In XE4 FireMonkey supported iOS 5.1. According to the platform requirements for XE5 this has now increased to iOS 6.
This something to be aware of. Even if your application could run on older, simpler devices, the FireMonkey runtime has demands of it’s own, over and above those of any application you might develop. Even “Hello World“.
FireMonkey XE5 only runs on Android devices with NEON hardware. This includes my Galaxy SII phone for example but not my ASUS TF101 because this uses the Tegra2 chipset which does not include the necessary NEON silicon.
And now, as well as a relatively high bar of entry on Android, that bar has been raised just that little bit higher for iOS as well. With FireMonkey XE5 now only supporting iOS 6.x and later, 1st Gen iPads are now not supported either, for example.
May I ask: why do you constantly focus on what you perceive as negativ easpects of Embarcadero’s products, and ignore any positives? Of course their products are not perfect, as with any development environment. The impression I get is that you have some sort of vendetta against them.
There is a little thing called “balance”. I hope you are also complaining to Embarcadero that they are only focussing on the positives and ignoring the negatives ? In fact, it’s worse than that. They are bending the truth about those negatives to breaking point to misrepresent their product in a better light than it deserves.
The latest example: David I claiming support for 97.5% of Android devices based solely on OS version numbers, entirely ignoring the hardware requirements that exclude devices regardless of Android version.
The change to iOS 6 is another. It’s not something that Embarcadero have volunteered publicly as far as I know. Just a quiet little change in the doc wiki that I am sure they hoped nobody would notice until it was too late (i.e. having bought and paid for XE5). They didn’t even update the feature matrix which still misleadingly talks about “iOS 5.1” in the context of “new” and “Improved” features in XE4 without mentioning that it no longer applies to iOS 5.1 as of XE5.
Unlike them, I’m not even asking anyone to pay me for anything, just sharing information that I think people should be aware of before handing over hard earned $’s to a company who are (understandably) being not entirely honest and quite evasive about the capabilities of their product.
Now, I wouldn’t call it a “vendetta” but yes, I do have an issue with them in that they royally screwed me over with the bait and switch that they pulled with mobile platform support in XE2. They screwed me out of over $1500 that I paid to them in good faith (a personal expense, not work related or in connection with any commercial venture or return). And then to add insult to injury, tried to force a price hike on my SA in violation of their own terms and conditions.
I am simply concerned that other people should not fall victim to their sharp practices. Apart from anything else, there are alternatives who are far more deserving of any available dollar spend and it would be a welcome outcome if adjusting the rose tinted blinkers through which people view Embarcadero brings more custom to those more deserving companies rather than swelling the coffers of the Embarcadero execs. At least, so I think. And it is – as I have to keep pointing out for some reason – my blog and my right to say whatever I feel on it.
You want to read Embarcadero marketing spin ? Go visit their web site (or one of the “MVP” blogs – they aren’t allowed to say anything negative so you should enjoy their blogs far more). 😉
So Embarcadero’s coverage is too positive, therefore you think being entirely negative is balance?
I can’t wait to read your revealing exposes of Apple and Microsoft.
For instance, I just learned that Apple dropped iOS5 support from XCode. It is not only available through an additional download and install. Can you imagine the nerve?
Apple didn’t “drop support” from Xcode. You can specify iOS 5.1 as your target platform in the latest Xcode and your app will run on a 5.1 device. All they did was stop including the 5.1 specific SDK itself anymore. But if you really want the SDK itself, Xcode still supports it and you just go and it from Apple if you want it.
You make yourself look incredibly petty, not to mention stupid, by trying to present that as “dropped support” in some sort of juvenile retaliation for pointing out a simple truth that Embarcadero have kept quiet.
You say “petty”, I say “balanced”.
Are you sure the latest XCode doesn’t require an require an additional download for older versions? I read somewhere that it does.
I hit send too early. I meant to draw a less subtle distinction between the situation in XCode and XE5/XE4.
Again, in the name of balance.
You get the idea…
I get that you are desperate, yes. 😉
It would be balanced if it was true. But your assertion is baseless, petty poppycock.
I hand am entirely certain that the latest Xcode does not require any additional download to produce iOS 5.1 apps. You do need an additional download if you want the 5.1 SDK but you do not need the 5.1 SDK to target a 5.1 device.
