Stop whinging and support Xojo

Xojo is one of the best development languages on the market in my personal opinion. We are using it for all our new Saas solutions. Get your hands in your pockets and support these guys. $599 is nothing for for this brilliant multi platform product.

Anyone on here who has released a product without any bugs, send me your CV. I’ve got a job for you!

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If you are doing SaaS are you talking web apps?

In any case people have different perspectives… It looks like you have been a user since about 2015.

As someone who has used RS/RB/Xojo for over 20 years it looks to me that things are getting worst in that respect and not better…

But it’s not just bugs… it looks like they are removing features we have relied on for many years… Hope I am wrong about that but there seem to be two in this release i know of so far… the Listbox border methods and the RectControl.MouseX,Y.

Yes they can be worked around… but only with more of our time. And they also make it harder to transition older code to the newer controls… like API 2 in general does for code.

-Karen

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That is correct Karen so we have worked with Web Framework 1. We made the decision to re develop our solution from the ground up rather than try and port from Framework 1 and whilst we have a long way to go the hard work is paying off. I agree some features have gone like mouse over and that was frustrating but we have got round it.

I like what they have done over the last year or so. Its a transition to newer technologies and that can only be better for us all in the long run. Surely you want to move with the times too ?

I will say however, we are happy to take our time with this so can probably afford to be a but more patient

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If you don’t move forward, you’ll get left behind. I won’t say that I agree with all of the changes we’ve seen over the last couple of years, and @Geoff_Perlman and I have had some long conversations about my concerns, but in the end I know that Xojo needs to push ahead with or without me.

I’ve been using Xojo for 20 years now, give or take. I’ve built and supported apps for every platform that Xojo supports. There are bugs. There have always been bugs. There will always be bugs. There are bugs in any software (yes, even development tools and programming languages), you just can’t expect perfection. There will always be changes, even some we don’t like. One of those changes mentioned by @KarenA has broken one of my apps when I converted it to Desktop API 2.0, but it’s one I can easily fix given the time to make those necessary changes.

I’ve spent the last three days with my head down making the conversion from Xojo API 1.0 to 2.0 and Xojo Desktop API 1.0 to 2.0. I’ve modified more lines of code than I wanted to believe I’ve ever written, and I’m far from being finished. But it’s worth it. Xojo needs to drive forward, and I can either move with them or get run over. I won’t fault them for wanting to make changes.

After all of that, if you’re still reading, I want you to know that I don’t think you should just be quiet and carry on. Xojo doesn’t know what we need if we don’t tell them, and I tell them frequently both what I need and what I hear from others. I would like to see more constructive criticism about concerns rather than what we sometimes see where I just cringe and hate myself for reading/hearing them, but we’re not all the same. What I consider to be over-the-top vitriol might be a Sunday morning over coffee and scones to someone else. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to remember that there are other humans like you and me on the other side of these imaginary battlefields, and – in the case of Xojo at least – they’re quite nice and understanding people who I’m thankful to know.

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I would agree, Paul.

I do disagree with much of what Xojo has done. Many of the Web2 changes make writing web apps much more complicated - need to know bootstrap, CSS, etc. - All those were reasons why I chose Xojo instead of traditional web page development. I think spending time on a whole new API is somewhat silly as is creating new controls for desktop. All this seems to distract from bug fixes and development for new platforms like Android.

But all that said, Xojo is a terrific product. I think this angst people are having over the control.MouseXY stuff is silly. It’s so easy to work around. It doesn’t make Xojo harder to work with. I don’t know of another product that allows you to compile for so many targets so easily and so well. Even though I complain about things I disagree with, I don’t ever plan on abandoning Xojo.

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Totally agree Anthony. It’s Exactly that. Work Together!

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I love Xojo, my livelihood to some extent depends on it, and I will continue to support the company. I don’t experience any show-stopping bugs and I try not to whinge too much in public, but it does drive me nuts that they diddle around incessantly with the language, changing Dim to Var and Append to AddRow and Text to Value (for controls that display text!) when the IDE itself hasn’t changed in any significant way since RealStudio was dumped in 2013. I can’t believe that they use the thing day in and day out themselves and don’t see the issues. The Navigator is a disaster, and I have to question the self-respect of any company that would inflict this on its users for the sake of “modernity”:

And don’t get me started about Help Text. This is a crucial time-saving feature when entering code that has not worked properly since the transition from RealStudio.

