After realizing that FireMonkey on iOS won’t pick up the new iOS 7 look automatically (bc FM doesn’t use native visual controls), I’ve been looking at Xamarin Studio (using C#) and their GUI designer which *does* use native controls. Unlike Oxygene for Cocoa, Xamarin Studio has its own integrated GUI designer (like VS and Delphi on Win32).

However, it’s still in alpha.
http://docs.xamarin.com/guides/ios/user_interface/designer

Worst case scenario (which isn’t bad) is that I’ll use XCode and Obj-C. It’s really a nice language, but XCode is such a departure from Delphi and Visual Studio’s GUI development…and I just prefer Delphi. Unfortunately, Delphi has moved their visual controls away from native implementations…and it has me looking elsewhere these days. Maybe they’ll buy/incorporate TMS iCL and I’ll take another look at Delphi on iOS.

http://www.tmssoftware.com/site/tmsicl.asp

Seems DelphiFeeds does not update itself from changes RSS (:

The cost of Delphi is trivial compared to other costs in my small business.

XE2 was over-hyped in the marketing but most people knew pretty quickly the FM/iOS additions were of little more than alpha quality.

I’m really quite narked about how they handled XE3, which will surely go down as one of the least used versions in recent history. I mean – why would anybody upgrade to it? It’s buggier than its predecessors, has no new features of any real value (Metropolis! Yay!) and produces more bloated and slower exes.

XE4 should have been XE3.5, as they strongly implied it would be. But they do need the money badly, it seems. Which worries more than a lot of other things do.

Delphi quality has always been variable, unfortunately. I think we’re quite fortunate that in recent years we’ve had two, arguably three pretty solid releases for Windows work (D2010, XE, XE2) with continual and very worthwhile improvements. XE3 dipped down in quality and new features Let’s hope XE4 represents a dip up.

Richard

program unused;
uses
Foo.Fx in ‘Foo.Fx.pas’;
var
c: Integer;
begin
c := Ord(Foo.enumBAR);
end.

and the following DPR will NOT compile in D7:

program unused;
uses
Fy.Foo in ‘Fy.Foo.pas’;
var
c: Integer;
begin
c := Ord(Foo.enumBAR);
end.

So getting dotty with unit names seems to be a bad idea in Delphi versions lower than XE4

Problems with the licensing system on the other hand have only gotten worse over the years since the introduction of activation. This particular one probably existed before but this was the first time it bit me.

And thanks