Why would you want the 5.1 SDK if you don’t need it ? Because as I understand it, with Xcode if you use API’s in the SDK that are not supported by your target platform you get no warning until your app crashes on the target device. This is less likely with Oxygene since you get warnings when you do that but still, if you want to be absolutely confident that your app is genuinely 5.1 compatible, using the 5.1 SDK is one way to be sure.
My certainty comes from having an actual Oxygene project right here, right now, happily producing a 5.1 app running on my 5.1, 1st gen iPad, using Xcode 4.6 from which I have now removed the 5.1 SDK just to be absolutely certain that when I tell Oxygene to use the 6.1 SDK for a 5.1 deployment it cannot end up using the 5.1 SDK even if it wanted to.
I also have an Oxygene project producing an Android Jellybean 4.1 app running on my ASUS TF101 tablet – something else that is impossible with Delphi XE5 “for Android”. You think I’m not sure about that as well ?
If you are correct that the latest XCode does not need any additional downloads under any circumstances to support older versions of iOS under any circumstances, then I stand corrected.
Nice try. But there is no “If”. You do stand so corrected. 😉
Myth busted?
http://blog.spacemanlabs.com/2013/09/how-to-support-old-ios-sdks-in-xcode-5/
No Bruce. This simply confirms what I already told you quite plainly: that you can get the old SDK’s in old versions of Xcode if you want them. And oh, look at that – the latest version of Xcode does indeed support them once you have them. This article doesn’t tell you anything that I didn’t already tell you.
You will notice that the article title you reference is “How to Support Old iOS *SDK*s” not “How to support old versions of iOS“.
You clearly have no experience of iOS development or Xcode otherwise you would understand the difference. You haven’t busted any myth, merely further demonstrated the extent of your lack of awareness and unwillingness to listen when things are explained to you in quite plain terms.
You are being very selective (and mistaken) in choosing what to read, because I already explained that I have a 6.1 SDK happily building an app that is happily running on a 5.1 device. No 5.1 SDK present or required.
Let me try to use words of one syllable:
You do not need the five point one S D K to build an app for a five point one device with ex code.
Dammit. “Device” is two syllables. There goes any hope of getting through to you.
Oh well, back to English that supposedly intelligent humans should be able to understand. If you don’t use the 5.1 SDK with Xcode you risk accidentally using an iOS 6.1 feature that is not supported on a 5.1 device, so if you want to be sure of not using parts of the SDK not available in 5.1 then it is advisable to be using the 5.1 SDK.
With the latest Oxygene there is even less need to have the old SDK because the Oxygene compiler will warn you if you use a 6.1 feature when building for 5.1 (Xcode doesn’t).
But you do not need the 5.1 SDK to build for a 5.1 device. Seriously. This isn’t something I’ve read without understanding, it is something I know from first-hand experience.
>So Embarcadero’s coverage is too positive, therefore you think
>being entirely negative is balance?
Actually, yes. If blog A exaggerates the benefits of X, Y, and Z, and blog B writes about the drawbacks of X, Y, and Z it does compensate. This blog serves a lot more benefit pointing out problems that Embarcadero has glossed over than a TeamB blog does whitewashing Delphi.
I’ll never get over the TeamB/MVP/wannabe people who DEMAND that other people say nice things about Delphi. When David Erbas-White recounted his rather depressing tale of a Delphi World Tour event, the forum moderator dropped in and then angrily demanded that David now list all the wonderful things about the event!
Maybe… just maybe… no one’s talking about the positive things because either 1) they’re overshadowed by more serious negative things, or 2) there simply aren’t any positive things worth noting (given so much of what counts as positive for Delphi are things other products had 4-5 years ago and if people really needed them they’d already have switched)?
I’ve not encountered another development tool that has so many of its own users (as opposed to outsiders) complaining about it (the closest being a significant amount of Java developers who attest that they use it because their job requires it and not because they prefer it). If there aren’t blogs singing the praises of Delphi, that ought to tell you something right there.
It never ceases to amaze me how much effort some people put into convincing people that something is bad.
They just need informing. They only need convincing if they insist on clinging to their own uninformed fantasies.
And don’t mistake correcting/dispelling myth for an attempt to convince the person expounding the myth. Those corrections merely serve to set the record straight for those who come after.
