Xojo Pro No Mo'

Sadly, my RS Enterprise / Xojo Pro plan expired an hour ago. I wish I was writing that $500 check like I did for 3 straight years, but as it stands, I just can’t bring myself to doing it. I tried and just couldn’t get over the navigation issues, seemed like 3 times as much work as RS. REALLY frustrating at times, and I have no idea why I need to completely rethink the way I have worked for 3 years just to accommodate a new IDE. In 20 years of coding, few things have made so little sense to me as this complete re-working of the basic navigation of the RS/Xojo projects.

Here’s hoping that 2013r3 and r4 address the navigation issues that are befuddling so many users.

I too am waiting; however, keeping patience. I’m just as frustrated as you, but more so with the bugs. I used to think ‘Why am I doing this? Continuing to wait for this product to get off the ground while life and other development platforms are taking off?’ I used to know .NET well… and I’ve been away for so long that I feel like I’ve made a mistake. I thought there’s no way in hell Visual Studio would have this many issues and bugs… never have. All I can say, is I was wrong:

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/SearchResults.aspx?FeedbackType=0&Status=1&Scope=0&SortOrder=5&TabView=0

I learned my lesson. So, I’m being patient with Xojo. In the meantime, I’m sharpening my Javascript, CSS, HTML & T-SQL skills (which can all be a benefit to my portfolio, and for development in Xojo… especially the Web Edition portion).

Xojo, even in its present buggy form, is yet a very powerfull application application.

I have to admitt, for myself the transition is also not easy and rather difficult. But at early june I renewed my Enterprise license again for one year and to be honest, despite the difficulties, I did not regret that one moment. At the 4th of June I installed Xojo and worked in it ever since, not even touching RealStudio one single time.

And now that seems to pays off. I became much more fluently in using Xojo and believe me there where many moments I was on the edge of giving up. But I didn’t and I am glad for that now.

I find the r2 version already much better than r1. For example “control arrays” works much better now they increment by 1. Using “folders” in the navigator to arrange my objects, make it much more clear. Still the navigator is a mess I admitt. But I am sure that under pressure of people like Bob Keeney, Christian Schmitz and many others, they will change it for the better. The whole navigator idea is good but they only have to change some things which are not working.

At first I also was frustrated with those big “Inspector” objects, however now I just initialise them in code. I use “Init_…” methods where I set those properties. Works faster for me and I find it easier to find things back.

The “Library” you can completely arrange it like it was with RealStudio except for custom objects, they are not showing in the library here. But that can be a bug too, I do not know. What I find very positive is that controls like “timers” are no longer be placed on the form itself but below in their own space. Makes a form layout much clearer.

There are already profesional applications developed and used by the use of Xojo. Let us not forget that Xojo itself is used for the development of Xojo itself. That proves that it works, not yet as expected nevertheless it works.

I am using Xojo since 2004 and for my purposes, I am happy with it. I write small administrational applications on demand. We also have to be willing to change our minds to a new way of thinking or doing things; And for many people, that is not an easy process which takes time. Just give yourself more time to adapt your way of thinking, just like i had to do with myself. When starting with Xojo I had exactly the same feeling as you, however I recognised my shortcoming and just adapted my way of doing things to the new Xojo. As humans, we are all so predictable.

So my advice to those people who are frustrated and are thinking of giving up is; “don’t give up, try to adapt to a new way of thinking/working and continue build your applications”. You will see, this method pays off in the long run. Hang on!!!

I am in total agreement with Bad Wolf, hang in there!

Hi all,

I am sorry, but I do not understand what troubles the Navigation ‘tab’ gaves you. People says: " a drawing is better than 100 lines", can you build a Navigation artwork that can represent a forward push (an example of what you want as the “New Navigator”) ?

Don’t get me wrong, I do not say I do not have troubles with the Navigator (I am feeling insecure with the IDE), but I do not understand the trouble.

