{"id":936,"date":"2012-07-31T20:16:45","date_gmt":"2012-07-31T08:16:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.deltics.co.nz\/blog\/?p=936"},"modified":"2018-02-28T11:22:13","modified_gmt":"2018-02-27T23:22:13","slug":"a-pain-in-the-butt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.deltics.co.nz\/blog\/posts\/936\/","title":{"rendered":"A Pain In The Butt"},"content":{"rendered":"[Estimated Reading Time: <\/span> 3<\/span> minutes]<\/span><\/span>

This post is one of those classic double-entendres for which us Brits are (in)famous, involving as it does both an actual Pain In The Butt and a euphemistic one.
\n<\/p>\n

I have been incapacitated recently by a sudden onset of sciatica caused – so my physio seems to think – by “Piriformis Syndrome<\/a>“. Basically a result (he thinks – without an MRI it is impossible to be sure) of the way my sciatic nerve is routed under or possibly through a muscle in my butt, click here to read more<\/a> about this wonderful condition. Nope, so rather than the “classic” spinal injury normally associated with sciatica (herniated disc etc).<\/p>\n

Certainly I know I pulled something<\/em> in my butt a couple of months ago (just moving some not very heavy boxes and over-extending slightly) and had been hobbling around with a sore hip which got variously better and worse ever since. I then woke up almost two weeks ago in deblitating agony – literally unable to stand, let alone walk.<\/p>\n

This actually had me in hospital on IV morphine for a couple of days, but thankfully recovery is proving quite rapid, and I am gradually resuming my normal activities.<\/p>\n

On that score I decided to pick up the CFFTPSample porting project<\/a> I embarked on a few weeks ago, specifically with a view to tackling the step of getting an iOS environment up and running with Delphi XE2.<\/p>\n

Quite simply, I gave up.<\/p>\n

I have had quite enough actual<\/strong> pain in my butt in recent weeks – I don’t need any more, euphemistic or otherwise.<\/p>\n

[Actually in the interests of medical accuracy, although the cause of my recent actual pain was located in my butt, the symptoms were actually felt primarily in my lower leg – constant, excruciating severe cramping of the muscles in my leg from the knee down to my toes.<\/em>]<\/p>\n

I only got as far as trying to install the FireMonkey for iOS libraries and when it refused because I didn’t have the right versions of iOS (demanding 4.2 or 4.3 – I have the latest Xcode and iOS 5.1 SDK) this was enough for me.<\/p>\n

If it doesn’t “just work” then it might as well not work at all.<\/p>\n

Delphi – in the form currently delivered in XE2 – is in my view simply unusable for serious iOS development.<\/p>\n

Knowing from others how much trouble they had getting things up and running in this area (without, as far as I know having run in to such early hurdles), quite simply I have too many other things of interest to waste my time fighting with Embarcadero’s hacks and work-arounds trying to get something up and running that will no doubt fall over at the very next Delphi, Xcode or iOS update.<\/p>\n

If they deliver something which is less of a hack, more stable and much easier to get up and running in XE3 then I might revisit it, but at the moment I feel my time in these areas is better spent learning Objective-C.<\/p>\n

Embarcadero seriously dropped the ball on this one. No matter how “clever” they thought they were being (riding in to town on the coat-tails of the efforts of the FPC community!!) and shoe-horning their rushed FireMonkey solution onto iOS, it certainly isn’t very smart.<\/p>\n

XE3 will have to demonstrate some vast improvements in this area, but I find it worrying that with the anniversary of the launch last year in Auckland of XE2<\/a> just 4 days away and the usual release window for the next version of Delphi rapidly approaching, we have heard nothing (to my knowledge) significant about the forthcoming release.<\/p>\n

Maybe the new “Delphi Evangelists<\/a>” know something about what is coming.<\/p>\n

It’s a bit of a shame that Embarcadero don’t have a “Critical Friend” program. Clearly my evangelism isn’t of the sort they appreciate.<\/p>\n

Upon further consideration this post might even represent, therefore, a triple entendre, as “A Pain In The Butt” might reasonably be how Embarcadero perceive me right now. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Estimated Reading Time: <\/span> 3<\/span> minutes]<\/span><\/span>This post is one of those classic double-entendres for which us Brits are (in)famous, involving as it does both an actual Pain In The Butt and a euphemistic one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,143],"tags":[292,135,137,136],"class_list":["post-936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-delphi","category-xe2-delphi","tag-delphi","tag-firemonkey","tag-ios","tag-xe2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1TKYv-f6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deltics.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deltics.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deltics.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltics.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltics.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=936"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltics.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2644,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltics.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936\/revisions\/2644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deltics.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltics.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deltics.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}