You still hear this same argument today in the software development world, where the big names are Microsoft, Apple and Google.

But how “safe” is their stuff, really? After all, they all seem to end support for products and tools rather often.

Microsoft recently announced that they are discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac, which was only just introduced in 2016. Last I checked, Microsoft is a Very. Big. Company. Yet they somehow cannot justify resources to keep a Mac IDE viable. Clearly, they have the resources so this is a decision about Microsoft’s focus and priorities, things that Big Companies change all the time.

Google drops products (or drastically changes them) often. Changing their “free for life” Google Apps (G Suite) product to a rather expensive monthly cost was not popular with many businesses.

Apple killed off iBooks Author, and although it was not a development tool, it was something that was heavily promoted for a while as the best way to make content for the iBooks Store. In the development world, Apple killed off their Carbon OS framework in favor of Cocoa after years of telling developers the two would co-exist.

In the 2000s before working here at Xojo, I did a lot of consulting (frequently migrating VB6 apps to Xojo) and one question that was often asked of me is “why should I go with a dev tool from a small company like Xojo instead of something from a big name like Microsoft?”.

The answer I always gave at the time was: “You’re coming to me to migrate a VB6 app. VB6 was from Microsoft and they killed the product off. Big companies do that all the time. A small company like Xojo focuses entirely on their product. It gets all their attention. If you had picked Xojo in 1999 instead of VB6, we would not be having this conversation right now.”

To that end, Xojo has been around since 1998 and has outlived many other development tools and platforms. Some of which come to mind are: Visual Basic 6, Metrowerks CodeWarrior, and (now) Microsoft Visual Studio for Mac.

Technologies are also regularly discontinued by the creators in favor of newer versions. It took years for the Python community to move from Python 2 to Python 3. But when Apple finally removed Python 2 from macOS last year, there were many apps and companies that had to scramble to update their code. PHP8 was release in 2020, but as of today adoption is only about 12%. In 2017, Google switched from Java to Kotlin as the official language of Android, impacting many. Apple promotes Swift and Swift UI over Objective-C and AppKit these days. They introduced Catalyst, but it appears to not be making much headway. Microsoft pushes out new frameworks at a rapid pace, which is exciting, but can be difficult for a development team to know what to pick.

I don’t bring these things up to point out mistakes. Change is inevitable in technology after all. I only bring these up to point out that, even with the big names, there are still risks.

All this is to say that if you are an enterprise company with a large investment in software and IT, you might want to take a look outside the big names and see what Xojo can offer. I realize that if you have standardized on a set of tools from a large vendor, say C# and Microsoft, you are probably thinking “there’s no way I’m switching to Xojo no matter what this guy says”.

We at Xojo agree. You probably should not be switching everything over to Xojo. That would be insanely expensive and risky. But Xojo can be a great complement to the tools you already use. Professional software developers (and their companies) keep lots of tools in their toolbox and Xojo should be one of those tools.

So what can Xojo do for you?

Xojo’s goal is to make programming easier, allowing you to get software made faster. Xojo saves you time and money. To that end, in enterprise environments Xojo is great for:

• Prototypes and proof-of-concepts
• Internal tools and utilities
• Testing
• Demos

With Xojo you can quickly build a desktop app (for mac, Windows or Linux) to test out REST APIs. You can build a web app to demonstrate some UI concepts or easily distribute information. You can build a mobile app (iOS or Android) to quickly try out ideas. Xojo lets you do All The Things without having to deal with a bunch of different complex tools and technologies. Xojo can give you the speed and power of low-code tools without all the limitations.

Xojo makes it quicker and easier to try out software ideas before you commit expensive development resources to your primary tools. A company’s biggest expense is usually salary and using an expensive IT department to slowly build everything is not a great value. You spend too much money on salary and sacrifice too much time on lost opportunities. Using Xojo instead can save you significant money that you can put towards the projects you determine are viable and worth more investment.

And don’t forget about internal tools. Every company needs internal tools of some kind and these won’t generate revenue on their own. Forcing these tools to go through an overworked IT department is slow and expensive. But not building them at all means your staff is less productive than they could be. Your advanced power users can use Xojo to create tools that will improve productivity at a fraction of the cost and avoid lost opportunities waiting for IT.

Like Apple, Google and Microsoft, Xojo isn’t perfect. We’ve made our share of mistakes, such as our transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 which was not as smooth as we had hoped it would be. The team is only human, but we do our best to learn from mistakes and if nothing else we are perseverant and committed to always making Xojo better. The fact that we’ve been doing this since 1998 is a testament to that.