You can start here:

http://www.bkeeneybriefs.com/2013/07/why-i-hate-the-xojo-navigator/

and note that 80+ people responded. Then, follow this Xojo thread:

https://forum.xojo.com/3275-project-navigation-productivity

and see how the item shot up to #2 in the Feedback. I am very glad it is working for you, really I am. But it is frustrating a ton of users. If you don’t understand what the trouble is, you are just not following the conversations on this board and you were likely not a beta tester. There has been a lot of complaints, it is not hard to find what people are frustrated about.

But for me personally, I get lost in my larger projects. I also have to do a lot of scrolling, a lot more clicking than I used to have to do because you have to drill down to get to the object you want to work on. I am constantly having to use the “Find” window at the top which in most cases is quicker than clicking to get to it.

True, there are still quite a few bugs with the Navigator, copy & paste, and the tabs, as well as various unhandled exceptions. But Xojo has come a long way from the start of the 2013R1 beta cycle, and that is for me a good reason to have confidence that most of these issues will be fixed over the next couple of releases.

Guys, we’re not talking about bugs, excessive eye-candy, or inconsistent focus issues. Those are all important items that need to be fixed and I am sure the Xojo team will address them. What we are talking about is a fundamental shift in behavior from the way the Project Tab worked in RS2012 and the way the Navigator works in Xojo. This is not a bug. This is a fundamental design flaw in the eyes of many long-term users. If it were just bugs, I’d re-up and just work through them until they get fixed.

But, that is not the issue for me (and many, many others). I can’t effectively work with the Navigation in Xojo. I was on the beta team. I’ve tried for months. It is tough to work with, and needs a redesign. I’m going to be patient and see what comes of this, I’m not ready to bail on RS/Xojo. I still like the product, development team and community, and I love the language. But I still have to be able to produce projects and right now it just takes to long and wears me out. So for the time being I am sticking with RS2012.

Even R1 was a LOT less buggy than than the first release of last IDE rewrite in 2005… and I am sure more bugs will be fixed…

But IMO this time the real usability issues are not due to the bugginess, but stem from unfortunate design discussions that go deep into the IDE with the navigator. Bugs are a LOT easier to deal with than such things.

To play devil’s advocate a little, I wonder how much of this frustration is due to experience with the old IDE and simply not adapting to change versus actual design flaws in the Navigator? Are brand-new users of Xojo complaining of these same kinds of issues?

Right now my feelings are mixed. There are things I like about the new design and things I’m struggling with, but that’s no different from before. With RS I got lost in tabs. With Xojo I get lost in the Navigator. Which is worse? At least with Xojo I can hope for fixes and improvement. :slight_smile:

The Tab issue was no where near the same the severity as getting lost in the navigator IMO …

The navigator simply is trying to do too much and display too much info at once… and often not enough RELEVANT info on what we are working on.

The Navigator is way worse. Did I say, way? I meant to say WAY, WAY worse. Sure sometimes I’ll get too many tabs open in RS and need to close a few but there is a huge difference in not being able to fine the tab I am looking for among 20 or so open tabs and trying to find an object in a list of hundreds and hundreds of items that are buried in a hierarchical list. Just so easy to get lost in where you are at and where you need to go. I would estimate the trouble I had with the Projects Tab in RS is about 1% of the trouble I have had with the Navigator in Xojo. They are just trying to put too many items in one list.

And I am not a 10+ year RS code like some people. I’ve only been using RS for about 3 years now and still spend more time in VB. So it is not like I had years and years of old habits to break. I do understand that argument. One thing about your argument that is not sound is new Xojo users would tend to have smaller projects they are working on at this point. It has only been released a couple of months, and I don’t suspect there would be that many newbie Xojo users that have 100K line programs they are maintaining at this point. I am sure there might be a few, but most will be still working in smaller projects where the Navigator is not as huge issue.

That’s a really good point, Steve! I’ve only recently started converting my major projects to Xojo and I’ll confess I didn’t notice these issues that much with small projects, but they’re definitely more noticeable with larger ones. I’ll see how I feel after a few weeks of actually working on a big project in Xojo.

It could also be that’s exactly how the Navigator got approved in the first place: demos might have been done with smaller projects where the more severe problems just weren’t as apparent.

I’m still confident they’ll get it figured out (but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t complain).

