Did you see it? ..ISVs, VARs, Consultants and Hobbyists.. I jumped at the phrase and asked Jim whether any of the Product Roadmaps he’d seen at DelphiLive had revealed any plans for a renewed focus on Turbo or Hobbyist editions of Delphi however it seems that they did not specifically mention anything. Luckily Jim had noticed the significance of this typo phrase too and was kind enough to pose my question to the new Delphi Product Manager, Michael Rozlog:

I should make it entirely clear that this should not be read as a statement of intent from Michael or Embarcadero but merely an indication of Michael‘s personal thoughts on Turbo or Personal Delphi editions. This is encouraging news though, as many of you will know I wrote a long Open letter to Codegear on the subject of the sadly neglected Turbos and received a lot of feedback indicating that many of you felt the same way.

So what now?

Personally I’m thrilled that there seems to be at least some internal support for a renewed Turbo or Personal Delphi Edition but as usual, the devil is in the detail, How can we get a great home/hobbyist product (as opposed to a crippled and essentially useless product) without costing Codegear precious sales/revenue?

There are several different facets to this problem:

• What type of audience is the product is actually targetting? (Home users, Small ISVs, commercial vs strictly hobbyists?)
• How should product be limited for that audience without damaging it’s viability or sales of the full product (As Delphi’s fate is intertwined with that of Codegear – not something we want).

There are three different potential products in my mind:

1. A Purchasable Commercial Product which is essentially a step down from Delphi Professional SKU in both price and features made for smaller software shops and developers that don’t need the features of the full versions.
2. A Non-commercially licensed product equivalent to the educational edition (which If I remember correctly is the Professional SKU?) where the price is a token amount to cover the cost of the bandwidth and packaging cost of the product.
3. A Commercially licensed but absolutely free product which is crippled in its functionality and features even more than the current Turbo Explorer Editions.

As you might have guessed from my use of mildly emotive language in the 3rd point above and in my Open Letter to Codegear regarding the Turbos I consider the 3rd Option to be a non-offering. Sadly, previous statements from the former Delphi Product Manager, Nick Hodges, hinted that this was also the way he felt it might go.

I would be interested to see how the previous editions of Delphi impacted Sales (there must be paperwork, come on?) as I felt that these were always an amazing offering for Hobbyists and Home users wanting to take up the language (I remember finding Delphi 6 Personal on a magazine cover disc – presumably thanks to the always excellent Tim Anderson).

I would ideally like to see something in between the 2nd and 3rd options option a reality, I am not qualified to make a factual assertion on this but I don’t think it would hurt sales if strictly limited to non-commercial use in the license. Massive Feature limiting such as removing the ability to use 3rd Party VCL components as the Turbo Editions persued removes some of the most well-known and advantageous reasons for using Delphi in my opinion and is therefore unsuitable for an ambassador product (which these editions would be). I won’t rehash my argument about why the product needs to be both free and well featured (see my Turbo Delphi Open Letter) but I will say this:

Whether it is fair or not, Microsoft and the Eclipse foundation have forced their hand – a reasonably useful free IDE for home and hobbyist users wanting to experiment with a language is now a minimum requirement for competitiveness in the programming language market.

It is worth noting that the Updated Personal or Turbo delphi is currently only number 8 on the list requests at the Delphi Uservoice page, we really need people to vote for it and also to discuss their thoughts on the potential product in the comments over there.

Michael suggested that he was looking for feedback, so I’m looking for feedback. Firstly: What would your Turbo or Personal Product look like and secondly: what would you do if you were the Delphi Product Manager? How do the results of these two views differ? Please think about it and then either put it in the comments below or on the Delphi Uservoice page.

(Items marked with an Asterisk * are non-free)

Delphi Tools

GExperts – Every Delphi Developer should have GExperts, adding a fantastic selection of features to the Delphi IDE and Editor.

cnWizard IDE – Quite a few commenters suggested adding cnWizard IDE here, I’ve never actually tried it but did consider it against GExperts. What put me off was the relatively uninformative website (yes, shallow of me but I can’t help it!).