Because he get money or some free from RemObjects. That is the reason. If don’t, why just don´t start using other tool and stop talk about Delphi?
I have neither asked for nor received anything from RemObjects that any customer could not get. That is: a great product at a great price with great support.
“Because he get money or some free from RemObjects”
Jolyon’s unflinching negativity aside, I would not assume this.
It implies an underhandedness that I don’t think either he or RemObjects have.
Indeed I’m always being negative, never pointing out the positive. I mean, just look at how I castigate and criticise Apple for the decision to not include iOS 5.1 SDK with the latest Xcode and force people to download it without any personal experience on which to base my incorrect assertions. Oh but wait, that wasn’t me, was it ?
Bruce, just because someone explodes the myths you prefer to cling to does not make that person “unflinchingly negative”. Your persistent, unflinchingly inaccurate portrayal of me borders on character assassination.
I don’t think MythBusters start with a preconceived negative conclusion and then only present evidence that supports that conclusion.
Looks more like fudding than myth busting to me.
The only person starting with a preconceived conclusion which they are then jumping to incorrectly whilst citing evidence that does not say what they think it does, is you.
I’m citing your constant and unrelenting negativity.
The other stuff just demonstrates your lack of alleged balance.
Not “citing” – “inventing”.
You did see where I recently stated that Delphi (VCL) remains the best tool for desktop Windows development and are just ignoring that because it doesn’t fit the “unrelenting negativity” myth, right ?
You are correct that I relied on someone else’s anecdote about this and had to go looking for the specifics. (XCode 5 iOS before 6.1).
When looking for something you have to have a certain amount of knowledge to know when you found it. You did not find what you think you did.
You cannot compare.
Oxygene is horizontal integration of various app technologies and does offer the vertical integration via Java and .net support.
The well known out of the box alternatives and XCode iOS and Android are specifically built in order to address Apps. And those are combined today with Web applications.
XCode will never become something like Delphi, that’s still a ‘C/C++’ IDE, a very comfortable one, but aiming at application. Apple solve the vertical integration issue via the web too.
The Delphi approach is aiming at compact vertical integration. You don’t need the web. You could work with the tablet only. That’s a strength once Delphi does offer the perfect compromise. It’s the combination of Application and Apps – that makes the Delphi concept still strong.
Since you are still dependent on the existing infrastructure especially when talking about services you cannot escape the mainstream technologies anyway.
The genius of Delphi at the conceptual level is about offering a consistent approach that works for everyone – except the contract developer. Such a closed approach is the contractor/freelancer enemy. At the technical level the question – isn’t is a HTML5 app good enough to serve exactly the App portion – horizontal technical integration.
Microsoft would address this issue perfectly if the had a sucessfull mobile platform. Somehow they failed to get this message through.
It’s impossible to discuss the advantages of those approaches at a technical level. Look at Adobe Marketing Cloud. Adobe will simply provide you their tools integrated into the cloud and your account will include everything for production. Our banks already offer full blown business solutions. ‘The book keeping system is already offered by the bank’.
In 2 years no one will talk about the horizontal technological integration people will begin to understand the vertical integration at the business level counts.
Last decade was the decade of the horizontal integration. This one is about vertical. That’s why the grass is still greener on the side of the road most developers did come from in the .net and Java world. The future will not be about tools. That’s something EMB will have to address. Maybe a medical care/hospital cloud … or something like that.
Keep in mind that if you look at the statistics, 93% of all iOS users are running 6.0 or higher since this month.
David I will love that sort of statistic. Of course 5.1 is a small proportion of devices. But they do still exist and it’s just a bit dumb to have access to those devices denied to you not because your application has such demands but simply because of the “native” runtime it relies on. And of course, it’s not just about potential users/customer.
Imagine someone in a similar position to me – they have some new(er) iOS devices in their household but they also still have an older 1st gen iPad or an old iPod Touch. Not worth selling and hey, I have this great idea for an app that doesn’t need the latest, greatest iOS gizmos, I can use that old iPad as a test machine !! Cool ! Thos old things can still be useful !
So they crack out the credit care, buy XE5, excitedly fire up one of the demos and … oh dear.
