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.