As was rumoured before the World Tour kicked off yesterday, the previous FPC/Xcode infrastructure based iOS support has been removed in XE3 and nothing (yet) replaces it.
I take no pleasure from being able to say “I told you so” to everyone who told me I was jumping the gun by commenting on things that had not been officially confirmed or announced.
Beyond [sic] this however, there are some things in the “XE3 And Beyond” blog post that might be interesting, if they ever come to fruition. My biggest problem with this post is that there is nothing in it that could not have been made known weeks or months ago, and imho should have been.
It is, in essence, the “updated roadmap” that was promised almost a year ago and which never arrived (until, in effect, now).
In particular, this observation intrigued me:
Our next generation mobile solutions are still in development and will be the first and only native development solution for both iOS and Android that share a common codebase (common with XE3 desktop projects as well)
First of all, these are products “still in development“, yet there is also confidence that when released they will be the “first and only” product of it’s type. This intrigues me for reasons I cannot go into.
Suffice to say, if Embarcadero really are first to market with this approach then I have a hunch I know what they are working on.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say: “who they are working with”. 🙂
Everybody knows how it will end. Another RoadMap that won’t be delivered and if they deliver something it will have a lot of bugs.
Something JT didn’t mention and everybody needs to know is, if you wanna get the mobile stuff earlier next year (again if they deliver) you have to buy or renew your SA, otherwise Embarcadero will of course charge again some kind of upgrade to XE3.5.
I would say, don’t buy XE3 now, wait earlier next year and 3 additional months to see if they will “deliver the best mobile development solution for any developer, period” as Mr. JT said.
In other words wait XE4 and see how it goes.
I have to say, I wondered what was meant by “an active XE3 license” when it is said that this is required for access to the mobile beta.
Any XE3 license purchased before the beta would presumably be active unless and until … what ? Until XE3 goes out of “Active” Support? Out of Passive Support? Or only if you have a concurrent SA ?
Not that I care over much at this stage. Unless there are some significant revelations still to come from the “World Tour” (am I the only one puzzled by the deafening silence?) I won’t have an XE3 license of any flavour.
Guess they mean you need a registered copy of XE3 to access the beta.
About the silence, first they have the bad habit to release Delphi in August, here in Europe these days are still summer vacation days for a lot of people and I guess they get very little attention, until September. I would avoid summer in one of the hemispheres for releases, I’d user spring/autumn times when most people are working. Second, it looks there’s little to talk about but what is missing….
According to a report from today’s Hamburg, Germany World Tour event:
“Mobile Studio will be a seperate product from RAD Studio XE3. It should
be included in All-Access. Could this please be officially affirmed by
some Embarcadero representative?”
There is no official confirmation of this but since this came from a report of a World Tour event, I’d consider it more than just a vague rumor.
Link at https://forums.embarcadero.com/thread.jspa?threadID=75773
Unfortunately it is confirmed
http://www.delphipraxis.net/167008-delphi-xe3-new-post.html (german)
“FMI (FireMonkey for iOS) wird nicht Bestandteil des XE3 Releases. Das sogenannte “Mobile Studio”, was für das Q1 2013 erwartet wird, ist ein kostenpflichtes Add-On/Zusatzprodukt für Delphi/C++Builder XE3.”
“FMI will not part of the XE3 releases. The so called “Mobile Studio”, which is expected for Q1 2013, will be a separetly charged Add-On for Delphi/C++Builder XE3.”
Thank you, Markus. Good info.
What I can imagine is that we will get the Mobile Studio together with Delphi or RAD Studio, maybe the add-on themes … as a package in BOGO. But I don’t know. It does make more sense than combining Delphi or RAD Studio with DB Tools for the most of us here.
On the other hand, making the Mobile Add-On Optional matches a real life demand for maybe one or 2 people working on Mobile Apps while others still focus on the server-side and desktop. As long a per seat licensing continues …
The situation is absolutely not clear at the moment. I am going to wait for XE4 too.
So who do you think they are working with? I’ve read the blog and i’m very excited to read what the mobile solution support will be delivered. And i think this time what the blog said is really what will be included in the next update, that is a good communication. But i agree with you EMB should not just delivering a rock solid tool but also build a rock solid communication with the customer.
The yearly release cycle is proven to be the problem for not delivering a good solid new version, not only bug fixed version. EMB should think about releasing it every 2 years so that they will release only new enhanced version that is fully ready and don’t have a critical and show stopper bug.
I don’t feel I am able to say who I think they are working with. But there are enough clues in the Embarcadero forums for you to piece it together yourself I think. 😉
They seem to be hinting at LLVM and a new compiler (JT’s post certainly is, unless that highly optimized comment was just marketing fluff) that would necessarily break away with current Delphi language on some fundamental aspects (ARC).
Marc kept hinting about something too, maybe an Oxygene/Prism for LLVM is coming? is that what you’re thinking?
If they let Hoffman touch the Delphi language I’ll quit using it. He’s a very bad language designer.
Looks like you get less for XE3 than you did for XE2 and to bring it back up you will need to fork out for the mobile platform on top of XE3 !!
Has XE2 been fit for purpose ?
Guys, this new name Mobile Studio is just a way to charge you more.
Look this, you wait a year for XE3 and they just release few features. Why? because they did expend most of their time fixing bugs on Firemonkey, which was released in Alpha stage.
Now, they plan to release Mobile Studio to charge us more earlier next year, and of course version 1 with lot’s of bugs.
I just give up, Delphi is too late in the mobile game and Embarcadero now is telling us to wait more???
iOS support (FPC) in Delphi Xe2 was not as good as the support for OSX. Embarcadero did demonstrate that it could be possible to develop application for mobile devices with something like the Firemonkey framework but show the limitation of the actual technology. Embarcadero seems to focus now on a new compilers for ARM, lightweight Firemonkey for mobile and better hardware support (sensor, gesture…). They are right: I can wait Q1 2013 to get a stable development plattform for mobile and meanwhile continue to use Delphi for modern Desktop software development.
Heh, there is a project to compiling Delphi and standard VCLK into JavaScript.
It would be a good joke to make “native mobile support” like HTML5+JS cross-compiler 🙂
There is a reason they didn’t tell anything before and they hinted at that when XE3 release was imminent. It is clear that XE3 is another interim release with too little to be appealing, thereby they couldn’t “kill it” from a marketing perspective early (especially as long as they hope to sell enough SA). Not they’re using the “roadmap” trying to sell you not the actual product, but the upcoming beta – again.
Here you see the astronomical distance between MS and Embarcadero, the former publishing public betas, the latter requiring you to buy an upgrade that could be useless to you just to access the beta of a product you could be interested in and you should spend time to test and report issues about to improve its quality. What’s next? Paypal button to report bugs in QC?
“…first and only native development solution for both iOS and Android”
This claim is bullshit.
RunRev has already released such a development solution that gives native binaries for both iOS and Android.
To be fair, LiveCode (the RunRev product) looks like a good, old-fashioned cross-platform 4GL similar to Omnis, back in the day. It doesn’t product a native executable in the way that Mobile Studio allegedly will. Rather it produces apps for a runtime framework that can be themed for a native look on each supported platform (i.e. the same way that a FMX app can) and has way of packaging an app within it’s own self-contained runtime engine.
But the claim remains dubious for other reasons. 😉