.
I have some large projects as well and I find it pretty easy. What I do is enable the tab bar and then create a few tabs for my major groups/modules. I then have four or five tabs with much less data in the Navigator for each. Have you tried that?
Thanks. Yes, and it works OK for modules. But the problem I have with is Windows when I have a tab set to some code in an event or a method from a control and close it, the next time I start it up I get the actual Window in the tab and not the location of the tab. Do you see that?
And this is not a Xojo issue, but was true in RS also, when I start it up the line number is not retained, it just pops it up to the top of the method.
[quote=14506:@Melvyn Pate]Thanks. Yes, and it works OK for modules. But the problem I have with is Windows when I have a tab set to some code in an event or a method from a control and close it, the next time I start it up I get the actual Window in the tab and not the location of the tab. Do you see that?
And this is not a Xojo issue, but was true in RS also, when I start it up the line number is not retained, it just pops it up to the top of the method.[/quote]
Yes, I experience that. I guess I leave Xojo running pretty much all the time, so it never really bothered me much. I hope that you can get your issued solved, Xojo really is a great product. I know I am going through a major upgrade on one of the primary applications at work and I dread the phase of deployment… bugs introduced, not found during testing, users dealing with screen changes to accommodate new features, moving their cheese, etc… So, I can surely relate to Xojo with this one and sympathize with them. It’s a part of the development of a long lasting, evolving application. As a user, I try to move along and find new ways of working with things, especially on the first public release. I am sure that 2013.2 is going to solve a whole lot of the usability issues that users have brought up, until then, put on some happy music and find the best way to navigate. Time flies, it won’t be long.
That way we can still keep the LOTS of generated code, it can’t be so hard to fire up those UI events to do that from a command parameters can it? Xojo already fires up from project file association so it is half way there today.[/quote]
[quote=14412:@Norman Palardy]I work on the IDE using the IDE so yes … really I can.
I get that its not the same as the old IDE - but it’s not “unusable” thats what I do all day every day 15 hours a day.
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Man I have seen it many times in the software development environment… The developers think they can force users to work with the application the same way as they do, instead of listing to the user. And from my working experience in that field, it’s usually goes wrong by not listing to the user and not try to understand how the user want to use the application.
To me it seems users on each platform: Linux, Mac and Windows has different way on working with the new IDE. And Mac users seems to be more happy with the new IDE than Linux and Windows users.
[quote=14517:@John Hansen]
To me it seems users on each platform: Linux, Mac and Windows has different way on working with the new IDE. And Mac users seems to be more happy with the new IDE than Linux and Windows users.[/quote]
Clearly we still have some work to do so that the IDE will feel native on Windows and Linux.
Thanks Jeremy, I am running mostly with Windows although OS X is available to me. However your posts and another post about IDE Scripting have given me some ideas, I can’t do the OS X automation as is but I think I can do something similar with Xojo IPC.
Carl, the RBIDEScript program seems to work on Windows, so if that is your platform, why not just write some scripts to do what you need and call it with rbidescript? Sadly, rbidescript doesn’t seem to work with Xojo IDE on OSX :-/
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