(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.

A logo for homecamp, created by @ribotminimus

I spent all day last Saturday at Homecamp at the Electrical Engineering building at Imperial College London. Homecamp is effectively a hack-day about Home monitoring, home automation reducing energy and energy resource requirements in your home.

Previous to hearing of the day, I had become interested in these subjects because I had seen Andy Piper‘s Current Cost posts and the associated IBM’ers who had been doing some fantastic work on providing code libraries for accessing the Current Cost data. The CurrentCost unit is a great little electricity usage monitoring unit that is available to buy on eBay for about £40. Whilst a large amount of our discussion from that day did revolve around the CurrentCost unit, it was not the limit of our discussion in anyway (discussion around this was easy because it’s a cool little unit that is low-cost and easy to extract data from!).

The Day began with Dale Lane and Chris Dalby who had organised the day distributing name labels and wireless keys and asked us to give suggestions for sessions. We also had a quick word from James Govenor (@monkchips) who was generously sponsoring the event via his GreenMonk consultancy. 

The First talk of the day was from Andy Stanford-Clark who is a Master Inventor at IBM. As one might expect, Andy’s own house is a geeks dream (it even twitters!). Almost everything that can be is monitored and automated, even to the mouse traps that are set in his loft which text him or his family when a mousetrap is set off or the cheese used as bait has gone off. He measured his water usage by requesting a new meter which had a magnetised needle, thus allowing him to setup a device which gets a signal every time the needle rotates. Andy was also a big advocate of the MQTT protocol which he uses for client projects with IBM and as the central messaging service for his house works. MQTT is a Publish-Subscribe protocol which makes it ideal for things like the house networks that we were talking about. He also mentioned the use of X10 and ZigBee in controlling almost device or system in the house. You can see Andy’s full talk in the video that Andy Piper made.

Photo credit: Andy Piper

Joe Short and Phoebe Bright then did a talk on Dynamic Demand. This is essentially about smoothing out the hour by hour and minute by minute variations in power demands on the national grid. This is important becuase peak time power requirements mean that power companies have to bring very expensive and very environmentally damaging types of power generator online. We discussed about how this requires social change and we discussed dynamic energy pricing as a method of bringing about this change. In Italy for example the government required dynamic pricing smart meters to be installed in every house. This means that people are rewarded for putting their tumble dryer (if you needed a tumble dryer in a hot country like italy!) on at 3am in the morning when electricity is considerably cheaper. The general message here seemed to be that we have limited scope for activity here until we can push suppliers for dynamic pricing. This will take some time but once this is done, you can for example program washing machines to automatically start when the national price of electricity is at it’s cheapest throughout the day (very cool).  

Dale Lane took us through some of the ways in which the IBM Hursley users of the CurrentCost units have been trying to address the social aspects of getting people to use less electricity. They have been working on a realtime site for sharing and contrasting data from their units and would like to start creating some XBox live style point scoring awards. This would mean awards for biggest 1 day improvement or lowest house rest point. 

We also had a talk from Nicholas O’Leary who gave an interesting talk about the potential for Arduino use in the home. The Arduino is an open-source electronics platform that allows the flexibility to program and build low cost sensor inputs (light, heat, magnetic etc) to interact with a number of outputs. Nick showed us an ambient orb that he had built to show the amount of power his house is using at that particular moment. It glows green, yellow or red depending on whether the house electricity usage falls within certain limits. You can buy arduino units and shields from a number of sources but I am planning on getting a starter kit which should be back in stock soon at tinker.it. 

There was discussion in both Andy’s talk and Nick’s talk about how you could end up consuming more power by measuring and monitoring your home by the time you’ve got a server plugged into all manner of electrical monitoring devices. We discussed the Viglen MPC-L device which runs on a rediculously small amount of electricity usage (there was some discussion of costing you approx £10 per year on electicity usage). The Arduino can be powered with a normal 9V battery.

We also had a presentation from the Patchube (Patch-U-Bay) folks who were explaining about how you can get data in to the site and the various ways you use and share that information. I could see a lot of potential for this site but first I need to generate some data to share!

Photo Credit: Andy Piper

Overall I had a very inspiring day and met some extremely interesting people from all manner of backgrounds, interests and areas. It was nice to meet so many people who I had interacted with on Twitter and some who I had never met before but whom I shall certainly be looking forward to meeting again soon. I will be ordering all sorts of kit to play with as a result of the talks given at Homecamp and so the day will almost certainly cost me a lot of money in gadgets and time in the future but at least I will have a lot of fun doing it! The first thing I will be doing is writing a native Delphi library for the CurrentCost unit and contributing that to the Google Code Repository. There is another Homecamp planned for March which I hope that I will be around for again and this time able to contribute some ideas and projects towards it.

Thank-you to Chris Dalby, Dale Lane and James Governor for their work in setting up the day and to everyone who presented or otherwise contributed to the day. I can’t wait to share what I do as a result of the inspiration that the first day gave me!

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.

This DVD can be bought brand new from Amazon.co.uk for £4.98 or used for £1.98, this means that even with postage and packaging on a single purchase you can still beat the price that iTunes is selling it to you! There seems to be a very limited range of titles including newer titles such as Batman Begins which still seems to be overpriced when compared to buying brand new from Amazon. Do not forget that buying from Amazon also gets you a hard-copy instead of the (possibly self-destructing) DRM’ed copy that you download from iTunes UK.

When compared to my subscription with Amazon DVD rental (now transferring to the UK market leader LOVEFiLM) the iTunes offering still seems overpriced. By my calculations as long as I receive more than 2 films per month (I currently get about 5-6) the mailed film borrowing seems much cheaper, as well as giving me a greater choice of films. I know that there are additional advantages to the iTunes service here (such as it being on-demand) but the price raise isn’t enough to convince me to give up my subscription yet.

Additionally, it would seem that some films (presumably with distribution restricted licenses) are available for either Rental or Sale only which seems a little discouraging if it is one of the films that you really want to watch or buy.

I shall wait until I have tried out the store before I decide on whether I will be using iTunes or not but at first glance it would appear that the pricing is severely discouraging when compared to other comparable services.

Correct. Every single page I visit when logged in is flanked by a Norwegian advertisement. My profile is not setup to mention Norway and I have 1 friend (About 0.25% of my total friend connections) who is in the Norway network so why, why, why are Facebook serving me adverts in Norwegian?

For a company who hope to paint themselves as one which will overtake Google as the online advertising specialists this is a serious problem? There has been a lot of hype surrounding Facebook recently and talk of it challenging Google, luring its much sought after employees away however to me this seems absurd.

Everything that Facebook does at the moment seems to smack of immaturity, possibly this is the result of Mark Z’s lack of real experience in Business. Many large internet companies today did indeed start off with a CEO who had no real business experience however that doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone can do it. Google employees seen leaving for Facebook will only be transferring for one reason: money. With Facebook’s recent valuation stock options can be seen to be as lucrative as the original Google options. Employees leaving to Facebook are not joining it because it is seen as the next bastion of the world’s academics (as Google is) but because they are on a gold rush.

Bottom line: Facebook is not in control of its own ascent, they are clinging on whilst the environment pushes them. Unless they begin to mature as a company they could spiral out of control and I would not want to speculate on what a desperate company might do with all our information if it came to hard decisions.

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!