Day one of the conference began with breakfast and Geoff’s keynote. He talked about many of the things that happened at Xojo since the last conference, such as 302 new features, 286 changes and 1400+ bug fixes. He also talked about Android and the Bug Bash, which are summarized below:

Android – When we showed Android at the last XDC it was essentially just a proof of concept. We had three possible routes we were going to take in terms of code compilation and had not even tried the first one. We ultimately went with plan B, which worked as expected. We are now feature complete for the first Android release and are rapidly fixing bugs. More on Android was discussed by Xojo Engineer Travis Hill during his session, The ABC’s of Android.

Bug Bash – We spent the month of August doing a Bug Bash and focused on different bug criteria than we usually focus on. We typically focus on the overall impact surface and bugs that we know will impact nearly everyone in a way that can’t be worked around get the highest priority. We realize that there are some bugs that do not affect many people but are very painful for those they do affect. And that is specifically where we wanted to focus our efforts with the Bug Bash this year.

The Bug Bash gave our engineers an opportunity to work on parts of Xojo they usually don’t work on making them more comfortable working in those areas. This increases our coverage in terms of who can work on what. In fact, today more of the team is comfortable working in different parts of Xojo than ever before. Most of the engineers have worked on the compiler, for example. We felt like this Bug Bash went really well and going forward we will dedicate 2 weeks per cycle to focus on fixing those types of bugs (mentioned above) when we look at what to focus on.  

Many other topics were covered in the keynote, like the Xojo community, Xojo’s participation in the GitHub Student Developer Pack, Xojo users, our design strategy and the Xojo product roadmap.

The rest of the morning continued with a session from Paul Lefebvre about how Xojo is made, followed by William’s session about the Xojo framework.

After lunch, we heard sessions from experts in the Xojo community. Always an interesting subject, Jim Meyer talked to us about using machine learning in Xojo apps. Kem Tekinay gave an interesting talk about using MemoryBlocks. Xojo Engineer Ricardo Cruz talked about the WebSDK.

We ended the day with two non coding sessions – Amy Barnes talked about the legal side of programming and Yousaf Shah discussed things you can do to improve your business other than coding. You can review the full sessions list and descriptions of all of the sessions here.

After sessions, it was time to go out on the town! We had a nice dinner at The Stillery, right in the midst of the craziness that is the Nashville Broadway area. After dinner a group headed out to one of the local honkey tonks to enjoy some live music!

Only morning sessions on day two when we heard from Christian all about MonkeyBread Plugins, his session gave some inspiration to Tim Dietrich, read about that here. Then Derrick Donnelly gave a very interesting talk about building digital forensic apps with Xojo (watch out for your fridge!) and the educational portion of the conference wrapped with Xojo Engineer Javier Menendez talking about integrating WooCommerce into Xojo apps.

We had lunch at a local diner, appropriately named The Diner. Then it was time for some fun – we visited an Escape Room (The Escape Game)! We split into three very competitive teams and entered the themed rooms where we had to “escape” by following clues and solving puzzles before the time ran out. Since we are all excellent problem-solvers, all of the groups amazingly made it out before the time ran out and none of the attendees or employees are still there. Everyone who particiapted really enjoyed it so we may do this type of activity at a future event.

It was really nice to get back to an in-person event and we look forward to doing more! Though we don’t have any plans to announce yet for the next conference, we are hosting a Xojo social meetup in London on November 9th, so if you happen to be there please come by and say hi!

William Yu grew up in Canada learning to program BASIC on a Vic-20. He is Xojo’s resident Windows and Linux engineer, among his many other skills. Some may say he has joined the dark side here in the USA, but he will always be a Canadian at heart.

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After a brief introduction welcoming attendees from 11 different countries, Geoff began the keynote by sharing some graphs showing how the Xojo community has been changing.

Along with a growing interest in Xojo, account creation is up 200%, we’ve seen a change in the demographics of our users. In 2017 only 22% of Xojo users were women. This year, that number has nearly doubled to 41%!