Never mind, they’ll do some Android on an old tablet they have… no NEON? Oh dear.
People are entitled to know exactly what it is that is on offer if they are to make an informed decision. Quietly slipping in a change to a doc-wiki page without updating the feature matrix accordingly is not adequately informing your customers. Actual or potential.
Incidentally, 6% (the proportion of iOS devices running iOS 5.1) of 400 million (the total number of iOS devices as of this time last year) is still a very significant number of devices.
I agree with Deltics, I think we (consumers) need a better understanding on what comes with XE5, if you go to their website you get the impression everything is included and everything is supported.
Am I the only one getting this impression? So, thank you Deltics to point out what is actually included, supported, not working, problematics etc.
Before I spend that kind of money I always love reading Deltics feed backs..
As far as I know, the more recent editions of XCode from Apple don’t support iOS5 either.
Pretty sure the latest PhoneGap/Cordova doesn’t,
XE5 does, I think, come with XE4 which would support it if you had to.
All in the interests of balance, you understand…
Yes they do, they just don’t come with the specific SDK’s. Never-the-less, my Xcode 4.6 has the iOS 5.1 SDK installed very nicely thanks very much. 🙂
You just go and download the earlier Xcode version containing the older SDKs (if you don’t already have them) from the Apple Developer downloads area and simply copy the SDK into your latest Xcode install where they will be treated as just a.n.other target SDK.
But you don’t need the iOS 5.1 SDK to target iOS 5.1. You can build with the iOS 6 SDK as long as you specify a target version of 5.1 and don’t try to use any API’s that are not supported by that earlier iOS version. If you are using Oxygene, in the latest version you will even get compiler warnings telling you if you do (not even Xcode does that I’m told!).
As for using XE4 alongside XE5… there are breaking changes in the source code of FireMonkey between XE4 and XE5 so if you are going to use “just use both versions” to try to dodge that bullet just be aware that it is headed to put a nice little hole just below the water-line of the (already somewhat dubious) “one codebase” claims that supposedly set FireMonkey apart in the first place. 😉
I think you are right. The biggest trouble with all dev tools creators (not only Embarcadero) is that they hide crucial information.
At times I feel that such companies behave like the Bikini concept (It hides more than what it reveals!!) 😉
I actually have a 1st Gen iPad and a 1st Gen iPod Touch, and let me tell you, NOTHING supports them. There are such a small fragment of apps in the app store that supports these devices they are hardly worth powering on. Apple really pushes developers to drop support for older OS versions. I made the mistake of trying to reinstall an app only to discover I couldn’t get the version that supports that device anymore.
I’m sure the choice was made with XE5 to support newer OS features at the expense of the 6% of devices that don’t support iOS 6.x. If they chose to go the other way then I am sure someone (obviously not you) would be up in arms that they didn’t support OS feature X in an effort to cover the other 6% of devices out there.
Offering choice doesn’t compel anyone to make any particular choice. Unless the issue was that the FireMonkey architecture did not allow Embarcadero to give application developers the choice and so the choice had to be made for them in a way that remains possible with Xcode itself and Oxygene of course. For example.
Of course Apple would like everyone to move up to more current iOS, but those who don’t want to aren’t forced to. It’s not even especially difficult (the chances are that most existing Xcode developers wanting the iOS 5.1 SDKs already have them).
But I doubt that there was a positive decision to not continue support for iOS 5 for laudable reasons. More likely it was to do with FireMonkey performance on the generation of hardware that does not support iOS 6 being just too embarrassing, in the same way that FireMonkey cannot get by without NEON support. At least by forcing people onto capable hardware some blushes can be spared in that department when comparing “True Native ™” with plain old native applications. 😉
http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/06/25/cyanogenmod-ending-official-support-for-nvidia-tegra-2-devices-after-cm-10-1/ – these guys can’t manage without NEON either.
I too have a 1st gen iPad, and am confused by your assertion that “nothing” supports it. I have plenty of apps on it that I use and continue to receive updates for. I also download more recent apps too. You seem to be implying that it should be a no mans land right now, and I certainly don’t see it that way. You may not use yours, but mine sees regular use.
But it certainly makes sense to focus on the larger user base. Just means I can’t target the only iPad I have. More reasons to spend/upgrade!
