Welcome to London! The 2023 Xojo Developer Conference is underway, starting with the keynote from Xojo Founder and CEO Geoff Perlman. The keynote video will be available shortly on Xojo’s YouTube channel so you can watch it on-demand, here is what we have announced so far:
Conference Apps
The XDC App is available on both iOS and Android for the first time ever! Search ‘XDC 2023’ in the Google Play Store or iOS App Store. A shoutout and big thank you to Xojo MVPs Martin T and Jérémie Leroy for making these apps. Martin wanted to test out the Android pre-release by developing a real world Android app. Jeremie then used Martin’s project to create an iOS version in a few days.
XDC Videos
We are pleased to announce that all of the XDC session videos and keynote will be available free on Xojo’s YouTube channel (XDC 2023 Playlist). You can subscribe to the YouTube channel to receive notifications when new videos are posted.
Bug Bash
As we announced at the last conference, we are spending two weeks per release cycle working on bug bash type bugs. This means we are looking for bugs that do not meet the regular criteria, so they are old, only affect one person or a small number of people, etc. For Xojo 2023r2 there are already 17 issues of this sort that have been resolved. One of them, for example, was reported twelve years ago. We are committed to focus on bug fixes and will continue to fix these types of bugs during each release cycle. As a reminder, if you have a bug that is a showstopper for you, something you cannot work around, please contact us – our technical support team may be able to help you or can escalate it to an engineer.
Recent New Features
In his Keynote, Geoff discussed some recent new features, including PDF, the ChartControl, Filtering the Debugger and more.
DesktopXAMLContainer: This is the foundation for what will be our updated Windows controls. We will start with using the new controls in the Desktop XAML container but in the future they will replace the Win32 controls with modern controls. William will be talking more about this in his session.
Popover Control: A dialog-like layout that can pop-up over the existing layout is in the works.
DatabaseConnection Class: A lot of work has been done to make connecting to databases easier with more on the way.
Xojo Libraries (formerly Xojo Plugins): Using Xojo libraries, you will be able to take some portion of a Xojo project and compile to a library you can distribute or use in your other projects.
Sales & Community Growth
Sales of Xojo licenses continue to grow in 2023! This year-to-date, license renewals are up 10% over the same period last year and new license sales are up 20%.
In-Person Events
Apple, Google and others have moved to mostly online events. And in that same light, Xojo will be focusing more on on-demand events and videos. Given peoples’ comfort and preference for online, on-demand content, we do not plan on having an XDC 2024.
Android
Xojo Android is currently at 96% completion with only a handful of things remaining. Android will be shipping in the next release of Xojo, 2023r2 (marked as beta). If you have a current Xojo iOS, Pro or Pro Plus license, Android will be included at no additional charge. The iOS license will become a Mobile license and will build for both iOS and Android.
Android in the Future
Initially, you will need to develop separate Android and iOS projects. The end that we are working towards will be a single mobile project that builds for both Android and iOS similar to how Desktop projects build for Mac, Windows an Linux.
Now that we are getting closer to Android shipping, we look forward to more time for us to focus on other things.
Artificial Intelligence
AI may not be on the roadmap but we are definitely thinking about it. There are some significant gains in the apps and how you create them. If you have input please reach out to us and let us know how you could use AI in your projects, or create a feature request. We are excited to see how the world of development and software in general will change with AI.
The rest of the sessions today will be presented by the Xojo Engineers. We look forward to hearing from Paul, William, Travis and Ricardo. We will keep this blog post updated and will let you all know when the videos are ready to watch! We look forward to the next few days and a great conference!