Xojo and 2022!

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Happy 2022 All You Wonderful Xojo Folks!

I’m so excited for Xojo and this year! As a developer for almost 35 years, it’s been a long time since I have been bit by the programmers bug like this. I feel like 2022 is going to be the year that I crank out some amazing software thanks to Xojo!!

A little bit about my story so far…

I found Xojo late in 2020, around November. I downloaded it, tried it out and figured I’d give it a shot… Didn’t really do much with it because I was busy with other things going on in my business. I had been writing a SaaS service in .NET and actually had built quite a bit of it, from the windows desktop app, then writing a Laravel/php web api backend, but with this service I wanted to also be available on mac, along with writing mobile apps as well. I had a MacBook, and I had XCode and I started learning swift so that I could release my app for MacOS and iOS, but then I would have to figure out how to write for Android as well. Somehow, and I wish I could remember how I came across Xojo, but I did. After reading more about Xojo and what it could do, I went ahead and licensed up because I was going to re-write the whole service in Xojo so that I would be able to launch on ALL platforms. Owning and running my IT MSP business in my local area, I just got crazy busy and didn’t find the time to even start my re-write in Xojo. Now, fast forward to
November 2021, and it’s time to renew my license. I hated that I didn’t do anything at all in Xojo for the first year I was licensed but figured, no worries, I’ll go ahead and renew and support Xojo for another year and this time I will re-write this app and get this thing launched for 2022.

Well needless to say, I’ve been writing my app/service and it’s coming along quite nicely thanks to the help of this forum and all the wonderful videos out there on how to do things in Xojo that has really made it easy for me to catch on. I feel good about where this is going and I look forward to a wonderful 2022 year. You guys will be seeing me around on the forum and I am excited to
be a part of the Xojo family for 2022!

I’d love to hear some of your successes with Xojo over the years past! I’m building my story now and I can’t wait for New Years next year when I can share the story of 2022 with you guys! So please share your stories and have a wonderful new years!

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It’s great to hear positive stories like this.

My move to Xojo was a result of switching from Windows (where I’d been using VB6 and then VB .net to build Windows applications and then with .net Web applications too), across to Mac back in 2014. In the last couple of years I have since switched to Linux.

I’ve made heavy usage of the 2018r3 release still creating and maintaining Web 1.0 applications in that release. I’ve since switched Linux desktop development to the current release. Sadly I’ve moved away from Xojo for mobile but with 2022 looking like support for building Android apps I will be released this year I may be back.

My first Xojo app was a web based ticketing support app for an IT MSP, followed by porting some VB .net desktop applications to Mac. Since then a majority of my projects have been web based with a more recent focus more desktop heavy.

I’m looking forward to 2022 and can’t wait to see what improvements Xojo release this year.

EDIT: this year is likely to see me make the switch to Web 2.0

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Welcome, @Jason_Cullins! Xojo is indeed a great tool, and this is the best support community anywhere.

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I’m really enjoying XoJo as well and looking forward to using it in 2022 and beyond!

I did a lot of programming in the past in various languages for both personal and work. When I moved most of my personal computing activities at home to Apple Macs in about 2006, I slowed down programming for personal use because I didn’t want to deal with Apple way of doing things vs. Visual Basic. At some point, I’d heard about Real Basic, but timing wasn’t right. Needless to say, my programming skills became very rusty. In 2021 I wanted to get back to it and XoJo definitely had me sold being able to code once and build for Windows, MacOS and Linux. I’ve been having a blast dusting off my skills and targeting each system!

This group has been awesome in helping with the bumps along the way. And I know that there are many things we’d like to see XoJo add, improve, etc., but it’s a powerful tool that is certainly enjoyable to use. I hope to see XoJo continue to be successful as well as all the great people here!

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Jason, very similar to me.

I found Xojo back in the RealBasic days and licensed up actually paying for it several times and had no real apps to show for it.

I don’t own my own business but I do side contracting. My real work is in C# .NET which is great and cool but totally Windows only. I love Macs and wanted a way to do Mac code. While I’d done XCode and released several apps in years past to the store I found it tedious and difficult to work in. Objective C in my opinion was kind of a train wreck syntactically at least. Then there was the process of getting your app in the app store, the signing, etc. I remember my carefully coded XCode app being rejected because I used a button style that looked too close to the “Answer Call” button on the iPhone app.

Swift came along and I was just too busy to spend much time with it. RealBasic, XOJO was just floating around and I did some personal projects in it.

Here it is 2022 and I was presented with an opportunity to recode a vendors application line so it was Mac compatible. I pushed for XoJo and they said fine. So in the next few months I will start that process. Hoping it goes well. The resulting app needs to support Mac and Windows and I know Xojo can do it. I’ve done it. But now the situation is real and not just some free app I’m gonna play with.

I’m 65 and have been coding for 40+ years. I work with a bunch of 20-30 something coders that all they have ever known in C# .NET and they literally frown on any other language but their beloved C# .NET.

There is no doubt C# is cool. I like it a lot. But I’ve always been more about the best tool for the job than trying to remain loyal to some language I happen to like. I suggested Xojo to this young group once and I think some of them sneered because it was BASIC. Yet today, in 2022 in our C# .NET app we don’t have a working visual designer!! We are using UWP (another mistake) and if any of you have done UWP you will know that the visual designer, the thing that allows you to drag and drop controls on your view, like the window designer in Xojo is so broken it is not funny. It is so bad we turn it off and we are doing views in XAML, code, like I did back in the days of C and Curses. It’s 2022 for Christ’s sake!

Also .NET core claims to be totally cross compatible, linux, windows, Mac. But there is no GUI outside of Windows. How M$ could let this happen is unbelievable.

Qt is a great little framework and I’ve successfully made Mac and Windows programs on it, but it is tweaky and rather expensive if you step out of the public domain world with it.

Also, both C++ and C# suffer from “DLL hell”. It’s not the same as it used to be but it is similar. In the .NET world you have nuget packages and we are constantly fighting incompatibilities between packages and dependencies. In C++ you have all these libs, standard library, extensions. All very powerful and very cool and if you ever look at the source you see a 1000 #ifdefs to comment out code for one compiler, one version, windows, or linux or whatever. It is extremely complex.

So while Xojo is not immune to any of these considering it can use libs and there are certainly things written in various languages at its heart. The point is, for standard functionality, if your app compiles and runs in a version then you have everything you need. No need to go and load xyz version of some lib. Qt is famous for that. Even some of their “examples” don’t run unless you have some specific lib downloaded and installed.

Anyway, rant off. I’m hoping that Xojo offers the simplicity I used to love about coding to a certain extent.

Happy New Year to all!

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