I am still using XE and was considering the upgrade to XE5 to get Android support. The problem is that I also have an Asus tablet. Not having support for this tablet would mean the upgrade to XE5 is wasted on me. I find this type of information very useful since, from what I have read so far, I was under the impression that ALL Androids would be supported by XE5.
John,
Use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ss.syscheck to test if your device is supported (if Neon is supported)
@John, when it comers to EMBR I have learned that it is absolutely necessary to always check the license agreement before purchasing simply because they aren’t trust worthy when it comes to submitting vital information to it’s potential customers.
I’m glad that Embarcadero did not waste their limited time on supporting obsolete devices at this point. You know, with enough pressure I’m sure they could add support, but of course that would go at the cost of something else, because they can only spend their time once.
As an app creator I’d be more worried about ios7 than ios5.
They used to have iOS 5.1 support. You could say that they spent time taking that support out, not that they saved time by not putting it in.
As an app creator I am concerned about having a device on which to create. Delphi XE5 for Android and iOS does not support either the iOS or the Android tablet devices that I own. I wouldn’t be able to tell that from their marketing.
I do think that the information about what Android devices it won’t support (regardless of OS version number) is really useful – thanks for pointing that out.
Just read the Embarcadero doc. This is not hidden.
Yep, not hidden, just not very well publicised.
Hi Everyone
I have looking at getting into mobile development and I have been looking at all the various solutions. I too come from a Pascal/Delphi background, but I am also learning C# as part of my job. I am very impressed with Oxygene, but there are two things holding me back
1 The document is really patchy, especially on the wiki site. I like to learn things by going through books or step by step guides on the Internet, but there aren’t any Oxygene books that I know of and the Oxygene wiki has loads of unfinished sections on it. What resources do you use to learn Oxygene?
2. I am not sure my current setup would work with it. I have a 4gb MacBook Pro with Windows 7 on Bootcamp. I have tried to access my Windows 7 on Parallels but it is really slow. I did send an e-mail to RemObjects asking if I could use my setup with Oxygene but got nothing back. Do you think this setup is going to work, or do I need to either add some more memory to my Mac or buy a cheap Windows laptop and network it to my Mac ?
I have also been looking at Xamarin Studio as I am learning C# anyway. Is that any good ?
1 – Documentation. I am using the resources for the platforms themselves. The Android SDK and the Apple Developer documentation for Cocoa. Applying those resource to Oxygene is straightforward but I am planning to blog on some of the more esoteric aspects.
2 – Yes your machine does sound a little under-powered for any VM based development environment. I think it might even struggle with Xcode or Eclipse. RAM is the key factor I think. I have 32GB fitted to my iMac (3rd party RAM, not the over-priced Apple parts) and each VM has 4GB assigned to it. Though I typically have only one Windows VM running at a time (either doing Delphi or Oxygene) I have run 2 simultaneously on occasion. The VM’s run Windows better than the more expensive high-spec PC’s at work !! (source: Windows 7 Experience score) 🙂
I have no idea about Xamarin. It’s not something I’ve looked at.
The link suggests that XCode 5 requires additional downloads and steps to support older versions of iOS. Are you fudging around with the term “latest”?
You’re so anxious to put a negative spin on everything that Embarcadero does that you seem to lose track of what you are arguing for. Or against.
I think “vendetta” was an appropriate description.
The link describes a situation with Xcode 5 and iOS 6 that is identical to the situation with Xcode 4.6 and iOS 5.1. I haven’t yet obtained Xcode 5 (it’s still only in beta afaik) so maybe they have made things more difficult to support iOS 5.1 but if that’s the case this is not mentioned or described in that link you posted.
It talks only about having to download the SDK separately, in an older Xcode version – that’s the only “hoop jumping” described.
It says nothing about Xcode 5 working materially differently from Xcode 4.x w.r.t selecting a base SDK and a (potentially) different target version if required. And if there is such a difference this would be far more noteworthy and a bigger issue than the issue of obtaining older SDK’s which is all that that post talks about.
You’re so anxious to prove a falsehood that you aren’t paying attention.
Which falsehood is that exactly?
The point that you are deliberately ignoring where even Apple is de-emphasising older versions of iOS because it takes the wind out of your “Embarcadero screwed up” narrative? Sure you can download the older SDKs, just like you can use Delphi XE4 for the 6% or so of the iOS population using 5.1.1 if you really want to.