A few years ago, just under half of Xojo users were under 35. Now in 2019, 61% of our users are under 35.

This broader change is partially the result of current Xojo community members who evangelize Xojo on social media, blogs or simply in speaking with friends and colleagues. We know that word of mouth recommendations always carry more weight than any advertisement. Geoff took some time to recognize a few members of the Xojo community that have gone the extra mile to build this community. Hal Gumbert and Tim Dietrich, both Xojo developers from the FileMaker community, regularly blog and share on social media their experiences with Xojo. Also thanks is due to Thomas Templemann whose rally cry on the forum encouraged users to review Xojo on slant.co. What may appear to be small single actions all add up to make a difference. The stronger our community is, the better Xojo will be.

Next Geoff announced the winners of the Xojo Design Awards 2019, learn more more about these stellar examples of what has been done with Xojo!

Our team has been very busy over the last 12 months. Xojo has introduced 48 new features, made 75 changes and fixed 465 bugs. To name a few: we added Dark Mode for macOS, native labels in Windows, iOS Table pull to refresh and variable row heights, better text rendering on Windows, URLConnection in API 2.0, incremental compilation for 64-bit and ARM and significantly sped up the layout editor.

But we’ve also spent a lot of time working on some big, multiyear features so let’s take a look at where Xojo is going.

Xojo Cloud

Xojo Cloud is moving to 64-bit because the modern Linux distros are all 64-bit. Going forward, Named Hosts will allow you to point a domain at a specific app. We will be switching from CGIs to stand-alone apps to utilize modern web protocols and we are putting a load balancer in front of each app so you can easily handle more concurrent users.

Interops

If you don’t already know, Interops are basically a better way to make calls into OS APIs than declares. Interops require less code, remove the need to convert data between OS and Xojo types and are far easier to write. A quick example:

These four lines of declares connect to the EventStore database on your iOS device:

Just to connect to the eventstore, you’re dealing with a lot of very unfriendly stuff. However, with Interops this is reduced to one simple line that is friendly Xojo code:

Interops are already a real thing. We are using them internally in the iOS XDC app for both for calendar events and local notifications as well. We are also using them to build the Android framework.

IDE Update

We’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes on IDE improvements. You’ve seen some of this in 2019r1 with the layout editor.

With that completed, we’ve now reached the point where the new Home screen and improved workflow are coming soon.

API 2.0

API 2.0, is a set of APIs that will replace many of the existing ones, they will provide better consistency in naming, offsets and error handling. In some cases, we are taking the opportunity to modernize the implementation as well. You already saw this with URLConnection introduced in 2018r4. URLConnection replaced the old HTTPSocket that used a library that had to be updated. URLConnnection uses the underlying OSs’ library, so as those OSs get updated in order to provide better HTTP connections, your apps will automatically benefit. To name a couple more, API 2.0 supports Bezier Curves for all platforms, not just iOS. And the Date class has all the features we added to xojo.core.date, including: Locale support, DateInterval support and TimeZone support.

In most cases the APIs have not changed and not everything will be replaced. Those that are replaced will remain for many years so you don’t need to worry about rewriting your code right away. This change has gone faster than expected (yay, it does happen!) and we plan to be in beta after just a few more updates are made.

Web Framework 2.0

Last year we talked a lot about the design of Web 2.0, this year Geoff focused on implementation and the great progress made so far. As a way of testing out Web Framework 2.0, we decided to port something to the web using it. Since so many have asked for it over the years, we’re working on a web version of Feedback. It’s in the early stages and Greg will be demonstrating the web version in his XDC session. While there’s still more implementation to do, the fact that we are using it for internally tells you how far we have come. Once the implementation is complete, we will begin beta testing.

Android

As you may remember we showed you a Hello World on Android back in 2018. Since then we’ve got IDE integration, apps running on simulator and apps running on actual hardware. We’re also building Android apps internally. In fact, we have put together an Android version of the XDC app! You can go to the Play Store and download it right now. This is a simple app, basically the HTMLViewer. However, the app is native and was built the same way you will be building native apps in Xojo. Travis will show you more controls and have lots of details and demos in his XDC session.