So join the many other enterprise customers that use Xojo as a secret weapon! You might find you like using a development tool from a small company that cares about its product and its customers.

You can try Xojo for free today. Licensing is available for as low as $399 per user (even lower when purchased in bulk). Contact us at hello@xojo.com for more information or to get a quote.

Paul learned to program in BASIC at age 13 and has programmed in more languages than he remembers, with Xojo being an obvious favorite. When not working on Xojo, you can find him talking about retrocomputing at Goto 10 and on Mastodon @lefebvre@hachyderm.io.

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1. Xojo is for everyone

It doesn’t matter if you are just starting to learn how to develop software or if you are already a seasoned developer, Xojo is for everyone! If you are getting your feet wet in coding, then you’ll find that Xojo offers a programming language that is extremely easy to grasp from the start. In fact, you’ll find a lot of contextual help in Xojo while coding, and access to the global Help menu is only a click away.

In addition, the Xojo Documentation website offers really easy-to-follow QuickStarts, Tutorials and Guides letting you make your own Desktop, Web, Android, iOS, Raspberry Pi or Console apps in no time! Add that to the more than 300 video-tutorials you can find in the Xojo YouTube channel, and the fact that all the Xojo language documentation is packed with code snippets showing how to implement a particular feature- copy, paste and you are set.

Need some starting points for a better understanding of how Xojo Projects work? The Examples folder included with the Xojo Download includes dozens of complete example projects you can open, run and inspect to see in detail how to implement a particular task or behavior; then you can  adapt and use these for your own projects. Even you can use the Search feature for filtering the example projects by platform, operating system or other criteria.

One thing you’ll notice the very first time you run Xojo is that you aren’t inundated with features you don’t even know what to do with yet! Everything is clear and concise in front of you, hiding the complexity generally associated with the development workflow.

As you advance in your learning process and get more experienced in coding, you can discover more advanced features at your own pace. And even then, things like Web debugging, iOS or Android deployment or truly multi-platform development, are still effortless. Xojo does all of this without installing thousands of files on each operating system or requiring the additional installation of other components in order to properly work.

What if you’re an experienced developer coming from another development environment or language? Then you’ll be able to learn and master the Xojo programming language in a blink while watching your productivity increase! In fact, Xojo is an Event-Driven OOP (Object Oriented Programming) language, sharing the same “dot notation” syntax used by the most modern programming languages; and Xojo offers guides to port your existing projects, for example, from FoxPro or VB6 to modern and truly multi-platform deployment with Xojo. And even if you are coming from other development environments as FileMaker or 4D, Xojo makes your solutions available for a more wide range of platforms as native apps and without hidden or extra deployment costs.

Being an OOP language means that Xojo will share the same set of paradigms and/or syntax you are used to dealing with in other programming languages; ranging from PHP to C++, Objective-C, Swift, JavaScript, Python, and others. In fact, you’ll discover that several of the language keywords, instruction blocks and function or methods calling conventions are very similar to the ones found in those.

Add that to the rich and complete Xojo Framework and the fact that you can even use external libraries if you need to; and you’ll realize all the possibilities you have at your hands for creating apps and complete solutions that can be used by individuals or companies of all sizes.

2. Make all kind of apps!

While several languages and IDEs are more suited or focused on developing a particular kind of products (database driven, mobile, IoT, etc.), with Xojo you’ll be using the same IDE and programming language to create all of these and more!

For what it is worth, that means that even if you are a self-employed developer, a Citizen Developer or need to develop a solution for a company, you’ll be saving a huge amount of time, money and resources in order to get all these things done with a single development environment. That translates into reduced costs and increased ROI in your development investments; from the simplest ones to the more complex and demanding, including Console apps acting as Daemons, background processes, task helpers… or APIs development as the middleware to interact with both Mobile, Web, Desktop or Raspberry Pi clients!

Do you offer consultancy services or are you working as a freelance developer? With Xojo you’ll significantly reduce the amount of time you usually spend following multiple changes and evolutions in programming languages, frameworks, SDKs, technologies and, probably, third parties IDEs (among other resources) in order to keep going with your business.

At the same time, due to the fact that Xojo shares the programming language and IDE among all the supported platforms (Desktop, Web, Android, iOS and Raspberry Pi) and architectures (both 32 and 64-bit / Intel and ARM), you can also expand the kind of solutions you can offer to you current or potential clients and keep them running as the technology evolves!

