Back From the Library

With Release 73 of GraffitiSuite right around the corner, and taking in everything happening in tech right now, I’ve made a decision regarding the future of GraffitiSuite.

The Explanation

The age of AI-assisted development enabling anyone to quickly create knock-off components with little to no work has negated IP concerns surrounding the actual code of GraffitiSuite. With some money for tokens and no sweat involved, anyone can replicate end products now. Competitors to real products built by a human that they openly distribute for free. This is one point of failure in the future of my planned use of Libraries.

Problems with the way Xojo Libraries operate (though, likely, there was no choice in the implementation of the system) also mean that a Library must be built with and for specific Xojo versions. This leaves customers waiting to use GraffitiSuite for new versions of Xojo as my own release timeline is disrupted by the need to drop everything and build a version for the Xojo release.

Freedom to modify is, obviously, lost with the use of Xojo Libraries. The biggest complaint about GraffitiSuite built as Xojo Libraries has centered on users being unable to modify of learn from the source code of GraffitiSuite. While I have always strived to quickly answer feature requests and assist users in modifying the end results, many never open those feature requests.

And the ship has sailed. GraffitiSuite was available for 22 years as source code releases. This means that many users are content to keep using those source code releases that may require minimal changes for new versions of Xojo as opposed to waiting for me to build new releases for each version of Xojo.

The Result

With the next release of GraffitiSuite, which will be released shortly, I’ll be moving back to source code releases. I’ll also be dropping support for Xojo Library Studio and Xojo Library Manager at the same time as these tools will no longer be useful for me and haven’t seen any real adoption among users.