https://livecode.wistia.com/medias/zhu7fua9yh
Here is the video link for everyone to make their own judgements.
My
personal thoughts and opinions:
A bit of a confusing event because of what I see as the broad overlap between the changes coming in v10.5+ and Xavvi. I couldn't really tell whether Xavvi was a real upgrade to v10 or just a re-branding of the IDE. The AI part of it is supplied by ChatGPT in various forms, and that worked almost exactly as you would expect if you have seen demos of CoPilot etc. with other languages. It mostly worked on the simplistic examples shown and no one had any big demo disasters. For me, what was shown was "nice" and "interesting" but not compelling and certainly no reason to reach for my wallet.
There were some protests in the comments about April 27 being awfully close and not being able to kick the wheels themselves on a demo. The push back from Kevin was that April 27 was a firm deadline for support although you were free to make your case privately. I really had the feeling of "pig in a poke" and deadline sales pressure tactics.
There were many people on line for the presentation - my impression was "100's" but I have no metrics to really base that on. Most seem to be LC regulars with a sprinkling of newbie questions. Some of the regulars were not holding back and were offering pointed questions and comments. I posted my two questions that I had previously aired here and on the website, and they were answered (although not in posting order) with a bit of handwaving and no substantive information.
There were A LOT of questions for the Q&A. They had allowed 15 minutes originally I think, but ended up recording 45 minutes with more questions left to be answered later via website or email. The quite a few questions seemed to echo my puzzlement on the overlap between LC 10+ (not going away - still being developed as the platform and engine of Xavvi) and Xavvi (new core of LC going forward - if you're going to only have one license, it should be a Xavvi license). Definitely mixed messages. It seems that Xavvi costs them a LOT in cloud resources for AI especially, so Kevin said that the price points between the two platforms could never be comparable. There was also some muttering about the ChatGPT engine and hallucinations, and there was an acknowledgment that it was possible. If so, just restate your prompt and try again.
As of this posting, the meter is at 6% and $23.5K and did not move significantly pre or post presentation. They say they have given themselves 22 more days to go, but the incentives expire tomorrow which seems like a real DISincentive to me. Perhaps their record on fund raising is catching up with them. I did not sense any ground swell of support from people saying "I've got to have this now!".
After going to Flutter/Dart after LC (dropped because of their Mac support holes), I ended up committing to the SwiftUI environment. I only use Macs and live in a completely Apple ecosystem (never even picked up an Android phone, and gave up on linux trying to find my flavour) so I realized (belatedly!) that all the cross platform hassles were just noise to me. I'll stick close to the mothership because it's free and will not go away on me ever. The only reason I am here is that HyperTalk was my first language and even now, if I think of a new art form or idea of what I want to see on my computer, I think of it in HyperTalk and have to mentally shift gears. I don't dream in Swift yet, and I know from learning other languages (French, Danish, Portuguese, Dutch) that this is the marker for gut level comfort for me.
I hope that OXT will live on, and I will probably always have a copy somewhere on the drive even if it is no longer first choice.
Do watch the video and make your own conclusions.
