Lately I’ve been writing a Web2.0 app and TBH I can see where folks are experiencing issues.
There are omissions, glitches and bugs that need addressing.
But, I also wonder why Xojo hasnt dog fooded Web 2 with Feedback or some other app they use and rely on ? And that would show them the issues developers are facing.
!5 years ago, before I ever joined REAL, they decided to write the IDE using the IDE. Something they hadnt been doing. A practice known as dogfooding.
And from my decade working there I can say that it helped make things easier to see when a user submitted a bug report. And there were a lot of bugs that never went out the door because we used the IDE to write the IDE.
It was a good idea to do this because
The engineers who are developing REALbasic are now having an experience more in line with their customers’ own experience, which gives them a better sense of what does and doesn’t work.
https://www.macworld.com/article/174461/realbasic-45.html
I do wish they’d write something like a web version of Feedback using Web 2. And, if thats not possible then work to make it possible. Feedback doesn’t have that complex a UI (does it?) It should be possible and if its not maybe that says exactly how ready Web 2 is ? It certainly says something about its readiness.
Your thoughts ?
Remember, they have a web version of Feedback coming. Which even without the dogfooding issue, is a good thing because the 2021 release of Feedback is aesthetically attrocious. The new app icon is peak “not giving a damn” and the toolbar doesn’t match with the titlebar. To say it’s on life support would be charitable. I hope the web version is more polished… but I expect it won’t be.
Towards the end of my time with Xojo, I started to throw together designs for what I wanted a web version of Feedback to be, without any consideration for what Web Edition could actually do. The intention was to get Web Edition capable of producing that. Geoff was aware of this, so it’s at least been on their radar a long time.
Hindsight is 20/20, but Web Edition with API2/New Framework/WhateverMarketingWantsToCallTheLanguageChanges should have come first, then Feedback from that.
I haven’t touched Web 2 at all. From what I’ve read, it really strays far from the original vision for Web Edition. But I don’t know wether that’s a good or a bad thing.
Web feedback has indeed been on the radar a long time. Maybe as long as Android which is still not released yet.
I’m not holding my breath for it.
But dogfooding Web2 with something important, like Feedback, would certainly lead to more issues they see being fixed.
Well, I’d say that this is a problem overall with Xojo. While they write the IDE with the IDE they don’t use it the way we do which is why their reporting is not very good, RTF support is dismal, and the listbox, while it can do some very cool things, is not very powerful out of the box. They just don’t have the same use cases we do. So if it doesn’t bug them it’s like trying to pull teeth to get them to upgrade something.
There just isn’t enough Xojo staff to do all the things they should do like testing and bug fixing. It’s why I stopped renewing my Xojo license. If Xojo doesn’t care to ship close to production code, then it’s not a tool for professionals. I suppose hobbyists are ok with it.
Instead of focusing on quality code, they focus on over moderation of the forums. It’s nuts.