DelphiCodeToDoc Options

DelphiCodeToDoc – Generate documentation from your Delphi Source comments, including JavaDoc compatible comments. DelphiCodeToDoc is open source and can generate Windows Help Files or HTML Documentation (or both).

SmartInspect* - This is a commercial product which gives you amazing code logging features for Delphi, .NET and Java applications (and even PHP too now which I also find useful). No more inserting breakpoints, watches and spurious ShowMessages()’s just to track the variables in an application. Even allows Remote Logging when an executable is deployed on a different machine. Saved me from a particuarly frustrating problem in a remote app recently.

SmartInspect Console

Innosetup – A Free installer which allows you to create fully customisable installers which support nearly every version of windows and even 64 bit architectures. I’ve also found it to be just as functional and much easier to use than some of it’s expensive competitors.  Did I mention it’s also free?

MemCheck – Not really an application per se. Not fully Delphi 2009 compatible yet but this is a useful little unit that means adding a single line to your project file and then creates a log file of the memory leaks in your application.

WAnt –  A Delphi specific Build Automation tool in the same fashion as the Java Ant tool. I looked into this tool recently because I wanted a way to automatically Checkout, Build and Test the Dwitterphi project that I’m working on so I know when the SVN Trunk has been broken.

Editors / IDEs

Programmers Notepad 2 – A General Purpose Notepad replacement which includes Syntax highlighting support, bookmarks, code folding, project and project group support and all the usual gubbins which you would expect from a lightweight notepad replacement.

Zend Studio* – My copy is a few years old, before they switched to Eclipse. I’m actually looking at replacing this with something newer and free.

Zend Development Environment (older version)

Eclipse – Needs no real introduction. A Base for so many tools. I also use the RadRails package for Rails and Ruby Development.

Version Control / File Comparison

Beyond Compare 3* – An amazing File Comparison utility with 3 way merge capability, folder sync capabilities, specialised viewers for various file types and remote comparison tools. I’ve mentioned it many times before but this is an essential tool for developers.

Beyond Compare 3

Toroise SVN – Easy to use interface for Subversion which integrates beautifully with the Windows Shell. My only gripe with this particular tool is that it seems to bug you often to download the latest updates when they should by now have implemented an auto-update feature.

SVNMonitor – Only Recently suggested to me by @dmiliam via Twitter. I installed it and found it tremendously useful for keeping tabs on whats happening with a SVN Repository.

Internet

SmartFTP* – There are a million FTP Clients out there, some are free with comparable features to SmartFTP but none come close to the overall package and polish that SmartFTP represents including support for FTPS and SFTP and very smooth transfer queues and folder sync features.

FeedDemon – Developed in Delphi by Nick Bradbury. It’s considered very cool to use Google Reader nowadays but you can’t beat the stability and power of a Desktop Reader and FeedDemon has it all. Fast and efficient, especially good when combined with the NewsGator Online Sync Service that allows me to sync unread/read items to my Work PC or even my Blackberry with NewsGator Go! and catch up with news on the go. Sync with Google Reader is also on the way. FeedDemon FTW.

FeedDemon 3

twhirl – I prefer twhirl as my Twitter client of choice as it isn’t as big and bulky as TweetDeck but all that will change when there is a great native win32 twitter client.

Browser

FireFox – No explaination neccessary really.

• Web Developer Toolbar – Simply indispensable for those who spend a great deal of time crafting Browser content or applications.
• YSlow – I’ll be honest: I’ve never had a site that is big enough to need the level of optimisation that Yahoo.com does but the advice this tool gives is sound and it will help you to identify bottlenecks in your sites performance.
• FireBug - Edit, debug, and monitor HTML, CSS and JavaScript live in any web page.

Google Chrome – Used for Day to Day browsing because it’s an order of magnitude faster than almost any other browser out there in general browsing (Just my opinion).

SuperPreview – A fabulous tool from Microsoft unveiled at Mix09 which allows you to view web pages in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 as well as your other browsers whilst allowing you to super-impose expected layouts on top of one another to see how the renderings differ. No more hefty VMs required for testing layouts.. great success!

Shell / Miscellaneous

Open Command Window Here shortcute

Command Prompt Here - A hugely underrated and disarmingly simple shell extension which adds an “Open Command Prompt Here” sub-item to the context menu in Windows Explorer. No more cd “C:really really really long path name” for these users.