3. Truly Native, Cross-Compiled, Multi-Platform Apps!

Some development environments or programming languages are focused (or are more appropriate) to a particular platform or target. With Xojo you’ll find that all of your apps will be compiled to native binary code on every supported platform.

That means that they will not incur the performance penalties imposed by byte code translations or that they can be easily reverted to source code, even your Web products!

What’s more important: the compiled apps will look and behave as you expect on every one of the supported operating systems.

In general, all of this means that you can be more confident about the fact that your intellectual property will not be the targeted or exposed by the most common techniques or exploiting attacks; and that translates into additional peace of mind regarding how you protect your investment in developing and deploying your solutions.

Even Xojo is created with Xojo! That is, the IDE offers the same look and feel and set of features from Windows, macOS and Linux.

4. Do more with less

During the designing, coding, testing or deployment phases of the product you won’t need to do complex set-ups or check for ever-changing dependencies! The Xojo IDE abstracts you from all the inherent and underlaying complexity, so you can focus on what really matters: the features that make your product truly unique.

This kind of complexity abstraction is evident not only for Desktop apps, but also for Android and iOS deployments and is especially evident when deploy web apps in combination with Xojo Cloud.

In this last case, you only need to click a button in Xojo to have your web app transferred from the IDE to your Xojo Cloud server. Your app will be up and running in a matter of seconds, without needing to deal with complex server configurations or investing all the required time in being sure that you have all the server security issues covered and under control. Think about that for a moment: if you are a small company or just an independent developer, you don’t need to invest  extra resources, time and money in order to have your web apps secured and running with confidence.

Of course, if you have the resources and/or the required knowledge, you can deploy your web apps yourself on any VPS or web hosting service of your choice that meets the Xojo Web deployment requirements.

But the best part is that it doesn’t mind if you’re developing for Web, Android, iOS, Desktop or Raspberry Pi: you can develop for any of the Xojo supported platforms from the operating system of your choice! In the case of macOS and iOS apps, development can be done on any platform a Mac computer is required for compilation.

In summary: it doesn’t matter what OS or platform you want or need to code for, you’ll be using the same IDE and programming language in all the cases, abstracting you from all the particularities and underlaying complexity on every case. And that means doing more in less time!

5. Rapid Application Development

It doesn’t matter if you are creating a Desktop, Web, Android or iOS app; or if you want to build your solutions for Intel or ARM based architectures. With Xojo you will be able to design the user interface via Drag & Drop from a rich set of controls ready to use. It’s that simple. In fact, the Layout Editor provides visual clues to precisely align every control in the Window, View or Page of the app; and if you’re targeting for macOS, Web, Android or iOS you’ll be able to see how your designs react when used in Dark Mode!

Reacting to users’ interactions in your apps is as easy as selecting a user interface control in the Layout Editor, adding the kind of event you’re interested in from a list (with contextual help about what it does and when it is fired), and writing the code you want to be associated and executed to that particular Event.

Add that to the fact you can reuse your already developed Classes, Modules and other resources; you can even reuse your code between different kinds of projects and targeted platforms!

6. No chains!

It doesn’t matter if the apps or solutions created with Xojo are intended to be used by dozens or thousands of users, even if they are database driven! With Xojo you don’t have to pay royalties for absolutely anything! Even better: you don’t need to buy a license in order to try, learn and use Xojo! There is no limited trial, feature limitations or other drawbacks when using the free IDE. Download Xojo and begin learning, developing, running and debugging your projects all without a license.

Features include, the access and use of the supported database engines: from SQLite to MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, or any other you can access using ODBC, and of course the included features to work with Reports.

You can buy a Xojo license when you decide that is the time to build your projects. Further, all Xojo licenses are covered by a 90-day money-back guarantee.

In addition, you don’t even need to pay for what you are not going to use (or going to use right now). What does this mean? Well, let’s say that if you only work with Windows and only want to create apps for Windows, then you only need to buy the Windows Lite Edition license for that ($99 USD), while if you need your apps to be run from all the supported Desktop platforms (including Raspberry Pi), then the Xojo Desktop Edition license is probably what you’re looking for ($299 USD); or if you really want to grasp all the Xojo power and target all the Xojo supported platforms (Desktop, iOS, Web and Raspberry Pi), then Xojo Pro is undoubtedly for you ($699 USD)! Oh and Xojo Pi, for building desktop and console apps, is free!

