Xojo for rant

Off-Topic
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Hi there,

these days I read a lot the threads in the forum. Boy, is there a lot of rant and criticism about Xojo:

  • version xyz is half baked
  • doesn’t listen to users
  • ignores user’s need
  • release beta versions
  • introduces stupid changes
  • team too small
  • overpricedhttps://forum.xojo.com/t/bootstrap-themes/56775
  • etc.

According to these thoughts, Xojo is the worst development product, such a mess . . . really ? And other products’ grass is greener ? Not sure about that. Once you look at other products, you see the same harsh comments.

For example, I see the same harshness about FileMaker for example.

Then what does that mean ? My opinion is that all development product has their weaknesses - and strengths. And that’s blaming is so easy.

I ask you all one question: are we wining anything with those harsh comments ? I am afraid that we ALL loose something.

What are your 2 cents ?

Thanks

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Hmmm…Xojo is a programming language and IDE. FileMaker something totally different. So comparing apples and bananas…compare cross Plattform languages and tell me your news. I don’t know a manufacturer doing this

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The truth is that you’re right. All development languages and environments have technical debt. All development languages and environments have to adapt over time. All development languages and environments have bugs. As software developers, we know that writing bug-free code is essentially impossible, and your projects have to either adapt or die.

Over the last 25 years I’ve worked in countless languages across many different fields and device types. There’s nothing out there that is perfect, and I’d wager that there never will be.

Does Xojo have bugs? Obviously. Are there areas where things could improve? Of course! I, however, have found that it’s the best environment for what it does, and so have many others in this community.

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The reality is that all development environments have their strengths and weaknesses. I’ve worked on many, many IDEs and languages over the years from Visual Basic to Delphi to Objective-C and Swift and countless others, sometimes by choice and sometimes because a client demanded it. There are things I like about each. There are things I dislike about each. But the only one that I’ve been using consistently throughout the years (since 1998, in fact) and which continues to be my main environments, is Xojo, for its incredible versatility. Everything I’ve seen from Xojo in the last year or two has been laying the groundwork for a very bright future but change is sometimes painful.

Do I have complaints? Sure and I’ve been able to express that on the forum over the years, and in Feedback. I can absolutely promise you one thing though. Whining gets you nowhere. It makes you look unprofessional and immature, and no-one wants that on their CV. Use Feedback. Email them if you have strong feelings about something. PM an MVP (there’s five of us). But straight-up repeated whining on a user-to-user forum only makes you look bad.

At the end of the day, only you can decide if any particular dev environment is the right one for you. There’s no wrong answer. Apart from Java of course. Joking. Kind of.

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I don’t not agree. FileMaker lets you create apps for Windows, Mac and iOS/iPadOS. Thats’s multiplatform. There are technical differences though, where FileMalek app is required to run the apps. But they are quite comparable in term of size for example.

Regarding multi-platform development product, I tried Xamarin. The IDE failed on MacOS, Windows and Linux. That was a piece of junk.

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Try NetBeans. Works seamlessly

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The subject of this thread is ranting about development tools. I diverged, but ask others to talk about the subject.

Thanks

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Xojo the IDE I think is pretty solid. I rarely have issues with it, though I think some recent decisions were a mistake, such as the changes to the tab locking. It’s no longer obvious when a tab is locked, so I’ve found myself frustrated when using Go to Location and it switches tabs to do so. That’s not enough to call the IDE terrible, and I’m certain other users have more significant navigational challenges.

Xojo the language serves me well, though I have a few pet issues. URLConnection on Windows is probably my biggest. In fact, URLConnection’s inconsistency between platforms I think is a huge fault, given how necessary HTTP communication is to today’s apps. I can’t think of a single real project that I haven’t needed to make at least one HTTP request, so this is a feature that needs to be rock solid. I hate having to deal with customer service tickets because KB3140245 didn’t install correctly. This is an area I really fault Xojo for taking the easy route instead of the quality route.

My other main complaint is that Xojo makes apps that look old. It takes serious effort to produce a modern design. I want to be using popovers and vibrancy. I want my listboxes to have kinetic scrolling and proper row coloring. I want to use proper transparency on Windows. I want my UI on Windows not to flicker at all, not just less. Xojo’s lack of UI effort becomes more and more noticeable each year. Even when we have received new controls, they have been lackluster at best. ComboBox is probably the most infuriating control in the library, and SegmentedControl is exceptionally difficult to make actually fit within its frame. I just want my apps to look like they were created sometime in the last 15 years, but instead I have to spend significant effort in doing so.

