Xojo for Mac

Xojo's decisions are puzzling at best. For a long time you had one big release with new features followed by 4 or 5 bug fix releases, thus resulting in a stable product that you could use like forever. Then they introduce a Rapid Release Model which basically necessitates that they have new features every 3 months because "Features sell products" according to the CEO, but in reality it just meant that there was never time to fix the bugs and Xojo descended into a beta quality product. The amount of emergency bug fixes (sometimes 3 for one release, sometimes they even skip a release and I leave it to your imagination as to why) since the introduction of the Rapid Release Model speaks for itself. That the pricing and version given here are way out of date (they did away with all the cheap entry versions and not only increased prices but moved the ability to create console apps from the now $499 Desktop to the $999 Pro version) is just one more sign of how Xojo is run. Warnings and critical voices were not just ignored but Pro developers were told in no uncertain terms that they are no longer the target audience for Xojo - it is Citizen Developers that the company is after. Enter API2, the new version of Xojo's language. Because Citizen Developers can't possibly understand "append" to add an item to an array it was renamed to "add" - and the same was true for hundreds of names and methods (eg DIM to VAR). With one stroke 20 years of books, tutorials, websites, video courses etc became useless. Brilliant. On a side note: forget using AI with Xojo - it will mix API1 and API2 code because a large amount of info on the web and code on GitHub is in API1. Even worse people who did not toe the line were banned "for a 1,000 years", some even longer. The Xojo forums are heavily moderated so don't expect to get true opinions on there. As a consequence the peeved of Pro's started their own free forum (ifnotnil.com) to keep in contact with each other and share their experiences on life after Xojo. Because if you have to essentially learn a new language with API2 then why not use a better and free one? Many went to Java or C#, some to Power Basic, some to Swift (like me), some to Python. And pretty much all said "I should have jumped years ago!" - there is a sense that Stockholm Syndrome is at work on the Xojo forums. I get it. Beginners love BASIC. Heck, I LOVE BASIC. But Xojo hasn't had what's best for the users in mind for a LONG time. Just look at the documentation - it used to be pretty good and clear, and now it is simply atrocious. It's pretty obvious that Xojo users have left in droves, and activity on the forums is very low. The company limps on, increasing prices to make up for a diminishing user base (some are a captive audience as they build their businesses on software they wrote in REALbasic / Xojo so have no choice). Let me be fair, cross-platform software has to make some compromises, and the Desktop version is good on the Mac, so-so on Windows, and hit and miss on Linux. But the web and mobile versions are WAY behind anything else. The desktop is beta quality, web alpha, and mobile should simply not be for sale (with iOS better than Android support). There also seems to be a new kid on the block that could give Xojo Desktop a run for the money. Called Objo and written by a fed up former Xojo developer in C# the intention is to make something that Xojo was supposed to be: a modern, fast BASIC IDE with an emphasis on BUG FIXING. Or as I used to say: BASIC FEATURES (pun intended) MUST BE ROCK SOLID. The reception on the ifnotnil.com forum was very positive and the Pros are impressed, and if the exemplary documentation is anything to go by then it might be worth a shot if I need a cross-platform app for my students.

Used Xojo since '98. It is a fairly capable tool, but its feature set and functionality have stagnated over time. Instead of giving customers what they voted for, Xojo choose to invest in a multi-year project, effectively rearranging the deck chairs. I'd advise anyone considering Xojo to take the time to asses the crowded development tool market place. If Xojo does everything you need, then great, but be warned, limitations and bugs have NOT been a priority in recent years and I can't be certain if they will be in the future.

I was annoyed by the API2 evolution because it required a lot of work on my 12 applications. But it's done, and thanks to Xojo I'll be able to keep them all up to date for years to come without much effort. A major evolution from time to time is unpleasant but is surely necessary to keep up with the evolution of our operating systems.

I've used Xojo for nearly 20 years now. Coming from VB Classic/.NET, this was a no-brainer and remains an amazing development environment with a truly dedicated team behind it. I've tried many other "RAD" environments in my career that claim to do cross-platform, and none come as close to perfect as Xojo does. It's the best game in town and continue to improve and impress.

The product was invented by a third party under the name of CrossBasic. The company now called Xojo purchased CrossBasic and rebranded is RealBasic. Years later the company rebranded the product Real Studio. They rebranded it once again to Xojo.

These rebranding were design to distance themselves from their past misdeeds and reputation of the product. The current TIOBE list of the most popular programming languages currently lists 150 products and Xojo is not found there. The product is now nearly 25 years old yet it remains a insignificant programming language with few users. That speaks volumes and blame lies with the guy that runs the company - Geoff Perlman.

I stop upgrading the product after they announced a sale of upgrades and then announced new pricing which did away with upgrades. Prior to this if you owned an earlier version you could pay a upgrade fee, but now they expect you to buy the product again by paying the full price over again. They also change what is included in each version so while you may have purchased what was considered "pro" before its now no longer "pro" and they now expect you to hand over even more money.

Once again the company is trying to rebrand its product by coming out with API 2.0 under the guise of helping it users. This was announces in October, 2019. Already a 3rd party add-on I purchased directly from the company's website does not work with my version of Xojo even though the product says it works with API 1.0. The 3rd party publisher has already abandoned supporting versions of Xojo using API 1.0 thus it will not be fixed. Xojo and the 3rd party of course didn't bother to mention that in the first place.

Geoff must think everyone just picks up bushel baskets of money growing from trees in their yard. To use this 3rd party add-on now requires buying Xojo all over again. Then downloading a older copy that uses API 1.0 but which will work with the third party add-on. The newer version of Xojo with unfinished API 2.0 is not useful as I am not going to rewrite all my projects to conform to the new API. No chance in hell that will ever occur.

Nearly every single project built with this product uses "dim" to imitate a variable yet the company now changes it to "var" under the guise of helping you and because other languages use it. Utterly insane.

The Modus operandi of this company is to introduce so called innovations in an effort to continually lure in new buyers who do not know about the long term history of the company. These half-baked so called features add more bugs to Xojo when the company should be concentrating on instead of fixing the previous bugs.

I compare this company to the Dilbert strip in which its revealed Dilbert's company has been intentionally issuing broken software so they can make their money off selling upgrades for "fixes" and selling support calls.

As long as Geoff remains the person in charge this company will still retain its distinction of having a larger group of pissed off former users than current users.