How could Xojo seriously publish a spotlight on that actively hates on third party components?
Not to mention it isn’t code signed or notarized, and includes the instructions many of our expert users warn never to post.
How is this leading by example?
Would you care to elaborate?
This is in relation to the latest spotlight on post. Go skim it and investigate the developer and product.
It is a great example of what not to do.
In addition to that, the unnecessary hate toward third party developers makes this distasteful. Hence, I’m bothered and have taken just as low of a road.
The author is proud of not having had to use plugins. I get that. Not convinced it comes over as hate.
But given they haven’t even used App Wrapper ( or any other tool) to get notarised, it strikes me as much a fiscal choice as an intellectual one.
I haven’t tried the app because even I will not use terminal to remove the quarrantine attribute.
They are unlikely to sell any until that is addressed.
I agree - not a good example to set, and a relatively simple issue to fix.
Well I was told weeks ago that the spotlight would be about someone else 
For accountig software based on Xojo we use at home over 10 years Kontor…really professional with great support.
Here’s the original blog post from the forum.
Everyone has their reasons for either using or not using third-party components* within their projects including, as Jeff calls out, being able to accomplish something without them. Personally I’m a fan of them, but for my own business and business model, it makes sense.
I don’t think shaming a developer for not using them is appropriate. I’m sure Edward has his own reasons as to why he doesn’t use them. On the Xojo front, I don’t see how showcasing projects that don’t use third-party components is that big of a deal, as it definitely shows that Xojo is very capable in of itself. And even if Xojo is more capable with third-party components, this doesn’t negate the prior point.
I agree, the code signing issues are a problem, but one has to be sufficiently deep in Apple development to understand all the ins and outs of this. Not everyone comes with this background or even has macOS or iOS project experience within Xcode (e.g. generally a good foundation in understanding Apple’s way of doing things). It’s great that the follow up thread helped point Edward in the right direction, but we should try and remember that not everyone is an expert in everything and mistakes will be made (heck, I know I’ve made plenty in my own life).
The Xojo community is small enough that in my opinion, we should be doing everything we can to help prop each other up rather than tear each other down. Much of this comes down to tone and how something is said around here. In many regards Tim, I would agree with you and I definitely had some eyebrows raised. But can we be kind and supportive instead? I also concur, especially if someone’s not a third-party component user, having this showcased if you’re a third-party component developer is hard, but that’s life. Not everyone is going to be your customer or will be the right demographic for third-party component usage.
Also while we’re on the subject, Alyssa notes at the top of the blog post…
Spotlight On posts focus on Xojo community members. We’ll use this space to tell the stories of people using Xojo, share amazing Xojo-made apps and spread awareness of community resources. If you have an app, a project or a person you want to see featured in Spotlight On, tell us about it!
Xojo is just trying to bring attention and awareness to apps created by others. This not only helps out these devs but also provide some interesting real-world use cases for Xojo out in the wild. I suspect any one of us devs could reach out to Alyssa and have our own products showcased if we desired.
* Purposely using the term third-party components instead of plugins as not everything is a closed source plugin and some components are simply raw Xojo source code.
Well said, @Patrick_Salo
Thank you!
The only thing that bothers me about the Spotlight On post is that it seems obvious no one even try to run the app being featured. That’s just sheer laziness. There should be some minimum standards, like the app actually runs on all platforms it claims to, and that a reasonable amount of detail is provided by the developer about the product’s features.
Care to provide a link? Google isn’t helping with this one.
I just read the post and I don’t see the hate. He seems proud of his accomplishments - and he should be, if he built a PDF engine.
I shy away from using plugins as well, because I like to learn and prefer to minimize my external dependencies. It helps that I only develop for the Mac, of course. The one time I can think of when I used a plugin was one that provided larger integers than I could get in pure Xojo or conveniently via Declares.
I didn’t read it as hate, I mean by that logic making plugins or mods to begin with is hate on the original software. I mean why would you make something that’s able to be made to begin with? They just sound like an excited DIY person.
I purchased plugins but ultimately decided against using them because of how their license keys needed written into an API call. Which I just couldn’t justify having in Offline Software.
Then I just started either using my own stuff or open source alternatives.
Some plugins are great but they just aren’t what everyone wants to use.
That’s not how plugins in Xojo work.
I don’t have time to develop a database or an IMAP plugin or do a million framework calls.
I thought the interview not very professional. There were no interesting questions like “what challenges did you have”. Questions like “what does your app do” or “how does your app differ from all the other apps out there” would have been helpful.
Even with the app being in version 1 it doesn’t look very polished.
Here it is:
https://shakehands.com/de/solutions/32-kontor-complete.html
Though the site is only available in German and French…
From MBS plugins purchase email:
if not registerMBSPlugin(“YOUR NAME”, “MBS Complete”, 202404, “LICENSE KEY STRING HERE”) then
MsgBox “MBS Plugin serial not valid?”
end if
You need to install MBS Main Plugin to register.
Looks like an API call to me. I wasn’t sure if users would lose access to my apps if this server went down or not.
What server?
Plugin license server
That is a call to a function in the MainMBS plugin, not an API call. So no server involved and nothing that can go down or break…
You can test it, either with a firewall like Little Snitch or with cutting your internet connection - the plugin will wortk…
As far as I’m aware, there isn’t one.
Ouch. This is not an API call. Why didn’t you ask Christian if you had questions in regards to the registration?
When I bought it a year or so ago on the license page it had this in the agreements:
“By using the product you agree to allow the product to contact Monkeybread Software’s servers and transmit encrypted data which can be used for usage statistics, check for updates and check for license validity.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20230326022248/https://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/xojo/license.shtml
It seems this has been removed since then so it could be different now, so sorry for my mistrust but I don’t really know what’s going on in the background of that function. If I’m wrong then that’s cool for me!