Xojo for Mac

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.

Xojo is a great development environment for creating software. I have used it for close to 20 years to make commerical Mac and some Windows based apps. There is a great community around it, lots of examples and resources to get started and third party developers to add additional features. I can highly recommend Xojo to anyone wanting to learn how to create software and who is also looking for a tool that can create cross platform, native apps.