[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] XE5 is officially out today, and the online store now has pricing for the new release. Being a scant 6 months since XE4 was released, with a $49 special upgrade price for XE3 Pro customers, I looked to see what special price might be on offer for XE5. $499 is the answer.
[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] In a comment on my previous post, David Michael made some observations about the cost of Oxygene being comparable to Delphi. This surprised me, so I did some checking. The results surprised even me.
[Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes] Well, not really RAD Studio as such, more like Mobile Studio (whether as part of RAD Studio Ent+ or the Mobile Add-On) since everything shown was oriented around the Android support and emphasising the fact that an application written for iOS can simply be recompiled and will run on Android. Or Windows or OS X, as before of course. About which nothing was said (or, to be fair, asked either).
[Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes] More than one commenter to recent posts has trotted out the same tired old myths that, in their view, prevent [insert current owner of Delphi here] from being able to compete fairly on the pricing front. Some of these myths are as old as the Enterprise Customer thinking that is the real problem, and just as stale, not having been updated to reflect current circumstances.
[Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes] In the comments to a previous post there cropped up the complaint that people asking for a realistic Starter Edition are just looking for a cheaper edition of Delphi for themselves. Maybe some of us are, but even so we are – or at least I am – not primarily concerned with the savings to our pocket. The consequence of there not being an affordable edition costs Embarcadero – and the remaining “Delphi Gentlemen’s Club” members – far more in the long run.
[Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes] There seems to be a perception among some people that Delphi is in the unique position of allowing developers to share and re-use code across the various platforms that it’s compiler can now (and will soon) target. But this is not the case. Oxygene has had this capability right from the start.
[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] In replying to a comment on his blog post about the pricing of the mobile add-on pack (XE4 – no news on XE5 as yet that I am aware of), Larry Hengen appears to be one of those people still under the belief that there are any “new buyer” type customers for Delphi. Are there ? Really ?
[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] I closed my previous post with an observation that the code for initialising an iOS user interface programmatically, as translated from equivalent Objective-C, contained a potential gotcha. I now have a little more time to expand on that.
[Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes] When XE4 came out and the full extent of the bait and switch perpetrated by Embarcadero became clear, I decided that my money was better spent with RemObjects and their Oxygene product. But it has only been this past weekend that I finally found some “quality time” to spend with it.
[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] The word is out. XE5 will be coming this September, as described in the announcement of a tour of Russia to promote the new release.
