[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: < 1 minute] Marc Hoffman of RemObjects blogged over the weekend about the forthcoming iOS 7 and arm64 support in Oxygene. Actually, the only part that is really “coming” is the arm64 aspect since, as he explains in the blog post, Oxygene has always been able to use the iOS 7 SDK betas from the first day they started arriving in Apple Developer previews.
[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: 10 minutes] It has been a frustrating week for me in some regards. It all started with the news of Microsoft acquiring Nokia. At first I paid it no real attention. I have never had a Windows Phone and my few experiences of Windows on any sort of mobile or handheld device had not left me particularly interested. But for some reason after a day or two I found myself thinking I should take a look at Windows Phone (and Windows 8, for that matter).
[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: 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] 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: < 1 minute] Marc Hoffman has confirmed that “Nougat” is to Mac/iOS as “Cooper” was to Java. Some have speculated that this will be based on Mono, but Oxygene has had Mono covered for some time already, so I strongly doubt that this is the case.
