Developers needs are not the same as consumers needs

There are lots of apps; desktop, web, and mobile. And they are for all kinds of needs for general consumption.

Developers needs often don’t fit that model though.

How many developers have IDE’s that the use on the Web ? Or on their mobile phone ? You might be able to write text there but if you using a tool like VS Code, Xcode, etc these are still mostly traditional desktop apps.

And this is where tool vendors often fall down. There are many who say “Hey use our tools you can write macOS, Windows, Linux, mobile, iOS and all kinds of other apps with our tool !” And, as Bob found, this is often like chasing unicorns.

I’ve spent a couple days on the phone with one tool vendor whose answer is “well just use Windows to write your macOS, Linux and Windows apps” To me this makes no sense. If your tool can create applications for macOS isnt the tool written using itself ? And if so then where is the macOS version of the tool since you claim you can write macOS apps. Or the Linux one for the same reason.

There are several tools like this where they claim you can create apps for all sorts of targets BUT you can only use the tool on one of the targets tat are supported. Which tells me that their tool is not written using their tool. If they wont use it to write their tool how can I be sure I can write what I need with their tool ?

While I might be critical of Xojo fairly often ONE thing they do is dog-fooding. They use their tool to create their tool.(1) Bugs in their framework show up in their faces and they have incentive to fix them because otherwise THEY see the bug all the time.

I wish more tool vendors did this.

footnotes

(1) Xojo does a reasonable job of dog-fooding but there are aspects of the framework that are not used in the IDE so they dont dog-food everything as thoroughly as we might like.