[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] Jim McKeeth is getting all excited about being able to develop for Google Glass using Delphi XE5. I’m pleased for him, I really am. It must be a huge relief that Delphi for Android can actually target this Android device.
[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] In the soon to be released Smoketest framework it is sometimes useful to create new test types to supplement the tests built-in to the framework. In this and the next post I will walk through the process of implementing and registering a custom test with the Smoketest framework.
[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] Are you doing Android development ? Whether you are using Delphi or some other Android development tool a key tool in the Android developer’s toolbox is the logcat command, part of the Android SDK. But it can be a little… how to put this kindly… crude. So I put together a rather more useful and – dare I say attractive – front-end under the rather uninspired name of ADB WINLOG.
[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] That is, according to Embarcadero’s “Chief Evangelist”. I don’t know how else to interpret his claim that the Delphi compiler produces 5MB+ of executable code per line of written code*2.
[Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes] To alleviate the grind of polishing and sanitising my code (and, let’s be honest, just plain ‘fixing’ it in some cases) ready for release, I have re-kindled my participation on Stack Overflow. In a happy confluence yesterday a question came up which allowed me to exercise one of the libraries that I’m preparing to release: Smoketest.
[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] In the comments on Raymond Chen’s blog post today, was a reference to a startling question on Stack-Overflow.
[Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes] A comment from Kevin P brought a build automation tool to my attention this evening, called Train. Train is a JavaScript based build automation tool from a little company called RemObjects. It is written in Oxygene but the API provides specific support for Delphi. It’s an open source project and free (as in beer). So I decided to check it out.
[Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes] Here in Aotearoa there is a beer company called “Tui”, named in turn for a native bird. As well as a series of TV ads voiced by the great Tom Baker, Tui are famous here for their “Yeah, right!” billboard ads. I felt compelled to make one for Delphi.
[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] A while ago Marco Cantu posted about an issue with implementing ShowModal in FireMonkey, specifically with reference to the difficulties this entailed on iOS and Google Android platforms. Chris Rolliston recently picked this same topic up and highlighted some problems that still remain in the FireMonkey “solution”. Both Marco and Chris however have missed a key point. Neither Google nor Apple are stupid.
[Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes] Sometimes when you launch a thread you don’t know when it will complete whatever processing it is tasked with. Sometimes you do. Sometimes it may never complete and will require that you expressly terminate it. Usually any given thread will have a lifecycle that is at least consistently one or the other, but sometimes you will come across an awkward thread which is not so straightforward. Sometimes you will be creating a thread on behalf of somebody else who is making these decisions.