Those are my two main issues for the desktop. I’m much less satisfied with the other targets. When it comes to cross platform development, while there are other tools out there, I haven’t found any that are seriously worth considering. Despite its faults, Xojo is still the best tool for cross platform desktop apps.

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Thanks @Thom_McGrath for your inputs.

I think all of us have some features in Xojo we don’t like or miss. The thread is not about this, it’s about the use of ranting, does it provide any benefits. I will edit my initial post.

EDIT

Can’t edit my initial post :unamused:.

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Ah, I get it. Sorry, I did mess that up.

As somebody that used to work for Xojo, I can say the discussion does matter. It’s a small company, they’re aware of the general feeling of the community. The discussions do help them keep a pulse of customer satisfaction, but it is NOT the only metric. Marketing uses more scientific ways to measure satisfaction. Engineers use Feedback and the forums to help decide what needs attention. They are just people though, so I strongly recommend keeping the conversation respectful. You never know what the future will hold. I started using REALbasic when I was 14 and made a bit of a name for myself in the community. That interaction is what helped me get my foot in the door. So how we treat the team now could end up affecting prospects in the future. In fact, nearly all of Xojo’s recent hires have been from within the community.

As long as we’re critical without being insulting, I think the conversation is productive.

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Word. Critisicsm is important and essential.

Learn, un-learn, re-learn!

But as this thread is specifically about “ranting”: I’m very annoyed if a few people are “discussing” their particular issues (as much as they are obviously valid and understandable) in almost every post and the tone of that discussion. The ones who are shouting the loudest and the most often are ultimately not right. The beauty of this forum is that you can mute / block those people, but I dislike censorship, so I didn’t yet block anyone, but I was very, very close to it.

In the past 2 decades I was more a consumer here, as I didn’t had enough time. Corona changed this a bit. But I remember many of these rants in the past, and I have aways been happy (though I hate “censorship” - as mentioned before), that Xojo is cleansing their house, so that you can find here what you are looking for. But I remember as well that as beginner I was very puzzled by some rants, especially when it escalated as such that seniors seemed to move away to other tools. Now I’m long enough with Xojo that I know that many, many came back, or didn’t leave at all :slight_smile:

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I’m writing this while being totally calm, so don’t mistake it for a rant:

What do you do if you see a product you love go downhill because the focus moved from quality releases to a „NEW FEATURES” PR driven model?

Not even you can claim that iOS is something to shout about - even after all this time.

After 3 years of development Web 2 is what? Feature complete? Stable? Fast? But don’t take my word for it. An online review by someone who knows a LOT more than you and I together described it as “pre-alpha quality”.

The core product is cross-platform desktop development - when will Windows and Linux get serious attention to fix the many problems?

What do you do when you have build a business on Xojo and its potential for the future, and see it squandered and are told that professional users are no longer Xojo’s target market? Have you followed Bob Keeney’s blog? It is known for its measured and fair assessments.

What do you do when you see long-term pillars of the Xojo community like Bob Keeney, Hal Gumbert, Thomas Tempelmann, etc that provided not just free support to the community but important free software (ActiveRecord, Xanadu, Aloe, Multiple Document Application framework, multi core processing, etc) give up and leave BECAUSE Xojo doesn’t fix the bugs?

You think Xojo is “appropriately staffed” now? You think having less and less engineers happened because they still published quality software that can be used to run your business on?

No, I predicted this would happen in 2007 when they introduced their feature driven Rapid Release Model. It was obvious that it would cause Xojo to release features before they are ready (because they needed it for advertising) and turn it into a perpetual beta quality product. And as much as developers WANT new features, what they NEED is a stable and mature platform.

Steve Jobs was GOOD in giving people what they need - before they even realised they needed it.

Do you realise that Thorsten’s company alone has over 100 Xojo Pro licenses, and his customers have a multiple of that? And that they all move to another development system?

I’m not ranting. This is a simple matter of fact statement of what was plain to see 13 years ago and then came to pass.