You can even upgrade to Xojo Desktop or Pro at any time if you decide that you need to use more advanced features not present in your current edition. In other words, you don’t need to buy a new license from scratch if you don’t want to. You can even change your Xojo Cloud plan at any time you require!

7. You’re not alone!

With more than 400,000 users around the world and more than 20 years on the market, the awesome Xojo community is one of the best programming resources you can find around to join to. In the Xojo Forum you’ll find the largest community and best place to get your questions answered by a large group of enthusiastic and seasoned Xojo developers.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a simple or a more complex problem, you’ll feel welcomed and probably have your problem solved in record time! In fact, many of the replies come from members of the Xojo Staff, ranging from Customer Service to anyone on the Engineering Team or even the Founder and CEO of Xojo himself!

Of course, you have other resources you can (and should!) visit, ranging from a dedicated publication about Xojo development, to Users Groups and Xojo Pages in Facebook, developers blogs about Xojo, and of course the official Xojo channels in Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. Don’t worry, you don’t need to search the entire web to find these, we have collected some of these valuable resources here and here.

And if you need to get a richer experience and more in-depth knowledge, in a face to face way, then you won’t want to miss any of the usual Xojo Events taking place in several American and European cities each year! There you can chat with other Xojo developers to exchange experiences, attend technical sessions, socialize and create new relationships that can lead in new work projects, etc.

The biggest of these Events is XDC, with Xojo developers coming in from all around the world, and where you will be able to attend sessions from expert Xojo developers and where you can talk with all the Xojo Team!

8. And you won’t be left behind

Did you know that Xojo is still able to open and run projects from earlier releases, even many, many years ago? Sure that in more complex projects you will need to upgrade code, and that’s because Xojo has evolved, and continues to evolve, to match the own industry changes and evolution.

In fact, the apps created with Xojo are 64-bit compliant (although you can still generate 32-bit code, if you need), with support for HiDPI graphics, Dark Mode support both on macOS and iOS, the latest iOS SDK, native Silicon and M1 compilation and meeting other non-visual changes imposed by any of the current operating systems.

You can expect several Xojo version releases every year, adding new features, improving existing ones and fixing bugs. But we also keep a bigger picture about the medium to long term evolution of Xojo, so you can always see the big features we are working on that will be coming in future releases of Xojo. That way, all the effort you’re putting in the apps, products and solutions you create today won’t be left behind in the future. You’ll be able to improve and enrich them for your users, keeping them current as operating systems evolve.

Need to request a feature is important for you or did you find a bug you can’t workaround? We listen to you. Go to our Issues tracker system to get in touch with us about the things you want to be added or improved.

9. Add your own features!

The Xojo Framework is large enough to accomplish most of the usual app requirements you may need; but sometimes you need to go a bit further, even the thousands of already existing external libraries around whose functions you can use directly from your code … and in these cases you’re covered too!

Xojo Provides SDKs (Software Development Kits) both for Desktop and Web applications; so you just need to start digging in the provided documentation and example projects in order to create your own Xojo Plug-Ins. These will be loaded from the IDE and you’ll be able to use their exposed features with the same simplicity you do when using the rest of the internal Xojo Framework.

10. Xojo Ecosystem

Don’t be afraid if you don’t have the time, resources or knowledge needed to develop your own plug-ins.

You can resort to the broad offer of excellent third-parties plug-ins, add-ons, libraries and classes you can choose from. These range from commercial software to Open-Source projects, or just plain free classes, modules or libraries ready to download and use in your own Xojo projects.

We are here to help!

All in all it’s time to give Xojo a try, isn’t? It’s just a click ahead right now, so download Xojo and rediscover the pleasure of coding!

“Developers adopting low-code platforms want dramatically higher productivity without sacrificing features that allow them to get under the hood if the application they’re building calls for it.”

That’s an understandable concern. Developers want the productivity they can get from low-code tools but they don’t want to give up the ability to call directly into the operating system when they need to. There are low-code platforms that don’t provide such access. Fortunately, Xojo isn’t amongst them. Our vision for Xojo has always been to make the tool easy to learn and highly productive to develop applications with, without sacrificing power when you need it.