UltraMon* – This improves the Multi-Monitor support in Windows hugely, something that if you haven’t tried it, try it now! Monitor specific task bars, extra system buttons on each window, wallpaper and desktop icon management. Ultramon is so useful that I’m suprised it hasn’t already been acquired by Microsoft like the SysInternals team were.

ProcessExplorer from SysInternals

SysInternals – From by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, The best set of power user utilities available out there, Acquired by Microsoft a few years ago. My personal favourites are:

• Process Explorer – Think of the windows task manager on steroids, double it and then add more.
• Autoruns – Comprehensive lists of everything starting up when your computer does.
• ps* Utils – Lightweight remote versions of your favourite windows commands.

VirtualBox – A Free and Open Source VM competitor to Microsoft VirtualPC and VMWare etc. Not as polished as VMWare in some parts of the user interface or networking features but very usable and getting much better with every release.

Window Clippings* – Recommended to me by marc hoffman (although how he knew about it – primarily being a mac user I’m not sure). A very easy Screenshot and Window Clipping tool. Great features, addons available and inexpensive. Everyone has their own preference for a Screenshot tool so whilst I would completely recommend this, I wouldn’t push for you to change over any other.

Power Toys – An amazing set of utilities that add to windows.

SyncToy 2 - A File and Folder Synchronisation tool that I use to keep files backed up to my home servers and which I will use to Sync important indispensable files (music!) to my NetBook when I finally purchase it!

This isn’t a completely comprehensive list (I’m not going to dump a list of everything from Windows Add/Remove Programs!) but I’d love to hear if you think I’m missing out on any spectacularly useful utilities for Delphi or Web Development. Hopefully you found at least one utility in this list that you’ve been putting off trying and have realised why I found it to be useful.

After a bit of Googling I was tipped off to the idea that my XML File could contain non-visible invalid XML Characters. Trying to open the XML file in Internet Explorer confirmed this suspicion as it threw up a rather unhelpful and non-descriptive error. I tried opening the document up in a Hex editor but the document was large and my untrained eye could not locate the problematic character(s) amongst the valid ones. After taking a few excellent suggestions on Twitter I tried opening the file in Altova’s XML Spy didn’t help correct the document as it claimed the document to be “well-formed”. After a little bit of Googling for XML Document Inspection solutions I stumbled upon a newsgroup post mentioning using Dave Raggett‘s excellent HTML Tidy Utility (which can, contrary to it’s name, be used for a lot more than HTML!).

By running the Tidy tool with the command line arguments:

tidy -mi my_broken_xmlfile.xml

This instructs tidy to indent and prettify the xml file (which I would always recommend for any XML File in development) and to modify the original file. In the process of Indenting and Prettifying it removes any invalid characters which make the document invalid. You could also write the Tidy’d XML file to a separate file using the -o output-file option instead. I then used Scooter Software’s fantastic Beyond Compare tool to view the difference(s) between the old and new versions in order to check what changes had been made.  

Incidentally, Beyond Compare is an invaluable tool for any developer allowing Both Local and Remote Comparisons, 3 way merging of documents and even folder comparisons (remote or local: very useful for websites).

My new Blackberry Bold recently arrived and whilst I shall leave the full review to another post but so far I think it is by far the best phone that I have ever used.

Blackberry Bold

However, when I first set it up, many of my applications were complaining of no Blackberry Internet Service which caused Blackberry Maps and some other applications to fail. By the time I discovered this it was a weekend so I couldn’t call the support line and go though the usual repeat 10 times “is it turned on sir?” and “do you have reception right now” before getting through to someone who maybe understands the issue. So I googled for the error and found a thread linked on the new Vodafone support e-Forums.

Wow. After a tiny amount of searching I found that the problem appeared to be linked with new Vodafone BB Bold’s being misconfigured in their factory configuration process by RIM. Many of the posters claimed that they had phoned the Vodafone support centre many times and were left with a helpless feeling that none of the operators understood the issue. This is a feeling that I’m almost certain you will have all felt before – that support centres are often not that helpful beyond reading you a list of general troubleshooting procedures from their internal support site. 

