Here’s the transcript of the relevant part:
Objo Studio podcast segment — English transcript
Episode: Things in life happen when they are supposed to happen
Podcast: Infinitum
Relevant discussion: 00:14:02–00:30:25 (episode time)
First explicit mention of Objo: 00:14:23
Editorial note
This is a carefully checked English transcript of the continuous Objo Studio discussion. Obvious speech-recognition errors and technical spellings have been corrected (for example: Objo, ObjoBasic, Garry, Xojo, REALbasic, Avalonia, .NET, SQLite, PostgreSQL and CI/CD). Repeated filler words and abandoned false starts have been reduced where they do not affect meaning. Timestamps are episode-relative and mark paragraph-sized passages rather than every word. One very short, overlapped aside at about 00:21:25 could not be recovered confidently and is marked as unclear.
The English rendering preserves the speakers' meaning and conversational tone rather than following the source language's word order mechanically.
00:14:02–00:14:23 — Introducing the subject
Speaker 1: What can you say? What's happening with you—what are you working on?
Speaker 2: Well, I'm doing my job, as they say. I'm exploring this new tool. I don't know whether I should talk about it now or not.
Speaker 1: Only if you want to. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I haven't made anything yet, but all right, I can start and then I'll add the links.
00:14:23–00:14:51 — Objo and the need it fills
Speaker 2: The tool is called Objo. The website is objo.dev. You know that, ever since 4D changed the way it licenses standalone applications, I've been looking for something suitable for developing cross-platform desktop applications—something that looks the way it should. I had thought about using Swift, and this and that.
00:14:51–00:15:20 — Enthusiasm, responsiveness and price
Speaker 2: But since this appeared, I can tell you I'm delighted with it. First, Garry, its author, responds to things so quickly—he fixes bugs and so on. Second, the licence is about £100. Mac, Windows and Linux: you can build and publish for all three platforms for £100. You don't need a licence while you're learning to program. In other words, you only need the licence to publish.
00:15:20–00:15:46 — Comparison with 4D and Linux support
Speaker 2: By the way, I was paying €1,200 a year for 4D for two platforms—Windows and Mac, with no Linux. This includes Linux, and it says “any flavor of Linux.” I mostly use Ubuntu. I mean, whenever I need to do something with Linux, I use Ubuntu, because that's what GitHub Actions runs, so that's the one I work with.
00:15:46–00:16:44 — Visual Basic, Xojo and the If Not Nil forum
Speaker 2: And the tool is like Visual Basic. I heard about it on—what's it called—remember the If Not Nil forum I mentioned, where disappointed users of Xojo, formerly REALbasic, gathered? REALbasic originated as a Mac tool in the 1990s, as an answer to Visual Basic—so that the Mac would have something similar—and it later expanded to Windows and Linux. But it's a small company and slow to respond to bugs. Its codebase was chosen back in the 1990s, and they're at something of a dead end. People are quite unhappy because some bugs have lingered for twenty years without being fixed. That forum was created by people dissatisfied with this situation. Various ideas for cross-platform tools appear there—who is making what, and how.
00:16:44–00:17:06 — Five years of work and the product name
Speaker 2: Then Garry announced Objo. He said, “I've been working on this for five years, and I think the time has finally come to release it.” So it's a Visual Basic-style clone. The language—he calls it ObjoBasic, although I think he may name it differently for marketing reasons. I think the language will be called Objo, while this is Objo Studio.
00:17:06–00:17:47 — C#, .NET, Avalonia and platform priorities
Speaker 2: What's important? The man responds incredibly quickly. Underneath, he is building it in C#, so it's .NET. But you don't see any of that. For the user interface he uses Avalonia, which is cross-platform. It even supports iOS and Android, although he only plans to introduce that later. It isn't his main priority; for now, desktop applications are literally the priority. That means it won't look 100% native on those platforms in the way 4D, for example, was completely native.
00:17:47–00:18:47 — UI appearance and a modern BASIC-like language
Speaker 2: Although 4D wasn't itself a native tool, everything it displayed was native on both Windows and Mac. This isn't, but it looks perfectly fine. Graphically, I would say it looks better than Java. I've been researching it—there are Java frameworks for user interfaces and GUIs that look native, but as soon as you open the Save dialog, you can immediately tell it's Java.
