I paid for the Pro license and I use Git with GitHub for version control. I have an iMac 21.5" Retina 2019 with Mac OS Big Sur 11.2.2.
Recently, I’ve noticed some strange behaviour in Xojo when saving a project. Instead of quietly saving the project and allowing me to continue, it pops up with a Save As dialog. I dismiss it… thinking I hit a wrong key or something and try again… and it works… or does it?
Today, I noticed that my project was saving it’s .xojo_project file but nothing else. I had added additional windows and classes but these were not showing up in the file structure as expected.
After a little research on this board I had a hunch and checked to see if my license key was current when, in fact, it was missing entirely! I also noticed that Xojo was treating me like a stranger as it needed me to enter my username and password… but that didn’t work… it said that I didn’t own any licenses. I just paid my annual renewal so I marched right over to the Xojo.com website to check and although it showed my subscription in good standing, I could see that my iMac was registered three times with the same key.
The solution was to deactivate these three ghost iMacs and then go back to Xojo and update my licenses… but how did that happen in the first place? I’ve seen weird behaviour from Git each time my iMac downloads a new OS update and I’m forced to connect Git back up again because XTools needs an update… could Mac OS updates be causing Xojo to think I’m using a new iMac each time?
Now, I’m concerned about my project. How do I make it switch back to a project file? It still saves itself as a .xojo_project file but it’s clearly a binary instead of a text format.
Update: After taking a backup via Save As (as a real Xojo Project this time), I simply performed a Save As to overwrite the binary project and everything seemed to work out all right. My .xojo_project file is no longer bloated and my text files are updating again nicely.
However, I still feel that there is value in this thread. In addition to helping out someone else who might run into this problem, I’d love to know what caused it and if there is a way to prevent it from happening again. The fact that there were multiple ghost devices hogging my license keys suggests that this is a recurring issue that just became an issue after successive events. Was it due to Mac OS updates? XTools updates? Or something else entirely?
Another user recently had the same problem. There was a Feedback case. When I checked that case it already had the status “Fixed”. But as usual it doesn’t say what was fixed.
I have this issue every time I update Big Sur. For whatever reason, Big Sur updates are treated as if you installed Xojo on whole new computer by the Xojo IDE. I have to deactivate all my licenses and reactivate it on on my Mac to get Xojo to do builds.
Saving and running in the IDE is never affected - just building.
Xojo server believes you boot from a different machine * and act accordingly.
Yes, at run time, Xojo calls home.
That goes even when you boot from the same machine, but with a different hard disk.
Advice:
Once your Xojo IDE have fnished to load your project at the start of a session, try to build it. You wll get an alert if the license key was “lost” since the previous run.