Since we know you all love seeing stats, I wanted to share some from the survey:

• 85% of Xojo users are satisfied
• 71% have recommended Xojo to someone else
• 60% primarily use the current release of Xojo
• 40% primarily make apps that they sell
• 28% primarily make apps for themselves
• 24% primarily make apps they (or their coworkers) use at their workplace
• 29% use the Xojo Forum
• 87% have had a positive experience using Issues, our new bug reporting and feature request system
• 74% have had a positive experience using the new documentation
• Target platform breakdown: Windows (75.95%), macOS (75.11%), Web (31%), Linux (28%), iOS (20%), Pi (18%)
• 25% have contacted Xojo Support in the last 12 months

We really appreciate everyone who took the time to fill out this survey. We get feedback from users in a variety of ways and the annual survey is so valuable in highlighting concerns, letting us know what you thought we got right, and bringing all kinds of things to our attention. If you did not receive the survey, please check your email settings and make sure you are opted in to our emails so you’ll receive future surveys.

Dana Brown is Xojo’s Director of Sales & Marketing. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Communication and a Master’s degree in Advertising. Having worked in the marketing field for almost 20 years, primarily in the technology sector, she has extensive experience in everything from digital marketing to search engine marketing, content creation, website development, event planning, brand development, advertising and more.

We continue to make progress on all aspects of Android support which includes:

• Code generation work to make sure your Xojo code performs as you expect with the Android virtual machine
• Controls with names, properties, and events that match iOS as closely as possible
• The debugging experience
• Removing external dependencies where possible, so you hit the ground running

Right now we have many of the UI controls working, much of the Xojo language and more than 30 example projects to help with testing. As you may already know, we are creating native Android apps using native Android controls and targeting Android 5.0 (Lollipop, API 21) and higher.

To give you a feel for this, here is a look at the Android version our Eddie’s Electronics sample project.

This should all look pretty familiar, especially if you’ve worked with iOS projects. And speaking of familiar, this is what some of the code looks like:

We even have the ability to run this project in both the Android Emulator and on a physical Android device. Here is Eddie’s Electronics running on the Android Emulator (Pixel 4 emulation):

As you can see, there is still more to do, but many things have been completed. We look forward to beginning the testing phase once we feel like testers can have a good experience with the items noted above. We cannot commit to timelines, but we are thrilled with the incredible interest we’ve seen! Rest assured that we are as excited as you to have Android support in Xojo and are working hard to deliver it.

64-bit support, for example, has been a major focus and continues to be. At one time, 64-bit was a nice-to-have. Then it became important and now it’s critical. There are Linux distributions that no longer provide 32-bit support. iOS now requires apps to be compiled to 64-bit in order to be in the App Store. You might have noticed that the 2017r2 cycle was longer than usual. This was due to the fact that we were doing some major refactoring of how strings are handled under 64-bit. Some of the string functions you depend on were not always behaving themselves and were much slower than they were in 32-bit applications. That refactoring took twice as long as we’d originally planned. That’s just the way things go sometimes. Even companies such as Microsoft and Apple have announced features that were later delayed. We’ve all been there.

We are also working to provide a 64-bit version of the Xojo IDE. This is important for those you of with large projects because the current 32-bit IDE can only address so much memory. Once your project gets big enough, the IDE can run out of memory even though your computer has plenty to spare. We need this ourselves because the Xojo IDE is written in Xojo and as you can probably imagine, is a very big project. 64-bit applications can address all of the memory your computer (or any future computer you own) will ever have. A 64-bit version of the IDE will permanently resolve this issue.

Sometimes the platform vendors make changes that require us to rearrange things a bit in the short term. For example, our first 64-bit platform was going to be Linux until Apple announced the 64-bit requirement for iOS apps to be in the iOS App Store far earlier than expected. Recently, Apple made it clear that under iOS 11 the Xcode 9 version of the iOS Simulator would not support 32-bit apps or debugging. We had originally planned to support 64-bit iOS Simulator debugging in 2018. Instead we are working hard and fast on that right now.

As a result of all this, some of our plans have been pushed out a bit. We had originally aimed to have Android, interops and plugins made with Xojo available for beta testing by the end of this calendar year. Now that’s not going to happen. We are still working quite hard on all these things (and more) but the 64-bit work has just waylaid us a bit. It is our intention, barring any additional unforeseen circumstances, to ship these features in the first half of 2018.

Fortunately, not all things have been delayed. We are working on a big update to the Windows framework that will dramatically reduce the flicker you sometimes see. This will not just improve the user experience of your apps but the Windows version of the Xojo IDE as well. Those of you that deploy to Windows or use Xojo itself on Windows will be quite pleased. I’m confident we will have these improvements available by year end.

If you want to help us with testing 64-bit Xojo or the updated Windows framework this year, please join our Pre-Release Testing Program.

For those of you that have been participating in pre-release testing, thank you so much. You are providing a valuable service to us and the Xojo community at large.