So what’s left before Android is in your hands? In this as well, a lot of the “heavy lifting” has been done, we need to finish implementing the framework and port the debugger and then we will begin pre-release testing Xojo Android.

As you can see, Xojo has made significant progress towards these many large, multiyear projects. An additional note, currently work on Plugins in Xojo is paused to allow us to focus on Android. We’ll do our best to keep you updated via Twitter and Facebook throughout the conference. Please use hashtag #XDC2019 online to search or share your own thoughts. Even if you aren’t here, we’ll do our best to reduce the Xojo FOMO! The XDC Video set is now available for sale.

Speaking of great conferences, the MBS Software conference will be in Cologne, Germany on October 24th and 25th of this year. There are already 40 people coming from 10 different countries, including Geoff Perlman!

The 2019 Xojo Design Award Winners are:

Best Consumer App: Goldfish

Yves Pellot, Fishbeam Software

Best iOS App: Snow Maps

Jeremie Leroy

Best Educational App: AcaStat

Phil Crewson – AcaStat Software

Best Vertical Market App: Script Studio

Dan Bronzite – Nuvotech Limited

Best Cross-Platform App: Studiometry

Tom Iwaniec – Oranged Software

Best Developer Tool: GraffitiSuite

Anthony G. Cyphers, GraffitiSuite Solutions

Honorable Mention: Mike Cotrone

For the best looking UI for a chicken and egg tracking app ever!

These developers represent the creativity, flexibility and diversity in the Xojo Community – support them and the entire Xojo community by sharing and reviewing their apps on social media and in app stores!

After a brief intro and some bragging about how this XDC sold out faster than any XDC before, how 25% of attendees are first-timers and how Xojo is represented by users from 12 different countries – shoutout to Stephane Pinel Xojo’s French Evangelist and and Javier Menendez our Spanish Evangelist who is attending for the first time (don’t think he’s a newbie though, he’s been with Xojo for 10 years), Geoff discussed the Xojo Community. Our forum has grown over 20% since the last XDC, with 18,000 members and over 43,000 conversations.

Xojo Cloud

People use Xojo Cloud because zero-configuration is an obvious advantage – we install more than 100 software updates per year which is 100+ actions that protect your app and your data that you don’t have to manage or install yourself. But it’s the industrial strength security that adds the most value. Xojo Cloud servers have been scanned over 1 billion times with zero known breaches to date. While no one can make servers 100% secure, Xojo Cloud certainly has proved itself to provide best-of-class security which is absolutely critical in today’s always-on, always-connected world. Check out Xojo Cloud‘s bigger and better servers – now with monitoring and stats build into the Xojo IDE.

Platform Landscape

The week started in earnest on the evening of Tuesday, October 4th as attendees joined us for early registration. After people registered and got their cool XDC shirts and Xojo water bottles, everyone migrated to the Revolve Bar at Hotel Derek for conversation and Xojo discussions.

The Keynote Starts

On Wednesday morning, the keynote started at 9 and Geoff opened with an overview of the conference and Xojo (see what we live tweeted). Highlights include:

• XDC 2016 had attendees from 12 countries, with about 45% of the attendees from outside the US. About 25% were first-time XDC attendees.
• There are now over 15,000 forum members, a 36% increase over last year, with over 276,000 posts.
• And yes, XDC sessions were recorded again this year! They’ll be made available for free to all attendees and for sale to non-attendees later this year.

To finish the overview, Geoff talked a bit about Xojo Cloud security. Web servers are constantly scanned for vulnerabilities at an alarming rate. Xojo Cloud is no exception; it is scanned about every 10 seconds with zero known breaches to date. Xojo Cloud remains a safe, easy and secure way to host your Xojo web apps.

