| Rank | Feedback Case |
|---|---|
| 46th | 62344 - Introduce canvas subclass that is capable of receiving text input events |
| 47th | 54450 - TextInputCanvas: Add ScaleFactorChanged Event |
Status today 2021-08-29T22:00:00Z 
Now at 26. Guess that proves there is interest despite what Geoff thinks.
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Maybe users want different things than what xojo thinks after all.
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Feedback is what we use to understand what is important to users. Geoff’s point was that if this feature is important to you, use Feedback. It’s great that this discussion has brought more attention to the Feature Request.
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The fact that the Feedback Case has jumped up so many spots just means that folks are finally doing, in this instance, what’s always been asked. If you want something, Feedback it, add points to existing cases, etc. I’d like to see this implemented as well, so I’m glad people are finally taking notice. It’s only now going to be apparent that it’s something people want.
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What you’re saying is true @Anthony_G_Cyphers Anthony but the current feedback system sure feels wonky.
For example, I’m probably one of a (literal) handful who is currently using the TextInputCanvas and so I’m very interested in this feedback case - I’m building a commercial code editor.
That being said, there are so many more important things that, because of the current feedback system, should be promoted to the wider audience but aren’t. For example, the ability for the String class to navigate and manipulate individual characters (case 65399) (or even correctly determine the length of a string in characters properly) that are way more useful to writing a code editor than the TextInputCanvas. Despite trying to promote that feedback case (and putting as many points as I possibly can as a Pro user on it) it has only reached position 139. The amount of hacks I have in place to work around converting between Text and String in my project is pretty depressing.
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Unfortunately, not everyone’s favorite cases can be pushed to the top, and @Geoff_Perlman has said a few times here that the ranking of a case in Feedback doesn’t necessarily determine its fate. There will always be cases that are fixed/implemented when they never show up on the Feedback top 100 or cases that might reach number one that aren’t implemented. This system is the best way to make sure that the Xojo team knows a new feature or bug fix is something that the community wants.
Is it perfect? Of course not, but there has to be some metric by which they decide what to tackle and this is what they wish us to use. Sometimes others will throw points on your favorite case, sometimes not. It’s about what’s important to the largest number of users, and not everyone may experience the issues you do in your use of Xojo.
My point was that we, the users, can’t expect Xojo to know we want something if we’re not telling them, and the change in this particular case’s rank over the last 24 hours means we weren’t doing that. We can’t blame Xojo for that.
The cases at the top are all very old. The tooltip case is from 2000!
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They may add it, they may not. That’s not something I can address. As I said previously, if we don’t tell them then there’s likely no chance something we want will be implemented. That’s my point.
The problem I have with this is that I find it very hard to get traction on things that I care about, because, well… they mainly to appeal to me and maybe a couple of others, but not enough to make it to the top 10.
I’ll be honest and say that I don’t know what the perfect solution is or what it looks like, I understand the need to triage, but I do think there should be an alternative method whereby some of these outlier case can be taken care of.
Yeah, I know, I am always causing problems because I don’t fit in the box.
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I beg to differ. Many of us old-timers have bugs that have been unaddressed for a decade or more. Some are ‘nice to have’ feature requests and some are ‘this thing doesn’t work in this circumstance.’ So I think many of us don’t believe, even worse, don’t have the faith, that the feedback system works. You can’t shift the blame to users for not using what we believe to be a broken system.
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Old timer and retired here. I confirm what Bob say.
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As hard as it is to hear for those that could put this control to good use (me included) I don’t believe that Xojo should be spending time on TextInputCanvas at the moment as they have far more important things to fix which will impact a wider user base.
That’s a very interesting insight that no-one has ever been hired to add a new area of expertise to the companies pool of knowledge and implement a specific feature.
Geoff and now you talk about a top 100, am I the only one that only can see a top 20 “User Favorites”? 
Everyone knows that the feedback points system is pointless (pun intended), 6 pro’s can get a feature into the top 20 in a heartbeat, does it mean that it is popular, no, but I’m sure you’re aware of that. If 74 users put a point each in then that ticket is far more important than one pro user adding one 75 point weighted vote yet it will still be higher in the ranking. This is the point that @Markus_Winter continually tries to make and I’m sure he’d be commenting in here if he wasn’t suspended again.
For example, I don’t believe there’s even a public feature request for mac building on windows (I can’t find it if there is) but from what I gather, resources are being put into it. How many users will benefit from that, 10, 50, 100 verses fixing a core issue with, for example, a windows framework issue?
I’ll be watching the delayed web based Feedback 2.0 system with interest on how the points system is addressed.
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The top 20 list (or for Xojo employees the top 100 list) is considered when the company plans their next steps to implement.
textInputCanvas is small enough, that the 20 people needing it can organize the maintenance.
Normally I’d agree. But this is work that Xojo does anyway. TextInputCanvas came from Xojo and it originally matched what was used in the IDE. At some point, they started making changes only to their version instead of the public version. It should all be one version. That’s more-or-less what I personally want out of this. They already have this control on their side. I just want them to update their github repo and build it, or make it available to our Xojo apps directly. It’s already there.
My pie-in-the-sky wish is what I have mentioned already in the Feedback case. The control should be a subclass of Canvas so we get all the improvements there, and the Xojo code editor should use it. That way if there is a bug fix, we all benefit.
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Aye, but it takes a lot more work to make it fit for public use than to make it work internally and changes can be made with relative impunity when it’s internal only.
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Correct. Documentation I’m not so concerned with. I think it’d be smart for them to document it, so that knowledge can be retained as engineers come and go, but not required. We’ve figured it out so far. The changes are a more interesting problem, but not a problem Xojo is unfamiliar with.
Seems to me that essentially that means more fleshed out and more ongoing QC for it… Might that result in fewer bugs?
-Karen
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One would hope that they are documenting it for their internal use too. Otherwise as staff rolls over they will find it’s more and more difficult to do anything with it. I am certain they are doing so. The problem is probably that changing things internally does not cause public outcry where changing things in the public version of it would cause that. When they decide to make major changes internally they don’t have to justify it to anyone but themselves. If they do it to us then we’re going to complain that we have to do a lot of work to use the new version. I’d be happy with just a warning that hey, this is going to significantly change periodically so if you want to be using the most recent version it will be an ongoing place you’ll need to allocate resources to…
I posted build 1.1 of our fork of the TextInputCanvas
I moved it to my thread since I probably wont ever find this thread again in the future when putting out more updates.
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