Or about you being constantly negative? At some point, people stopped paying attention to Grumpy Smurf, too.
Who know what your motivation is? I’m just pointing out where I think you’ve gone off the rails. Call it balance.
However, if pressed, I could probably come up with something at least moderately positive about your posts. Some of it might not even have to be sarcastic.
This one:
– q.v. Bruce McGee
I just verified what I already knew to be true using the absolute latest Xcode 5.
“Out of the box” yes, iOS 6 is the earliest deployment target available using the supplied iOS 7 SDK. So I copied the iOS 5.1 SDK from my existing Xcode 4.6 installation into the Xcode 5 SDK’s folder. That’s it – I didn’t need to download anything since I already had it. No other “hoop jumping” involved. And if you find that difficult then you won’t get very far as a software developer.
Hey presto, I can now select a deployment target all the way back to iOS 4.3 if I wish, never mind 5.1.
This is slightly different from before where you didn’t actually need the 5.1 SDK but this was because the 6.1 SDK supported 5.1 targets. The iOS 7 SDK does not. Nothing to do with Xcode itself “dropping support”.
Feeling your position falling away underneath you, I see you too are now reaching out desperately at the notion of using XE4 for older device support “just like” with Xcode. Except that it isn’t “just like” with Xcode at all.
With Delphi you literally have to use the older Delphi version; you can’t just take the old FireMonkey out of XE4 and use it with XE5 in parallel with the new version of FireMonkey.
Furthermore, the two versions of FireMonkey involved contain breaking changes, so never mind supporting Android and iOS apps from a single codebase, you will have to use two different compilers and include $IFDEF code just to enable code to compile in different versions of Delphi even if it only ever runs on iOS devices, if you wish to support iOS 5.1 apps using XE4 and use XE5 for Android support.
I also never said that Embarcadero “screwed up” in this area. Another falsehood (you appear to be a habitual liar).
I merely drew attention to an increased minimum requirement that may be important and of interest to people that Embarcadero have chosen to slip quietly into a doc-wiki page and which they do not mention elsewhere at all that I have yet found.
For some reason, instead of deploying any positive arguments as to why this might be a good thing or at least have positive reasons behind it, all you can do is try to prove that this is no different from Apple from a position of either ignorance or wilful misrepresentation, and are unwilling or unable to accept that your flawed understanding has caused you to make a fool of yourself in the process.
FTR, i can select Deployment Targets all the way down to iOS 4.3 in my (untouched/unmodified) Xcode 5 GM install.
iOS 7.0 is the only *Target SDK* available (because Apple recommends always building against the latest Target SDK, a recommendation i second). But out of the box, Xcode 5 lets me build applications that will run just fine on iOS 4.3.
As you pointed out: the same is true for Oxygene — with the added benefit of Oxygene giving you optional warnings as to what features are available on what targets.
The way Deployment targets work on Mac and iOS is really unique, and something new/unexpected to most Delphi and Windows developers. On Windows, if your app links to a Windows API feature that’s new in, say, Windows 7, your app is DOA with regard to running on older systems — unless you jump thru hoops like manually locating the API entry points form code via GetProcAddress, etc.
On iOS and Mac that is quite different — you can build an app against the latest SDK, and *use* classes and features in the latest OS version, and your app will still run on older versions — as long as you gracefully check/recover when functionality is missing.
You can read more about how this works, and how Oxygene improves on it, at http://wiki.oxygenelanguage.com/en/Deployment_Targets.
“Additional download” and “not available out of the box” aren’t the same thing?
“liar”? Now, now…
You said “Apple dropped iOS 5 support from Xcode”. They didn’t. Xcode 5 supports iOS 5.1 perfectly well. They simply stopped including the required SDK. It’s not the same thing.
And you added “It is not only available through an additional download and install”. Which apart from the fact is flat out wrong, ignores the fact that if you already have the SDK you don’t need to download or install anything. And “install” is hardly an accurate description of what is involved – simply copying files to the place that Xcode 5 supports for that precise purpose.
Nothing to say about having been taken to school on how using different versions of Delphi is in fact nothing like the Xcode scenario which you previously asserted was “just like” ? No surprise there.