Speaker 1: Yes, of course.
Speaker 2: This uses Avalonia, which is also open source. Naturally he pays some sort of licence to use it, and it's very powerful. You don't see any of that complexity: you work as you would in Visual Basic, with a form editor, classes, everything. The language is very modern; it isn't BASIC as it was forty years ago, of course.
00:18:47–00:19:17 — “Things happen when they should”
Speaker 2: For this little project of mine, it's as if... When this happened—I've said before that I have a phrase for when people ask, “When did you get married? When did you have a child?” Things happen in your life when they're supposed to happen. That is how this happened for me: at precisely the moment when I was planning this little project and didn't know what to build it in. I could see that if I went down the Swift route and so on, I wouldn't finish it within any reasonable time. Then this literally appeared.
00:19:17–00:20:30 — The planned app, local-first design and application size
Speaker 2: My project is conceived as a membership system with paid dues, attendance at events and record-keeping. The central idea is that nothing goes to the cloud: everything stays locally on the desktop. If you want to synchronise something, you do it manually—in other words, you initiate the sync. It is to be a desktop application. Linux is a bonus, because I hadn't planned for Linux, but I know at least one advanced user who will use it on Linux if I build it. So I already have a Linux tester.
It produces small applications. Even though it bundles Avalonia and some DLLs, an empty project—one window, one form and one method that displays something—comes to 40, 50 or 60 MB. Compared with 4D applications at 400, 500, 600 or 700 MB, that is quite small.
00:20:30–00:21:16 — Build and publish workflows
Speaker 2: There is a build operation you can run on one platform to try something—compiling and building the applications. On a Mac you can build for all three. Publishing, however, has to be done on each platform, or by bringing up that platform to run the publish step. What does publishing mean? For a Mac, for example, it does everything: it creates the DMG; you can supply your credentials, Developer ID and Team ID; and it signs and notarises the application. All of that is built in.
00:21:16–00:22:03 — Windows and Linux packaging/signing
Speaker 2: It is the same on Windows: it creates an MSIX archive, which, if you didn't know, is just a ZIP file. [A short overlapping aside is unclear.] You can also use Azure Trusted Signing—the service I mentioned and used for signing 4D—and it sends the package there, signs it and so forth. That is optional. There is even something for Linux. I hadn't realised Linux had a standard—not exactly a default, but a generally accepted verified service or something—for signing Linux applications. On Linux it produces a tar.gz, which I gather is a standard package there. I still need to look into that.
00:22:03–00:22:34 — Fast addition of text-based project files
Speaker 2: So it is very... well, that is what he had from the start. What didn't he have initially? For example, he originally designed the project format as a binary package. People immediately said, “Come on, man, in this day and age...” He is also a big supporter of Git—you can see it from his... Then they told him, “Come on, find a way to save it as text files.” He did it in ten days. See how quickly he responds? Ten days, and now you have everything you need for Git.
00:22:34–00:23:23 — Databases and readily available frameworks
Speaker 2: What else was there? Database support: initially he included only SQLite. People said, “All right, give us MySQL and Postgres.” That took literally two weeks. Do you know why he can respond so quickly? Because he chose a good foundation, unlike Xojo. They started long ago with C/C++, while he uses Avalonia and .NET. He has a large number of ready-made frameworks that he only needs to integrate into his own product. For example, people asked him for a WebView—what we would call a Web Area in 4D. He added it and said, “And while I'm at it, here's a Markdown Viewer too”—another control at the same time.
00:23:23–00:24:44 — Community, release pace and AI integration
Speaker 2: I am, as they say, delighted with it. Naturally, I paid for a licence immediately and joined the forum so I could discuss it and follow everything. There is a Swede named Bjorn who sends him ten bugs a day. Garry praises him, of course—thank goodness for a tester like that—and keeps pumping out releases. Every seven to ten days there is a new release: bugs fixed, this added, that added. So it is ideal for my little project. I don't know what the future holds, but in a qualified sense it is familiar; the language resembles Visual Basic.
And yes, it has AI and agentic coding right away. In Settings you choose, “I want Codex,” or Claude, give it what it needs, and that's it. The first release was usable, bugs aside, and not even two months have passed. Sometime in the second half of May he said, “Here you go, everyone,” and released it publicly.