Time to be pragmatic about it. Bob reported back that they can’t just replace the navigator, and I think they make much stronger points about it than most acknowledge. Realistically, it’s getting bug fixes for the rest of the year.

Here is a workflow I’ve recently found that I really like. I’ve been using this with SSG_ListBox, which despite existing for about 10 days, has a metric f-tonne or so of code in it. I start a coding session with all the items in the Navigator closed and a single tab. I think about my immediate task at hand for approximately 28ms, then open the classes or other items I think I’ll need to accomplish the task in new tabs. From there, I’m fairly productive and I don’t get lost scrolling all over the navigator in one tab looking for related items that aren’t quite on top of one another. Some little clicking bugs aside, this feels very much like the old IDE’s tabbed approach and lets me quickly find things in the main tab that I might need for a moment.

[quote=26328:@Marc Zeedar]It could also be that’s exactly how the Navigator got approved in the first place: demos might have been done with smaller projects where the more severe problems just weren’t as apparent.
[/quote]

Marc, they build Xojo with Xojo, now. In August, 2011, I saw Geoff demonstrate the new IDE by running it from the new IDE. They surely are aware of the pain, and probably have adapted their workflow around it. The big key right now is helping developers who are accustomed to RS figure out how to become accustomed to Xojo. I’m pretty convinced that that is a good 85% of the issue here.

I am well aware of that and I think it’s a big reason why things get fixed. But design designs are made long before you actually have a full implementation to test, so it’s possible that those early design decisions were made with simpler projects and some aspects of these problems weren’t as noticeable.

I’m certain they’re aware of them now and like I said, I’m confident they’ll get things sorted out, eventually (but in the meantime there’s pain).

Figuring out a new workflow is definitely key.

My big problem is the speed of the IDE. It is painfully slow moving controls around the screen and changing properties, and I am using the Mac version on a 2010 Mac Pro with 10 GB Ram. It lags and feels unresponsive. I would have thought that this problem would have been addressed by the development team from day one. It reminds me of trying to write VB code on a 386 PC many moons ago. It feels clunky. I’m just afraid they will never fix that, because if it could be fixed, it would have been already, especially before its release.

I think that is my biggest beef. I don’t want to have to figure out a new workflow. I can build projects in RS2012r2 just fine, I don’t personally have any real show stoppers that I was waiting on for Xojo to address (and I know others did). It doesn’t matter to me that Xojo engineers have worked in it for a while or that professional Xojo code suppliers have figured out workflows that they can deal with.

That doesn’t help my projects, my frustration level, or my bottom line one iota. I need a tool that works well for me. I’m willing to give them plenty of time to respond to the Navigator issue that so many users have brought up. I’m willing to be patient. What I am not willing to do is force myself to use it and be frustrated just because they didn’t see the problems associated with going from the Project Tab in RS to the Navigator in Xojo. They will (hopefully) listen to the complaints, build what they are going to build, and I’ll vote with my wallet. Right now, as I mentioned at the start of the tab, I’m not renewing.

That’s definitely the proper response. If 2012r2 works for you, then great. Hopefully they’ll have fixed Xojo by the time you need to upgrade to it.

(For me personally, there are key features like Cocoa that I wanted for my app, so I’m finally moving it to Xojo from RS2007r4… yeah, you read that right! I preferred that ancient version for that project and never moved it. It’s amazing it still works as well as it does. I also am anticipating iOS support, which will only be in Xojo.)

For all those people who doubt about the navigator design flaws, open a big project with many objects and files and you immediatelly know why people are complaining about the navigator. Even deselect an item can be under some circumstances a pain.

Sometimes it looks like the navigator has its own will.

When there is no serious problem with the navigator, there would not be so much people having difficulty with it. When someone like Bob Keeney who know Xojo inside out, says that the navigator doesn’t work, that must be true.

I like Xojo very much and I want to support this tool as much as I can. However we do not do Xojo inc a favour when we say the navigator works fine when it in reality does not.

We are not against Xojo but we want things fixed who do not work economically.

For very small projects, I am sure the navigator works fine. But once your project becomes larger (and it must not be that much larger), navigation and selection problems arrise, even when structuring the content with folders.