Sometimes you just need to put the cost vs reward equation out of your mind and say “I’m going to fix this even if it costs me money, because I take pride in my work and I care for my users”.

A year or so ago Geoff assured me that the IDE will be getting some love, but so far I’m not really seeing it.

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Yeah the parameters entry mechanism and display could definitely need some love but I have got to say for relatively small team they knock out an impressive number of features and enhancements. Hopefully the language tweaks are nearing completion, Android too must have been a significant effort requiring considerable resources so maybe we start to see some IDE love soon.

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I really liked the “tips” window in RB where you could see all the method overloads… I still miss that.

-Karen

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Please tell me why it is so hard to fix this bug: <https://xojo.com/issue/57894> 57894 - Bug “57268 - Inspector odd behaviour” is back. The bug was already fixed and then it came back. Watch the video. Every edit in an external window is super annoying.

I can relate to Xojo though of course on a smaller scale. As the user base grows so does the bug list and feature requests. You can’t please all of the people of all the time.

I have made promises to customers with the best intention to have a new feature or bug fixed implemented within a certain period and have fallen short. Come on we are developers this happens.

I am loving what Xojo are doing here and can see the bigger picture. It isn’t going to happen overnight. As I have mentioned we are redeveloping from the ground up. It doesn’t stop customers asking when will it be available and when will this be fixed in the current version. We have lost some customers because they couldn’t wait for features that are in competitors products. It’s just the nature of the beast.

Anyway I for one are behind the team at Xojo. Of course I want everything working how I want it and I want it now but I am also realistic.

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This could go above the editor window - but do you always have it this narrow?

This one issue is the thing that bothers me the most. We need a stable (it’s kinda stable now) IDE that has innovative features that make coding simple, clear and fast.
Where simple is getting access to information (code completion, code intelligence, add new method etc.) in a easy way.
Where clear is, anyone is able to read the code and find the information about it (notes, method name, parameters etc.) in the way we may expect (popup, tooltip, code intelligence etc).
Where fast is the shortest way to add, modify, refactor code. Currently there is no good way to do such.

The concept of Xojo, RealBasic, Realstudio is good, modular and neat but the innovation seems to have been lost. Even the language is not actually updated, we get “Var” (cool but?) and “Binary Enumartions” ok so these are not actually binary since they are “Classes” and one get’s “This name already exists” for classes that have the same name. Also the speed is down, since it’s not truely binary but it does the job.
Well innovation is key, maybe we have expectations/hopes that xojo wil evolve to being a readable, easy and powerful language just like swift and javascript has evolved to? I bet one could name a few really powerful features those languages have but xojo doesn’t have.

It’s true Xojo is cross platform in a good way. And it’s team works hard, i mean hard to do as much as it can. And since we’re on the forum we mostlikely support xojo (financially) by owning a license to the product.

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Shut up and “send money” posts always backfires. Bad idea.

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It was suggested a long while ago as 5 min sort of fix (making it a little better) to move the headers above since there is plenty of Vertical space. But they had little interest in it.

(Though even doing that is only making it a bit better).

So users will still have to copy paste parameters into VS code, edit them there and then copy paste them back. Thats the only workable way I know.

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There are other ways of using the space the right way. Just like the inspector could have (top to bottom)
[LABEL]
[FIELD]
instead of (left to right)
[LABEL] [FIELD]
making better use of the space, if the TAB stops working well this would be a good way to use the space and keep the inspector small.

On methods, one could for example show the declaration on top and on hover (when a method is used in code) show as much info as it can but compact so that the Signature and Description are directly readable. This saves one from going to the Docs on xojo’s code base and browsing to the method when it’s custom cod base (method, property etc).


Left space is completely unused, right fields are very small…

From 2014…
<https://xojo.com/issue/32869>

in short, we could use productivity improvements!

Please elaborate

This post has enough calls for unnecessary arguments, let’s avoid adding even more.

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Enough said

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Why donty you tell your users that they should support you and give you money even if you dont delivery a quality product, lets see what happens.

Unfortunatelly this is NOT A CHARITY, If they dont solve long standing bugs, improve the lack of functionality but instead waste time changing names of keywords and even REMOVE usefull things, well, there is no reason to waste money in something that is not a real improvement.