Xojo Design Awards

After the conference overview, Geoff announced the winners of the 2016 Xojo Design Awards, which honor excellence in software design. Awards were given in five different categories and Best Overall, which was awarded to EverWeb. EverWeb is a website builder that allows you to build a website with no code at all.

The winners are:

• Best Developer Tool and Best Overall: EverWeb
• Best Business App: Light Blue
• Best Consumer App: Alinof Timer Pro
• Best Cross-Platform App: PubCoder
• Best iOS App: Studiometry Touch

Congratulations to the 2016 Xojo Design Award Winners! It is an inspiration to us all to see such powerful and amazing apps made with Xojo.

Xojo Recent Changes

Geoff next talked some of the changes to Xojo since XDC 2015. There were many, including:

• 949 bugs fixed
• 187 new features implemented
• HiDPI support added for macOS, Windows and web
• Raspberry Pi apps
• 64-bit apps using the LLVM compiler
• Addressed the top iOS requests

By the way, be sure to give Xojo 2016r3 a try as it dramatically decreases 64-bit compilation times.

Xojo Roadmap

Geoff then presented a roadmap for Xojo for the coming year. First up was Xojo 2016 Release 4, which is expected to ship in December. Notable new features include:

• Better Xojo Cloud upload speeds
• Windows HiDPI will be out of beta
• The Windows IDE will be HiDPI
• The Windows graphics framework is getting an update to switch to Direct2D and DirectWrite for smoother graphics and hardware acceleration

For early 2017, Xojo is expecting 64-bit to be out of beta, enabling things such as debugging, XojoScript, Windows manifest and other features.

Later in the year, we expect 64-bit to become the default build target. But don’t worry, 32-bit is not going away! We are also working on the 64-bit version of the IDE itself. The new Xojo framework will be expanded to have feature parity with the classic framework to make it easier for you to start using it in your projects. Lastly, we are also expecting the ability to write plugins for Xojo in Xojo (first announced at XDC 2015) to be made available.

Towards the end of the year, Xojo is working towards shipping an updated IDE with simplified project layout and management. We are also working on a new SDK Interoperability feature (Interops) that will make it much easier use your Xojo apps with standard app frameworks for iOS and macOS. And this new feature will be leveraged to provide an all-new Xojo project type: native Android mobile apps!

Geoff closed the keynote by talking about the history of Xojo, the team and how everyone can help spread the word about Xojo. Telling friends and coworkers about Xojo is a great way to help others enjoy its benefits and grow the Xojo community. Lastly, since Xojo turned 20 this year, Geoff talked a bit about what has changed in the development world since REALbasic 1.0 (the precursor to Xojo) was first released.

We also introduced limited-edition 20th Anniversary t-shirts, if you are interested email hello@xojo.com to order.

General Sessions

Following the keynote, Susan Fennema did a talk on Managing Your Projects. Susan did a podcast with Paul back in August and this session had even more useful tips to help anyone become more productive at just about anything. Her Smarties giveaway proved quite smart, indeed!

After Susan’s talk, Travis and Joe tag-teamed a presentation on the new Xojo framework and then it was time for lunch!

Sessions, So Many Sessions

After lunch the breakout sessions started. At this point there were always two sessions going on simultaneously and attendees often said they wanted to be able to attend both so it’s a great thing they were all recorded. There were sessions on a wide variety of topics, including iOS development, testing, databases, reporting, REST and so much more. With 36 sessions altogether, XDC truly is a “firehose of knowledge”!

Activities

Coming to XDC is not all about work and learning – you also get to have fun! This year’s evening activities started with a rockin’ night of live music with Skyrocket, a fabulous 70/80’s cover band. Our fearless CEO, Geoff Perlman, even joined the band on stage to play drums in a rousing cover of American Girl by Tom Petty.

The next night everyone headed across the street to Grotto Ristorante for conversation, drink and a fabulous Italian dinner.

What Attendees Are Saying About XDC:

“This was my first XDC. Almost overwhelmed with information! I definitely enjoyed meeting everyone and I now have real faces (and accents) to attach to the forum posts.” – John Knight, Jr.