In those rare cases when you need to use an OS capability for which the Xojo framework does not provide built-in support, there are three different ways to do so:

1. The Shell – Xojo’s Shell class makes it easy to issue OS commands and get back results.
2. Plugins – These are libraries (usually written in C or C++) that can include OS SDK calls.
3. Declares – These allow the developer to call individual OS calls from their code.

If you’re a developer using a traditional 3GL language and want to get the productivity benefit of low-code tools, take a look at Xojo as it gives you that without sacrificing low-level OS access.

Just as people have varying levels of skill and interest in video games, the same is true of app development. There are those that are happy to devote enormous amounts of time to learning everything they possibly can. They don’t care how long it takes. They want to have control over everything and are willing to do whatever is necessary to make that happen. I’m so glad those people exist because there’s a lot of great software that might not otherwise have been created without them. I’m not one of those people. I really want to focus mostly on what makes my application unique, abstracted from the nitty-gritty of app development.

That’s why I have always been attracted to tools like Xojo. I am a citizen developer. Of all the job titles I have had over the years, all of them in tech,  none have ever included words like programmer or engineer. I do some software development but it’s just a part of my job. It’s something I do to help me in my work or to help my co-workers.

When I founded Xojo, Inc., tools like Xojo were called RAD (Rapid Application Development) tools. Now the term du jour is Low-Code. Put simply, it means that a development tool provides a lot of built-in functionality so you don’t have to write too much code compared to more traditional languages and tools. That’s Xojo. You can build your user interface visually via drag and drop.

The set of built-in commands (the framework) provides you with everything you’ll likely need to handle the things that do require some coding. Xojo is a cross-platform tool making it easy to create apps for different platforms such as MacOS, Windows, Linux, the web, iOS and even Raspberry Pi, without having to learn all the details of each one. Unlike some cross-platform solutions, Xojo builds complete native apps which means your apps have the look, feel and performance of those written in the more complicated tools that require so much more code.

It’s not all upside. There are sometimes very specific features for which Xojo has no built-in support. An example of this is notifications. The good news is that should you find yourself needing functions like this, there’s a vibrant Xojo community of users who have likely already created that functionality and you can just add it to your project. And Xojo is updated multiple times per year so new functionality is always appearing.

If you’re like me and you want to be able to quickly and easily build applications that make life easier for you and perhaps your co-workers, Xojo is something you should seriously consider. Xojo is also free to use and learn. You only need buy a license if you decide you want to deploy your application. We provide lots of free resources including a video library with over 250 videos, tutorials, and documentation as well as a textbook designed to help you learn app development.

It’s tremendously empowering to be able to build even a simple app that helps you accomplish tasks more quickly and efficiently. A low-code development tool like Xojo is a great place to start.

Visual Studio can also create web apps and as it would turn out, you may find that Xojo is a better option for web apps.

Technically, Visual Studio for Mac can create ASP.NET Core Web Apps. These type of web apps use the ASP.NET framework, but do not provide a form (layout editor) for your app’s user interface. Instead you’ll have to create everything in code, including mapping UI actions to corresponding code. ASP.NET Core also requires you to use the MVC (model-view-controller) design pattern, which can be a bit daunting for beginners.

I was not able to find a concise tutorial on how to use ASP.NET Core with Visual Studio for Mac. The primary tutorial on the Microsoft Doc site, Building your first ASP.NET Core MVC app with Visual Studio, shows you how to make a simple web app to show movies from a movies database but it consists of 10 separate sections, each rather lengthy, and it is not specific to Visual Studio for Mac but is instead for Visual Studio for Windows.

So to demonstrate something a bit simpler, here is how you can create a Xojo web app that works like the “Hello” app shown in the native Mac and cross-platform desktop app posts.

A Simple Xojo Web App

Start by downloading and installing Xojo.

1. Launch Xojo and select “Web” from the Project Chooser. Enter an Application Name of “HelloWeb” and click OK. You’ll see the structure for a Xojo web app with these parts: App, Session, and WebPage1. Since WebPage1 is selected you’ll also see the Layout Editor, something not available in Visual Studio for Mac.
2. In the Layout Editor, you can drag and drop controls to create the UI for your web app. Drag a Button control and a Label control on to the layout so that it looks like this:
   
3. Click on the Button and then select “Inspector” in the toolbar. Change the Name property from “Button1” to “ClickButton” and change the Caption property from “Untitled” to “Click Me”.
4. Now click on the Label and change its Name property to “ClickLabel” and its Text property to “The button has not yet been clicked”.

You are done with the layout and can move on to the code.

