[Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes] I thought I should at least take a look at the amazing Android support in XE5 so I decided to work through the tutorial that was brought to my attention recently. The first order of business of course, is getting installed.
[Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes] There is an old saying about comparing “apples and apples” or more accurately in this case, “Androids and Androids”. A commenter has already pointed out that an Embarcadero blog post referencing the “effort” described by my series of posts demonstrating how to build a camera app for Android using Oxygene was not a fair comparison.
[Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes] Not a Merchant Ivory production, but Part 3 in the Oxygene for Java camera app for Android series. So far we have seen that we can work directly with the Android platform manifest and layout files and how the Oxygene language is a first class citizen in the Java platform and just one way in which it simplifies and improves the business of writing Java code, in Pascal. Now it’s time to make the app do something useful.
[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] Part 2 in a short series demonstrating the development of a simple camera app for Android using Oxygene. In the previous instalment we looked at the basic framework of our app. For this instalment I was going to show how to implement the camera preview or viewfinder for this instalment, but instead have decided to focus on listeners.
[Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes] Part 1 in an as yet unknown number of articles using a (very) simple camera application to demonstrate building first class Android applications using “Pascal for Java” – i.e. Oxygene Cooper. In this first instalment we will look at the basics – the components we are going to need and the basic UI of the application.
[Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes] Iztok has been at it again, making comments that prompt another post. 🙂 He expresses his view that there are only two viable options for mobile development. The first is essentially the web-based technology approach (HTML/JS/PhoneGap etc) and the other is the platform native tool chains, Eclipse/AndroidStudio/Xcode etc.
[Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes] Embarcadero have blogged about the first Android app “in the wild” (actually, being on the Play store I think it’s the first domesticated app – wild ones surely get side-loaded ? :)). Rather embarrassingly they already have a comment from someone unable to use this “true native Android” application on their actual Android device.
[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: 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] 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.