And the inability to take criticism, the locking and removal of threads, the banning of critical users just reek of panic - and is a serious stain on Xojo’s reputation.

The MVPs were supposed to be a conduit for the user community to voice their concerns and provide input - instead they seem to have become Xojo’s goons that do the dirty work for them (eg locking threads), controlling the message that users are allowed to hear.

I wish Xojo well. I want them to succeed. But I also see where this ship is heading, and the captain ignoring the advice and warnings of the most knowledgeable people and instead insisting that nobody tells him how to run his ship when he is heading for an iceberg … well, what do you do then?

Say that shouting doesn’t help?

It’s all you have left before jumping ship.

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Bob Keeney still does Xojo development full-time so I’m not sure why you think he left. We still hear from Thomas Tempelmann as well so I don’t think he’s left either. It’s important though to remember that not every user stays a user forever. Some leave because their job changed, some because they no longer need Xojo and yes some because they chose a different tool. You can’t please everyone but hopefully we please most of them.

I won’t disclose how many licenses Thorsten’s company has but I will say they don’t have anything remotely close to the number of licenses you believe they do. If any of his customers have licenses, we are unaware of it. If they are buying licenses due to Thorsten’s work, that’s great of course but again, we have not been made aware of that. If that is the case, I certainly urge @Thorsten_Stueker to reach out so we can talk about how we can work more closely together in that regard.

We are always working hard to improve Xojo. It will never be perfect because no product ever is especially development tools where the landscape is always changing but we are a very hard-working and dedicated team. The fact that we are still here after more than 22 years and stronger than ever (when measured both in the diversity of skills of our team, our very low team member turnover rate - average years on team for existing members is 14.5, meeting our revenue goals and our overall financial strength) when so many other tools have disappeared over that time, says something. Are we perfect? Of course not. We have and will make mistakes as we are human after all but we have always been quite transparent, accepting of respectful constructive criticism and willing work with users to make Xojo the most productive tool ever. Xojo is a work in progress though and it always will be.

Conversations like this one show me just how passionate so many members of the community are about Xojo and that’s one of the things we all love so much about the community. Those passions can sometimes get us fired up when things don’t work out exactly as we had planned but over time they mostly go in the right direction. Consider that we still have many users who started with v1.0 in 1998.

As always we will continue to work hard to make Xojo better and better. We can’t do everything that every user wants but I believe we do hit most of what the majority of users want. It is also important to remember that the majority of users don’t spend a lot of time on the support forum so voices here are not always representative of the entire user base. Nevertheless we listen to all that have something constructive to say and will keep pushing forward to incrementally make Xojo better and better.

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In my own defense, anyone that knows me knows that what you’ve written above in no way describes me as a person or as a leader. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that I have never, ever said anything like, “don’t tell me how to run my company” as it’s simply not my nature. I am frequently seeking out the opinions of others as I firmly believe I make the best decisions when I have the best information and appreciate consensus when possible. It’s not easy to rattle my cage as I’m a fairly calm and rational person. Anyone who has ever reached out to me has found that I’m more than happy to converse. I can’t guarantee we will always agree on everything of course (who does?) but the conversations are almost always productive.

As I said, unfortunately we can’t make every user happy. I wish we could. But we try our best to make as many of you happy as we can.

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Tim Dietrich who created Aloe stopped using Xojo. I stopped using Xojo and have been moving Xanadu to PHP. We did so due to bugs not being fixed and the years it took to get a half-baked Web 2.0. It comes down to Xojo just isn’t reliable. If you can’t trust your tools, your effectively forced to move on. Tim didn’t want to. I didn’t want to.

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It was not directed to one specific person it was more like “No one is goig to tell me how to run my company”

You posted that as an aswer to a thread in this forum a couple years ago. Not sure if the post was deleted, but if Markus and I remembert it, I’m sure there are others that also read that.

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If you can find it, I’d like to see that because I simply don’t talk like that to anyone.

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Hmmm. https://millan.dev/2019/04/04/saying-goodbye-to-netbeans/

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I’m sorry to hear that. We fix a LOT of bugs with every release but we can’t fix them all. There’s no large development tool that can. But we do try to work with users when they run into showstoppers.

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Bit difficult with threads being deleted … :roll_eyes:

… but I know a few other people who remember it. They would possibly chime in but have been banned …

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