And yes, “liar”, unless you can show anywhere that I have even remotely suggested an element of “screw up” on the part of Embarcadero in this area.
Go home Bruce, you’re drunk. 😀
I wouldn’t say that Apple is hiding the fact that they don;t support older versions of iOS out of the box. It’s just not very well publicised.
So don’t go too hard on them.
Keep going Bruce. You are doing a great job of making an idiot of yourself. You don’t need my help anymore. 😉
Splitting hairs and obsessing over the wrong point…
So, what was your original point again? That Embarcadero, like Apple (and others?) are concentrating on newer versions of iOS.
Thanks for the heads up.
In all of your balancing, I don;t suppose you’ve seen anything about what percentage of Android devices do and don’t support NEON. That would be genuinely useful.
The situation with Embarcadero and Apple are not “like” each other at all.
Apple are emphasising the newer SDK in the latest version of the tool, but you can still use that latest version to target older versions as long as you have the required SDK. You can still use Xcode 5 to create iOS 5.1 apps.
Embarcadero are not emphasising a newer SDK, they are mandating a new minimum deployment iOS version. You cannot use XE5 to create iOS 5.1 apps. Period.
Call it splitting hairs if it helps you sleep at night. I call it comparing apples with apples [sic]. The only person deviating from their original argument is you. Being an inconvenient truth for your position and so it is not surprising that your instinct to subvert and misrepresent the truth should kick in.
Yes, those NEON stats would be useful, and I’ve looked but haven’t been able to find anything. Not that the %ages matter if the device you have happens to be one that is not supported. But if we can’t find those stats, let’s just derive a meaningless statistic from Android versions and entirely ignore the hardware requirements. That’s more balanced, right ?
If you look at the threads and comments on this issue you will find that there are plenty of people that had not stumbled across either the blog posts and/or the doc-wiki pages and so were unaware of these minimum requirements. So I don’t much care what you think. The point of mentioning these things has been vindicated.
Really, you should go and have a lie down and try to sleep it off.
I’ll leave you to it, then.
I think you’re doing it right – let the customers be heard. It is not wrong to tell your opinion about a product. If EMB doesn’t ask their customers about these decisions on what to drop in the next releases then the customers are telling them via their blogs. Hopefully marketing reads this and tries to be a little bit more “informational” on what they’re doing and dropping an supporting with each next release.
My 3GS runs iOS 6.x – if anyone have something older than the 3GS, I’d bet they are not the app using kind of users.
A bit of the same for Android. The majority of ARMv7 devices support NEON – with the exception of Tegra 2. If you have a known brand Android phone or tablet that was made in late 2011 or later, it will most likely have the required hardware, and a supported Android version.
Am I bothered by XE5 not supporting non-NEON devices?
Not really.
There are 24 million iOS 5.1 devices and Tegra2 chipset is more widely used than people perhaps realise. But the issue is not so much the number of devices that these exclusions represent in terms of a potential market for any app you develop but the implications if these are the devices that a developer has available to them for development/testing purposes.
My own situation is a double whammy. I have an iPad #1 (iOS 5.1) and an ASUS TF101 tablet (Tegra2) for development and testing.
To use Delphi XE5 for iOS and Android development I would need to purchase additional hardware in addition to the Mobile Add-On rort and the point is that there may be others in a similar predicament unaware of the increased minimum requirement, given the confused messages Embarcadero are sending (feature matrix and FAQ both indicate or imply 5.1 support vs platform requirements stating iOS 6).
One Kidney I might be able to afford, but two … ? 😉
Besides if it’s no big deal and there are good reasons for it, why not put this potentially important information more prominently and more clearly in the product info ?
On Windows, if your app links to a Windows API feature that’s new in, say, Windows 7, your app is DOA with regard to running on older systems — unless you jump thru hoops like manually locating the API entry points form code via GetProcAddress, etc.
Only, that isn’t actually true. Delphi 2010 added the ‘delayed’ directive which gives, in effect, the OS X behaviour on a case by case basis.
http://blogs.embarcadero.com/abauer/2009/08/25/38894
Open up a ‘recent’ version of Windows.pas/Winapi.Windows.pas, and you will find functions like CreateDirectoryTransacted with the directive added accordingly.