 

“2016 was my first time attending XDC, and it was amazing. I learned a lot, and met so many incredibly nice, interesting, and brilliant people. I want thank everyone for their kindness, generosity, and for the laughs. I feel like I’ve found my “tribe.” – Tim Dietrich

 

“I felt the same way at my first XDC 4 years ago, and still feel that way every year. It’s a great event, with amazing people, and I’m already looking forward to next year!” – John McKernon

 

“It was filled with useful information, of course, but more importantly, the people from Xojo and the other attendees were passionate about the platform and willing to dive in to help a newcomer learn.  I even had the opportunity to spend a couple hours with the CEO and some others and have a great discussion!  That says a lot about a twenty-year-old tech organization.  We will be converting our systems to Xojo-designed apps and I’ll be going again next year.” – Bill Kapeles

 

“I was another first timer at XDC. In my 30+ years of involvement in the software industry, this was one of the best development conferences I have attended. Professionalism and willingness to engage with new attendees was evident at every level. Wonderful experience!” – Karen Bintz

 

“The presentations covered such a wide range of topics. It was really cool to see all the incredibly different ways people use Xojo and to hear the depth of knowledge each one has in their particular areas. I learned a ton, and it was a privilege to present as well….. plus it was fun! It was particularly great to meet everyone in person. The whole event ran smoothly, the food was great, the entertainment was great.” – John Joyce

 

“This. This is why I go every year. Renewing friendships, meeting with clients (both old and prospective), learning new things, and talking Xojo non-stop makes for an awesome experience.” – Bob Keeney

Thanks!

The Xojo Team wants to thank all the attendees of XDC 2016. We could not do XDC without you. And a special thanks to all the presenters helping to make XDC so valuable by providing wonderful, varied content. We can’t wait to see you next time!

From left to right: William Yu, Paul Lefebvre, Stéphane Pinel, Alyssa Foley, Greg O’Lone, Dana Brown, Norman Palardy (seated), Travis Hill (standing), Geoff Perlman, Joe Ranieri, Robin Lauryssen-Mitchell, and Jason Parsley

This video package includes 30+ educational Xojo sessions recorded live at XDC in Austin this past May. You’ll get over 30 hours of sessions, including the XDC keynote, along with presentation slides and example projects to help you follow along! With video access, you can watch in your browser or download a copy (SD and HD available) for your own personal use.

Want a little something to know what you are getting? Everyone can watch Paul’s 45-minute Introduction to iOS session free! Learn more about XDC in the conference highlights video and in the XDC 2015 Recap blog post. And don’t forget, all XDC attendees have free access to the video through their accounts; just another great perk to attending XDC!

Geoff Perlman opened XDC by announcing that, for the first time ever, we are recording the entire conference- that includes Geoff’s keynote, all 35 sessions plus bonus material! Recordings will be available for sale by early June. XDC attendees will get a copy free.

xDev Magazine’s Marc Zeedar Checking in with Passbook on his Apple Watch

After a review of this #XDC2015 attendees- representing 12 countries, with 24% of attendees being first time attendees- Geoff moved on to talk about what’s coming up in future releases of Xojo.

Xojo Cloud Upgrades
Starting in June, all Xojo Cloud servers will get upgraded to 2x the RAM, 2x the throughput and full SSD storage at no additional cost! That means in June: Small Xojo Cloud Servers will offer 1GB RAM, 20GB SSD Storage and 200Mb/s throughput; Medium Xojo Cloud Servers will offer 2GB RAM, 40GB SSD, 2 vCPUs and 400Mb/s throughput; and Large Xojo Cloud Servers will offer 4 GB RAM, 80GB SSD, 4 vCPUs and 800Mb/s throughput. All at no additional cost per month, plus the extensive Xojo Cloud Security and 1-click deployment of your Xojo web apps! With this upgrade even Small Xojo Cloud servers will be have database support for MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Cookie Break at the Radisson in Downtown Austin, Day 1

Xojo Web Drag & Drop
Geoff gave us a demo of touch-enabled drag and drop, coming to Xojo Web. This feature gives you client-side (browser) ability to handle drag and drop. You’ll be able to specify controls that can be dragged, those that can accept drops and get notified when drops occur.