5. To track the number of clicks you’ll want to add a property. Click the “+” button on the Layout Editor command bar and select Property. Give it the name “NumberOfTimesClicked”. Leave the Type as Integer.
6. The last thing to add is the code to increase the clicks and display them in the label. Click on WebPage1 to go back to the layout and double-click on ClickButton to show the Event Handler window. Click on Action and then OK. This displays a blank Code Editor. Here you’ll put the code to run when the button is clicked. This is the code:

NumberOfTimesClicked = NumberOfTimesClicked + 1

Dim buttonText As Text = "The button has been clicked {0} time{1}."
buttonText = buttonText.Replace("{0}", NumberOfTimesClicked.ToText)
buttonText = buttonText.Replace("{1}", If(NumberOfTimesClicked > 1, "s", ""))
ClickLabel.Text = buttonText

If you read the native Mac app post or the cross-platform desktop app post you’ll notice something. The steps and code are exactly the same when creating a Xojo web app as when you are making a Xojo desktop app, at least for this simple example.

You should now save your project.

Testing

To test your project, just click the big Run button on the toolbar. This starts the web app in your default browser. Click the button to see the label get updated.

Indeed this is a ridiculously simple app and is really designed just to give you a quick feel for the development environment. But it should be pretty obvious that Xojo is much, much simpler to use for creating web apps than Visual Studio for Mac.

But Xojo has one other huge advantage when it comes to web apps: deployment.

If you need the fastest possible way to deploy your Xojo web apps, you can sign up for Xojo Cloud and then with just a single click of the “Deploy” button on the toolbar your app is built and uploaded to your server for use by anyone.

If you would rather use your own servers you also have the option of deploying a Xojo web app as a single executable file with a built-in web server (Linux, Windows and Mac servers are supported). Or you can use deploy your Xojo web app so it uses a CGI interface to connect to your own Apache web server.

Visit the Xojo Dev Center to learn more about Xojo Web App Deployment.

First, if you’ve ever used Visual Studio on Windows before, be aware that Visual Studio for Mac is not the same thing. Essentially Visual Studio for Mac is new branding for Xamarin Studio (Microsoft bought Xamarin in 2016), so Visual Studio for Mac looks and works nothing like Visual Studio for Windows.

After the 15-minute download and installation process, where I was asked for my admin password three times, the first thing that surprised me is that Visual Studio for Mac is a bit limited in how it can create desktop apps. Although it can technically create two types of desktop apps (cross-platform desktop apps using Gtk# and native Cocoa Mac apps), it cannot create native Windows, Linux or Raspberry Pi desktop apps.

Since Visual Studio for Mac is just a rebranded Xamarin Studio, I was able to find a tutorial on the Xamarin site called “Hello, Mac” that shows you how to create a simple Mac Cocoa app with a button and a label. When the button is clicked, the label displays the number of times it has been clicked.

I should warn you: it is very long and frankly a bit complicated for such a simple app. In particular I was surprised that Visual Studio for Mac does not have a built-in layout editor to design your Mac app’s UI. You have to use Xcode for that and then make sure its changes synchronize back with Visual Studio for Mac. All in all, it took me about 20 minutes, minus interruptions.

If, like me, you’ve used Xamarin Studio or Visual Studio for Mac you might be wondering how this compares to making the same app in Xojo. Here’s how to make that same app in Xojo:

Hello, Mac

Start by downloading and installing Xojo.

1. Launch Xojo and click “Desktop” in the Project Chooser. For Application Name use “HelloMac”. Click OK.

You are now looking at the Xojo Workspace window. You’ll be doing all your development in this window and won’t need to switch to another tool at any point.

On the left you can see the Navigator which has the default components for a desktop project: App, Window1 and MainMenuBar with Window1 already selected and its window layout displayed in the Layout Editor in the center of the screen. Unlike Visual Studio for Mac, Xojo has a built-in Layout Editor for designing your Mac UI so you won’t have to jump over to Xcode to create the layout.

2. On the right you’ll see the Library of controls. From there, drag a Button and a Label positioned like this:
3. Click on the Button and then click on the Inspector button in the toolbar (top right) to show the properties. Change the Name to “ClickButton” and the Caption to “Click Me”.
4. Click on the Label and change the Name to “ClickLabel” and the Text to “The button has not yet been clicked.” For the Label you’ll also want to check the right-hand lock in the Locking section so that the label grows and shrinks as you resize the window.

