I’ve not been blogging very much lately. This summer was very busy with a lot of traveling including a trip to France to join my son who was studying in Lyon. We camped at several music festivals in Michigan and Kansas. In August I started coaching a rookie FIRST FTC robotics team and that’s been challenging. (They are smart kids!). Work-wise we’ve been pretty busy with a big consulting project that’s starting to wind down.
All of that aside, I’m just not excited about Xojo at the present time. 2019 R2 was a very good release until they added API 2.0 into it. I can’t talk about beta program specifics, so I’ll leave it at that since it has a ton of IDE bug fixes and enhancements. I was doing active development with the R2 alphas it was that good.
Unfortunately API 2.0 was added and despite months worth of beta testing and dozens of builds, it feels half-baked, buggy, and not ready for prime time. It feels like it could have used another couple of months to gestate and be fully thought out before it was released to the masses.
The new events don’t really solve much of anything and in most cases just make life incredibly difficult for existing Xojo developers. If the goal was clarity I’m not sure that going from Open to Opening, to name one case, really solves anything. If anything, I could argue that Preparing or PreparingToOpen is more appropriate for what it really means. To be sure, I’m arguing semantics but the semantics of an API are important.
The new events make it practically impossible to use R2 and still use older versions of Xojo. I’m already getting support questions on when are we going to support API 2.0 for ARGen and Shorts. The answer is I don’t know because it’s non-trivial to update their code bases to API 2.0 and still support API 1.0. I feel like I’m caught between a rock and a hard place and I know I’m not the only 3rd party Xojo developer caught in this bind.
I also think that’s part of my problem. I feel like Xojo has willfully ignored professional developers in favor of citizen developers. API 2.0 does nothing for me and with the way events were changed (it seems like change for the sake of change), it actually harms my business.
The upcoming Android platform does nothing for my business. Sure, it’s a shiny new target and I’d love to kick the tires on it, but iOS is still using the now deprecated Xojo framework. I know the goal is to have a single mobile project and have different build targets (like desktop does right now) but at this point I have no idea when that will happen. Based on what was reported at the MBS conference last week, there is still significant work to be done on Android yet. Then we still have to wait on an iOS update to get it to API 2.0. Could that even happen by the end of 2020? I’m not so sure. Maybe. But what gets put on hold during that time that I could use now?
Speaking of iOS it seems to be languishing on its own. It’s been out for years and to do some pretty common iOS tasks you have to go through declares. That’s not exactly a RAD environment. I’ve done a commercial project with iOS and it was great to use my favorite language, but I was literally 15 minutes away from giving up on Xojo iOS. It was only with some Herculean help from several forum members that I was able to get THE key feature to work at all.
Raspberry Pi is another target that’s been fun to play with. I did an electric kiln controller with it and again it took going back and forth on the forums for several weeks to finally nail down some of the problems. To be fair I had a bad thermocouple converter, but the fact that there were only a few people using it made it that much tougher. The Do It Yourself (DIY) and Maker movement is huge and yet Xojo is barely making a dent in it (I’m basing this on the lack of traffic in the Raspberry Pi sub forum).
What I could use today is Web 2.0. What I could use today is a desktop grid control, and a simple built-in Date picker. What I know others need today is built-in PDF export and viewing. It’s almost criminal how old the RegEx and XML libraries are. I’m sure we could list dozens of things we could use today rather than six to twelve months from now.
Xojo built its business on being a really good cross-platform environment. I still think it’s a really good desktop development tool – I could even argue it’s still the best cross-platform development tool out there. Adding half-baked targets with such a small development staff helps neither the targets nor the development staff because despite what the company line is (on being adequately staff), each target *does* take time away from other projects.
I feel abused at worst, or at least unappreciated by Xojo. I’ve devoted countless hours talking about the product, trying to get people excited about it, only to feel like I’ve been ignored by the company. If I write a good review of a release they quickly spread the news, but if I’m remotely critical of a release it’s only silence. Look for this one to not get promoted either.
Besides this blog, I only have one other way to get their attention – I can refuse to upgrade until they listen to what I *need* to run my business. If they don’t give me what I need I will look for alternatives and switch to that product. There are only a handful of Xojo old-timers around – and that should speak volumes. Xojo is a development tool that you want to love but it’s hard to be ignored and still love the product.
I’m tired of feeling ignored. What about you?