Geoff Perlman being interrogated by the Austin Police…at the Dinner Detective evening event.

64-bit Schedule
As you know, we’re working hard updating all platform frameworks to be fully 64-bit capable. It’s huge project with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and we’ve made great progress to date, Geoff announced that we have already built a 64-bit release of Feedback for OS X and Windows. Xojo iOS is already 64-bit. We’ll be adding an optimizing 64-bit capable compiler & linker and few if any changes will be required in your projects.

Bob Keeney and Scott Boss on the Lone Star River Boat awaiting Austin’s Bats

Raspberry Pi
Probably the most talked about announcement is that Xojo will be adding support for Raspberry Pi later this year! Xojo Pro users will get Raspberry Pi included in their existing licenses at no additional cost. Separate Xojo Raspberry Pi licenses will also be available.

Plugins in Xojo
Get ready to build your plugins in Xojo! We’re developing a new plugin format that lets you build your Xojo plugins in Xojo- no more C/C++! No Plugin SDK, so no waiting for features to get added to the SDK, use features as soon as they are available. These plugins are compiled down to LLVM bit code. Existing C/C++ plugins will continue to be supported long term on existing platforms & 64 bit desktop/console/web platforms.

Xojo developers ready for a good dinner and a good mystery.

Retina Support
Retina support will be coming in 2015 Q4 with support for both the Xojo IDE and the framework, so you can support it more easily in your own apps.

Geoff also announced that we’ll be dropping Windows XP build support in Xojo 2015r3. We’ve blogged about this many times since 2013. Leaving XP behind is necessary and doing so will allow us to move forward and adopt new technologies on the Windows platform.

As always, XDC’s 3 days went by incredibly quickly. XDC 2015 wrapped up with a brand new coding contest- it was totally retro, dude! Bruno’s spaceship trumped even Joe’s bot, and he won a new Apple Watch!

Bruno, conquerer of Xojo Space and winner of #XDC2015’s Coding Contest

If you missed #XDC2015, don’t make the same mistake in 2016. In addition to the 35 sessions and other perks of being an attendee, there was the time Christian Schmitz’s brother full-body tackled the “murderer” at our Dinner Detective event and a gorgeous cruise down Lady Bird Lake ending in an amazing view of thousands of bats taking flight! The benefits of the conference are many and the memories…well, those can’t be quantified and some should probably not be recorded. As one attendee wrote me yesterday “Words can’t express the time that I had, people I met, and what I learned. I wish that I had attended the earlier ones. I will be at the next one…”

The Lone Star Riverboat, Docked After Taking XDC Attendees on a City Tour and Bat Viewing

For additional information, you can watch Paul’s XDC recap webinar. Also, check out the many threads on the Forum from some of the Xojo Forum’s most active members. If you have any questions feel free to post here or ask me on Twitter @Xojo. If you were at XDC, tweet us a pic of you wearing your #XDC2015 shirt in your hometown for a RT!

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We are still feeling the excitement from the great conference we held in Las Vegas and we can’t wait until XDC 2015! We have already hit the ground running to secure a location for next year. Las Vegas was a fun location for the conference, many attendees expressed that it was their first time in the city or that they hadn’t been in years. I had only been one time for a short weekend trip 10 years ago, so driving in from the airport with Alyssa was pretty spectacular- seeing Excalibur and NYNY- then pulling into the fabulous Monte Carlo!

Tuesday night we opened registration and got to see a lot of familiar faces and meet a lot of new XDC attendees. The special Vegas-themed shirts this year were a big hit!

The Monte Carlo food was fantastic. They served us a full breakfast and lunch each day, giving everyone more opportunities to chat and get to know one another.