After reading the thread I registered myself on the forums and posted to the thread asking for help at about 12:35AM on Saturday night. By 08:04AM on Sunday morning there was a response from an official member of the Vodafone e-Forum team saying that I should check my email for the first steps towards help. After going providing them some account and security information as well as confirmation of the problem they got back to me first thing on Monday morning and by 9:00AM Monday morning, my BIS problems were sorted.

This whole experience left me with a great feeling of satisfaction surrounding the help I was given. Whilst this form of customer service will certainly not appeal to time-sensitive queries or to businesses, I found it to be my most gratifying customer service experience for a long time! Thank-you to the Vodafone eForum team and I truly hope that this service has enough support internally, I will certainly be writing to Vodafone to provide feedback on this service! 

Whilst these types of support forum contain the same types of poorly specified, badly spelled and possibly over-expletive filled posts that any forum contains, what amazed me was that without exception the team were very calm and were usually able to provide resolution. The eForum at Vodafone is a venerable gold mine of well researched information from official Vodafone staff members. No flim-flam answers about expected handset release dates, queries on phone unlocking (a contentious issue for networks) and even suggestions for gettign the most out of your plan or phone (the only way I found the fantastic BetaVine site) can all be found on the site.

My initial impressions of the AppStore are pretty good, the process is very smooth and the Applications that are currently available seem to be of a pretty good calibre. A Couple of things still annoy me immensely about the whole iPod/iTunes operation and the first is that it still requires a long and painful snyc of everything, even when I’ve only added a single app. The Second is that iTunes is so determined to send me an invoice email even for songs, applications and videos which are absolutely free, there is already so much unnecessary email in the world, why worsen the problem!

After the update and small reboot, I was greeted by the welcoming icon of the AppStore being added to my homepage where I promptly set about adding 4 of my most desired applications.

The ones that I have added so far are:

• Facebook application – The only notable features of this is that it allows you to chat to facebook chat users via the application, this would be incredibly useful (or annoying) to an iPhone user. The other notable feature is the addressbook facility which for some (most of my friends don’t keep their number on there) would be extremely useful to an iPhone user.
• Remote Application – Does what it says on the tin: Allows you to control iTunes remotely. Amazingly useful if not a little buggy sometimes!
• Twitterific – Currently the only Native twitter client which is annoying because the interface is confusing and frustrating.
• NetNewsWire for iPhone – The iPhone RSS client produced by Brent Simmons of Newsgator who created the best RSS Reader for macs by the same name. This syncs all my news and feeds with FeedDemon, My Blackberry client and every other Newsgator client that I use. Utterly useful.

The only problems that I encountered where a slight problem with Syncing my NNW feeds from Newsgator. If you are having problems with NNW hanging then goto Newsgator online and reduce the number of feeds that the iPhone version is subscribed to. It’s not a problem for me because I certainly don’t want all my feeds clogging up my iPod and would only want to read a slightly smaller subsection of my total feeds.

I haven’t yet paid for any applications but as I’ve just been given a nice shiny iTunes gift voucher I suspect that I will branch into some of those ones very soon.

Once installed PicLens places a small translucent play button over photos on supported sites when you put your mouse over them. Supported sites include:

It also supports any site which uses the mediaRSS format. Once activated the PicLens plugin opens up a fantastic full screen app for viewing photos. Danny recently announced version 1.6 which includes a fantastic new feature called “the wall” which displays your photos in all their glory in a 3D environment allowing a fun and very easy way to skip through a photostream as shown below in the screenshot I capped of my own photostream.

I would highly recommend that everyone downloads this plugin, I have never found a more pleasurable interface to browsing photos. Rendering is smooth and satisfying and I wish to congratulate Danny and the team for their excellent work!

What is so special about using the Newsgator products? Well they all synchroise with the Newsgator online database which means that I don’t read items on my Blackberry which I’ve already read back at the office using FeedDemon. The power and flexibility afforded by this are excellent as they also have an API interface to this which I’ve been meaning to tinker with for some time! I would highly recommend that everyone try these products for a little while – even if you already have a favourite RSS reading platform!