[Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes] Be careful what you wish for. A lot of people were overjoyed to hear that Unicode support was coming to Delphi. Some were skeptical of the chosen implementation approach however, it all seemed just a little bit too easy. I was one, and sadly it seems I was right.
[Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes] I’ve been staggered at the response to my recent post calling for a “Community Edition” (and a “Standard Edition”) of Delphi. Even more staggering though was that some people still don’t “get it”, thinking that a free or cut-price version of Delphi will somehow be the financial ruin of Embarcadero.
[Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes] The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things. Of shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax. Of cabbages, and kings. And why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings. And why the cheapest version of Delphi costs a new user as much as a pretty reasonable second-hand car. Why even an upgrade costs as much as a half decent new PC (excluding monitor). And what might be done about that.
[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] If you are using any version of Delphi that is more than 3 versions older than the current version (i.e. Delphi 2005 or older, as of today), the days of upgrading to the latest version will soon be over.
[Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes] This is what I love about Delphi. After almost 15 years of Delphi’ing there’s still new things to learn, and I don’t just mean new features in the latest releases. I mean, basic, fundamental things that have been there for years, just undiscovered (by me). In this case the discovery was a little annoying, but never-the-less educational.
[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] or: The Search For a Practical Issue Tracking Solution I’m currently evaluating numerous issue tracking systems. I’ve already found one that I intend using myself (FogBugz) because it “just works” (and it’s free for 1-2 users, which will do for me at least until I manage to figure out how to clone myself. Twice). I like stuff that “just works”. I’ll often overlook other shortcomings of pretty much anything that does what it does well and delivers some benefit without getting in my way. On the other hand, you could show me the most capable, feature endowed “Be-All and End-All”, but if the user experience of it is painful, unintuitive or causes me hassle in any unreasonable way shape or form, then I’ll quickly pass.