The general session started on Wednesday morning with Geoff’s Keynote. By far, the topic most people were excited to hear about was iOS. The Keynote did not disappoint.

Here are some highlights from the Keynote:

• XDC 2014 is 16% bigger than last year with Xojo users from 14 countries.
• 14 users in attendance that have been users since v1 in 1996!
• Marc Zeedar was named Xojo MVP for community support and attending every conference we’ve ever held!
• Xojo Cloud Recap – It really is that simple and secure! Rackspace has told us, “Only our most paranoid customers have this much security”. And we include it in all Xojo Cloud accounts!
• Since we switched to Xojo Cloud ourselves, we have had zero known security breaches after 15 million server scans by hackers.
• Currently Xojo Cloud is hosted out of Chicago, but later this year we’ll add London, Sydney, Hong Kong, Virginia and Dallas.
• Our framework has been around for 15 years and we are working on updating and modernizing it for consistency and new features.
• The new Xojo framework will have modern APIs, consistently named APIs, all indexes will start with 0 and most classes and functions are the same. Don’t worry, it won’t break your existing code!
• With the new framework UI controls are shared across all frameworks, making it much easier to share code between project types.

• Xojo iOS demo showed a Xojo app working on iPhone and iPad, including auto-layout.
• Xojo iOS will be released to the alpha testing group in May and we’ll have a better idea of when it will ship once it goes to beta.
• iOS will be sold as a separate license for $400 or you can add it to your Xojo Pro license for only $200. Sales will begin upon release.
• The XDC App was announced- made with Xojo Web and hosted on Xojo Cloud. The app includes a sessions list and schedule, Twitter feed, and map to help you find your way back to the hotel in case you get lost!

The day continued with educational sessions- we heard from Joe Strout about building a Xojo iOS app, Xojo MVP Marc Zeedar talked about how to get more out of object-oriented programming, Jared Zelek talked Design Patterns, which is always a very popular session, and more! We ended the day with an Ask the Xojo Engineers panel where attendees brought their questions and had some dedicated time to hear what the engineers had to say.

That night we met up at the Monte Carlo Pub for a wonderful dinner and some networking time. Attendees talked to one another about what they do with Xojo projects, where they are from, their strategies for the upcoming XDC code competition and more… Several groups hit the casino afterwards!

On the second day, Thursday, we heard from Hamish Symington of Light Blue Software about how to get and keep happy customers, Xojo Engineer Travis Hill gave us some insight into scale testing for web apps, Carol Keeney and Seth Verrinder talked about databases, and Xojo Engineer Joe Ranieri covered the Xojo Compiler. Later that afternoon Bob Keeney gave a presentation on Xojo Consulting and Xojo Evangelist Paul Lefebvre gave a fascinating presentation on Practical User Interface Design.

That evening we gathered for some Italian fine dining (and drinking) at the Monte Carlo restaurant d.vino.

We concluded the conference with a day of educational sessions. Bob Keeney and Seth Verrinder covered Xojo Reporting Tools, Paul Lefebvre and William Yu taught us what we can do to learn to love Linux and Kem Tekinay talked MacOSLib. Christian Schmitz talked about what’s new with the MonkeyBread Software Xojo Plugins, Tim Hare covered data mining and we heard about Xojo Desktop application PubCoder from Angelo Scicolone.

After having a few of our 38 sessions repeated, we started the XDC battleship code competition. Attendees’ apps fought to the death on the high seas- er, I mean the big screen! Congratulations to winner Jim Meyer, well played, sir. Jim went home with a brand new, top of the line, iPad air! What a great way to end XDC 2014!

For additional thoughts on XDC 2014, you can watch the XDC 2014 Recap Webinar. You can also read attendee thoughts in various forum topics and on Twitter, search #XDC2014!

Stay tuned for our save the date announcement for XDC 2015. Will you be there? Don’t forget that XDC 2014 sold out, so make plans to register early!