Skip to main content

Living with Xojo

Xojo is a fantastic, integrated development environment. With it, you can do multi-platform software development. I think there is no faster way to go from an idea to a running prototype. For MacOS, iOS, Windows, Android, WebApps. It can do it all.

Xojo as an organization, itself has learned to develop fast. Something they have been struggling with in the past.

The disadvantage of the focus of Xojo on continuous improvement with a relatively small organization causes some challenges in the users development process. Frequently it is impossible to finish a project after upgrading to a newer IDE version without redoing major parts of the code.

Xojo when it starts up, gives a nice Recent Projects menu, where you can select a project you are working on and want to continue to work on. It does not separate in what version of Xojo you work on for what project, however. So if you have to maintain production code in an older version, the only save way too work is to have separate machines for that.

I've learned the hard way NOT to install the newest update of Xojo on my Mac. So that I don't open project files with the newest version. Start working on it and get stuck after routinely saving the project with changes, and later in the production environment find that there are bugs to deal with. Bugs, by the way, can also be improvements what make old version code incompatible.

There are three ways to deal with this flaw in the Xojo IDE:

  • To have separate machines for code in production maintenance and new code.
  • To finish projects with the existing IDE version and schedule (when time is available) IDE maintenance to update to a newer version.
  • Use Xojo only for prototyping and do the final build in a dedicated (Mac/Windows/iOS/Android/Web)App development IDE.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

De EU en de crypto war! Overheid zie toch eens de kansen!!

  Naar aanleiding van het uitstekende artikel van Fred Hage in de Computable van  27 november 2020. Overheden worstelen met End-to-end encryptie en ‘lawful interception’. Met andere woorden privacy op internet aan de ene kant en de mogelijkheid criminaliteit te onderzoeken aan de andere kant. Het blijft me verbazen dat overheden blind zijn voor de kansen die dit dilemma biedt! Stel "ik kan bij de NL-overheid mijn encryptie regelen" (met de wetenschap dat ze mee kunnen kijken). Dan doe ik dat toch zolang ik niets te verbergen heb! Dus: Overheid wordt eens wakker en bied zelf encryptie services aan! Ga met de betrokken internet diensten zoals Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft .. etc. om de tafel zitten en ontwikkel encryptiediensten en standaards voor (vertrouwde) burgers waar ze gebruik van kunnen maken. De diensten kunnen dan vertrouwd verkeer van onvertrouwd verkeer onderscheiden. Ze kunnen vertrouwd verkeer direct, eventueel automatisch, onderzoeken. En me...

Microsoft; Google; IBM all the same.

  Today, Microsoft announced https://cloudpc.im/. After they announced Windows 11. After the Windows 11 announcement, it rapidly became clear nearly no existing Windows 10 will be able to be upgraded to Windows 11. No coincidence. They want to move all customers to monthly payments. Soon you only can run Word, Excel and PowerPoint in a browser. Just like with Google! So what is the difference? It is all the same! You lost control over your data and your wallet!  What will be the countermovement?

Google fails but Firefox too!

Google clearly gets more and more influenced by typical old style USA marketing people. And with that it loses the quality edge. Youtube and other advertising platforms present you all the time with advertisements not fitting your interests. Cashing with it on de advertiser and annoying you with sounds and images about things you never will buy! Google introduces Chromebooks (a nice and user friendly Linux solution) but then marketing comes in and you need to replace your hardware every 3 to 5 years. They have a super photo storage solution but then marketing comes in and you are in the dark. Chromecast was nice until marketing came in and stopped with chromecast audio. Now we have creepy listeners all over the house. (Or you stop using chromecast as I did). I liked Google but it starts to annoy me more and more. I love their innovative power and their openness toward open-source. But I hate the increasing influence by creepy sales. I'm sad about the poor sense for customer needs b...