00:24:44–00:25:44 — Future mobile support and a possible iPad companion
Speaker 2: So, objo.dev—I'll put that in the show notes, along with a few other links. Try it if this sort of thing interests you. I believe that within the next year, once it has stabilised a little, he will move quite quickly on something for iOS and Android too. You still have to weigh what you need and whether it suits your project. My idea, even if he does that, would be not to reproduce the entire application next time, but perhaps build a smaller app myself. I don't need everything on my iPad, but I do need certain parts. For example, someone takes the minutes and records who is and isn't present at meetings; you could enter that immediately on the iPad without needing the complete application. Of course, perhaps it could become the complete application over time.
00:25:44–00:27:08 — Choosing a tool to suit the problem
Speaker 2: When you look at cross-platform development, the If Not Nil forum has a great many tools. You think, “Good grief, I tied myself to 4D and haven't paid much attention to what else is out there—and there are so many things.” It is like learning to program. I used to try to teach my female classmates at university how to think, but they would immediately jump to Pascal, Fortran and “give us an exercise to work on.” I would say, “Forget that for a moment. First solve the problem in your head; then, based on the kind of problem and your solution—the algorithm—you decide whether Pascal, Fortran or C is best for it.” It comes back to the same principle here. I would never make a game in 4D. You can, but what would you produce—a one-gigabyte DMG for a Yahtzee game? That doesn't work, because it pulls in everything and you can't strip it out.
I am very enthusiastic. I don't have anything of my own to show yet because I started from the opposite end compared with 4D: I'm learning, following developments, looking around and opening everything, of course, but first I decided to automate the build and deployment process.
00:27:08–00:27:46 — CI/CD and Objo's command-line interface
Speaker 2: I wanted to do in this what I had already done for 4D—for a Canadian client, or for a project. CI/CD was considered from the outset. There is an objo command: a small objo binary, a Unix executable, inside the Objo Studio package. You can call it with objo check to check the syntax, objo build or objo publish. There are also the command-line operations objo license activate and objo license deactivate. He anticipated from the beginning that someone would use it this way. I had just started trying to work out how to do it when I opened that page in the documentation and thought: the man has considered all of this.
00:27:46–00:28:41 — A licensing issue in GitHub Actions
Speaker 2: The deactivation part is a little awkward. I ended up with activations left behind, so the other day I had to ask him, “Garry, please delete everything I've activated in the last five days and leave just one licence.” A GitHub Action runs in a virtual machine: you register and activate the licence, then the GitHub Actions VM finishes its job and ceases to exist. You can never start that same machine again, yet it has activated a licence that remains on the account. There is not yet a web interface where you can manage the three allowed machines yourself by saying, “Deactivate this one, activate that one”; you have to do it by command. So I asked him to sort it out. But my point is that he thought about this use case too. He had five years to prepare, and it has all come together nicely.
00:28:41–00:29:25 — Garry's medical background and domain experts
Speaker 2: And, believe it or not, the man is a radiologist who developed his own software.
Speaker 1: The man is a doctor. What can you say?
Speaker 2: The same kind of background. Many 4D developers started that way: an English teacher, someone who graduated from a music academy... The Scotsman I'm working with on a project for Oman is a geneticist, a doctor—a physician—who developed his own LIMS, a Laboratory Information Management System. People coming from other fields have subject-matter knowledge; when they try to build something themselves, just imagine how much of that we're going to see now with these AI tools. It is so much easier to try things now.
00:29:25–00:30:25 — Using AI to automate the workflow
Speaker 2: I was just thinking: I built this... Since I arrived in Mokrin on Friday—I did nothing over the weekend—I started around Tuesday, doing a little at a time, and with ChatGPT alone I made five of those Actions: “Make this for me; now make this.” In the old days, when I worked with 4D three or four years ago, you would have to think, “Man, there is some bug, some typo—work it out, analyse the logs.” Here I just say: I had a typo; the folder was supposed to be named Windows-x64, but I mistyped it. I couldn't look at it any longer, so I simply pasted in, “Here is my Action, here is the log—what's wrong?” It replied, “You have a typo here and here.”
So that is everything I need. Next week, when I actually start programming in it, I will immediately see how the AI works and start using it...
[At about 00:30:25 the conversation turns from Objo to a newly released local LLM.]