As 2024 draws to a close, let’s take a look back at Xojo over the last 12 months. The year started strong with changes made to Xojo’s licensing that encourages new users and code sharing. We’ve added, expanded and polished Xojo resources. And Xojo itself grew a lot in 2024 with long-awaited features, unanticipated features, overall speed and efficiency improvements and significant bug smashing. All this adds up to a better development tool, used by a growing community! Read on for the highlights:
Community and Resources
In order to succeed with Xojo whether you are an existing user or a new user, you need great resources. In 2024 there have been over 95 new posts on the blog. The latest addition to the Xojo team, Gabriel Ludosanu, has written some wonderful tutorials and explainers on the blog that can quickly get you up to speed with many useful Xojo features.
Speaking of Gabriel, he’s also been enhancing our YouTube channel with Shorts, which are short-form videos (in portrait-style) that quickly introduce or highlight topics.
For our many new users, the Xojo Textbook and Teacher’s Guide have been updated. In addition, we do our best to support Xojo for students, such as with the GitHub Student Developer Pack.
In the spring we made a change to Xojo Lite to allow it to use the text project file format, making it easier to share your projects using services such as GitHub. We also made Xojo for Linux available for free to better match the ethos of that platform.
We are pleased to share that 2024 was a year of tremendous growth in the Xojo community as our GitHub Student Developer Pack and changes to Xojo Lite have helped drive more new users to Xojo than we’ve seen in years!
New users help drive growth in Xojo, but its lifeblood is our dedicated user base. With four releases in 2024, we continue to improve and make Xojo better for everyone. One thing we’ve been working on for each release is ensuring there are blog posts highlighting major new features, often written by the engineer that worked on the feature.
And of course don’t forget about our long-standing resources such as the Xojo forum, YouTube channel, documentation and example projects all of which get new information through each year.
With all that said, another valuable part of the community is the Xojo MVPs. These dedicated Xojo users help us by providing design feedback, testing of new features while they are in early development and general advice. They truly do help point Xojo in the right direction!
New Features and Improvements
We introduced many shiny new features in 2024 but we also hit the bugs hard. We fixed 16% more bugs this year compared to 2023. We fixed 224% more “old” bugs (that’s bugs that are 2 or more years old) compared to 2023. Overall, we fixed over 900 bugs, closing more bugs in 2024 than were created. We have to give a special shout-out to Robin for his work with the Issues queue. He helps ensure we have reproducible projects for bugs, which makes fixing them much more realistic.
But it’s not just all bug smashing, of course. Here are some of the other great things we’ve worked on throughout 2024.
Let’s start with some things that are not actually part of a specific Xojo release. There have been several robust example projects that we’ve produced to help you use Xojo in fun and exciting new ways. Some include:
- In Using ChatGPT, Geoff shows you how to connect to the ChatGPT API.
- Log4Xojo by Gabriel adds some slick app logging features.
- Android Design Extensions by Xojo MVP Martin adds “910+ UI extensions for Xojo Android framework”.
- DBKit, although not new in 2024, has been continually improved by Geoff, our intrepid founder and CEO.
Moving on to new features, perhaps one of the biggest announcements was the addition of preemptive threads, spearheaded by William with lots of feedback and testing from Xojo MVP Kem. Preemptive threads allow Xojo apps to even more easily take advantage of the multiple CPU cores that are prevalent on today’s computers and devices, resulting in speed improvements that can be orders of magnitude better than using standard threads. William also added the highly useful ZIP capabilities, recently got XojoScript working with ARM on Windows, has improved the debugger and exposed our SSLSocket TLSv1.3 support.
Ricardo has been doing tremendous work on the web framework, making it much faster and adding new features such as Popovers, CSS classes, simplified & faster WebDataSource and Named Colors (Ricardo’s fav!). If you haven’t looked at Xojo Web in a while, you might want to take another peek.
We also did a major upgrade to Xojo Cloud’s Linux backend that kept Travis busy for a while.
Javier has led improvements in the Xojo framework and iOS, adding long-requested features such as Popovers and Barcodes/QR codes. In addition, iOS can now use the privacy manifest. Speaking of Javier, he also improved macOS app distribution with Sandboxing, Hardened Runtime and Notarization, one of your top feature requests. Charting and PDF have also continued to improve under Javier’s watchful eye.
Android has been getting lots of fixes and new features in 2024 with Paul adding such things as tablet support, localization, better Declare capabilities, TCPSocket, RegEx, ByRef and much more. When not working on Android, he’s also spent some time on the Code Editor by improving autocomplete and adding new capabilities such as row highlighting, syntax help area size settings, easier standardize format and selection matching.
Behind the Scenes
Although not as publicly visible, Jason (or JSON as we call him around here), handles the bulk of technical questions that come in through customer support. The personal touch and assistance customers get from him is often lauded by them as something you don’t see from other companies.
You may not have noticed many mentions of Travis above, but he’s been hard at work in Xojo’s kitchen, cooking up things you’ll likely see in 2025.
Matt and Geoff work diligently to keep the docs updated with Xojo’s many changes and improvements.
(This bit is from Paul, since Alyssa won’t write about herself.) Lastly, Xojo wouldn’t exist without Alyssa keeping things operational. From dealing with general customer support issues to social media, licensing, marketing, accounting and even more I can’t think of, Alyssa is the glue that holds Xojo together. The rest of us nerdy introverts really appreciate everything she does.
Thank You
This is all made possible because of the one-of-a-kind, amazing Xojo community. To those of you who have supported Xojo through the years, and to the new users out there finding and enjoying Xojo, we thank you! We wish everyone a lovely holiday season and we look forward to seeing you in 2025!
The Xojo Team
Geoff, Jason, William, Alyssa, Robin, Paul, Travis, Javier, Ricardo, Matt & Gabriel