Ideas wanted for surprise MBS feature for Xojo.Connect
Last year we presented our DynaPDF graphics class integration, a feature we worked on a few weeks before the conference in secret (see presentation video here). Beside the normal support requests and preparing the session slides that was a bit of extra work each day. The presentation file, I submitted before the conference, did miss the new special slides and I added them just before the presentation to make sure I didn't leak the news myself.For Xojo.Connect 2020 in Nashville this year we look for a new idea on what to present as a surprise. Not sure if we find a compelling idea. It should be something which is useful to a large portion of the user base and not a feature for a you alone or a handful of people. And it should be plugin feature, so not a wish for iOS extension or some grid with containers as that is better written in Xojo directly.
Do you have ideas? Please email us.
I would also encourage the Xojo team to take a week before XDC, look through feedback cases and maybe let every Xojo engineer pick an annoying bug, a little feature request or something they'd like to see or have and spend some time onto this. Especially as a lot of feedback cases never come to the top 100 list and never get attention of the management. The in the keynote Geoff could present that list and maybe demonstrate those improvements. Those items would be first hand news shared with the crowd. Finally for the last session, if something got fixed at the conference, present it there. I did this before at a conference where I had a short lightning talk on the end and could show a new feature I programmed at the conference.
One of the feature I would do as a developer on the compiler is to make sure it annotates the nil object checks and out of bounds exceptions as far as possible with details like line numbers or name of variable. Not for all cases of course, but the functions to raise this exceptions could be overloaded and when the LLVM frontend for Xojo parses the lines and adds the checks, it could include the parameter with line number if it knows them.