You are now done with the layout and can move on to the code.

5. To track the number of clicks you’ll want to add a property. Click the “+” button on the Layout Editor command bar and select Property. Give it the name “NumberOfTimesClicked”. Leave the Type as Integer.
6. The last thing to add is the code to increase the click count and display the count in the label when the button is clicked. Click on Window1 to go back to the window Layout Editor and double-click on ClickButton to show the Event Handler window. Click on Action and then OK. This displays a blank Code Editor where you’ll put this code to run when the button is clicked:

NumberOfTimesClicked = NumberOfTimesClicked + 1

Dim buttonText As Text = "The button has been clicked {0} time{1}."
buttonText = buttonText.Replace("{0}", NumberOfTimesClicked.ToText)
buttonText = buttonText.Replace("{1}", If(NumberOfTimesClicked > 1, "s", ""))
ClickLabel.Text = buttonText

The Xojo programming language resembles Visual Basic, but has an OOP model that is similar to C#.

You should now save your project.

Testing

To test your project and test the app, just click the big Run button on the toolbar. Click the button to see the label get updated.

Although this is a ridiculously simple app and is really designed just to give you a quick feel for the development environment, it should be pretty obvious that Xojo is much, much simpler to use than Visual Studio for Mac when it comes to creating Mac desktop apps. There is less overhead and you don’t have to use Xcode at all.

But Xojo has one other huge advantage when it comes to desktop apps: you can just click a button or two to get native apps for other platforms! Go back to Xojo and look at the Navigator and the section called “Build Settings”.

There you can check the boxes for “Windows” and “Linux” to also build this project as native apps for both Windows and Linux in addition to Mac. Just transfer the files over and they’ll run as is because they do not rely on any external frameworks.

This capability is a tremendous time-saver and is a major reason why so many people choose Xojo to make cross-platform desktop apps. If Visual Studio for Mac is something that interests you, then you should definitely be considering Xojo so that you can make truly cross-platform desktop apps faster than you ever thought possible.

Rapid Application Development

Rapid Application Development (RAD) is not a new term, but it is gaining in favor again as people and companies strive to create the software they need. RAD is a better way to make software! With RAD, you have focused, small projects and you use more appropriate tools to help create the software. Small is beautiful!

The idea is to not spend a lot of time on up-front design requirements and specifications and instead to create something quickly and refine it over time. This iterative approach to creating software allows you to rapidly get to working software that you can show to your customers regularly to get their feedback.

This user involvement is critical. By showing customers that you can create software rapidly and ship it regularly, they become invested in its development. And they know that changes they want or bugs they need fixed have a better chance of being addressed in these frequent releases.

RAD is truly win-win for development teams and their customers.

How Can Xojo Help?

One of my favorite quotes is from Alan Kay: “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.”

Xojo is great at making simple things simple. It doesn’t overwhelm you with too much all at once like other development tools so often do. This approach means you can quickly start creating your app, and learn as you go.

Xojo is particularly great for creating prototypes of apps. Even if your company primarily uses other tool chains such as Java or Visual Studio, you can take advantage of RAD and Xojo to quickly create prototypes to show to management. Perhaps this prototype will help get a full project funded or perhaps you’ll end up using Xojo to create the final product.

Because Xojo can create apps for so many different targets, it is particularly well-suited for RAD development. Xojo can create apps for:

• iOS (iPhone and iPad)
• Desktop (Windows, OS X and Linux)
• Web (and Xojo Cloud adds 1-click deployment)
• Raspberry Pi and other ARMv7 single-board computers (coming soon)

So if your company has a mixture of Windows, OS X and Linux machines, Xojo can help. If you are switching to Linux to save money on OS licensing, Xojo can help.

Do your developers have OS preferences? Xojo itself also works on Windows, OS X and Linux.

Industrial-Strength

Not only is Xojo great for prototypes, but it also has industrial-strength features needed for serious software development projects:

• Works with any source control system, including Git and Subversion
• Open-source unit testing framework
• Many available open-source projects
• Many 3rd party products
• Robust database support
• Interact with web services
• Threading
• In-App Scripting
• Robust graphics

Learn More

With Xojo, you’ll be able to have faster time-to-market, reduce your complexity and improve the quality of your software development projects, all while lowering your development costs.

Want to learn more? Download Xojo today and try it for free. And watch the Rapid Application Development video to see Xojo iOS, desktop and web projects in action.