Community Welcome Page - Translations are on their way

I just wanted to keep you all informed. The translations of the Community Welcome Page are rolling. A few issues and wishes came in. I will see whether I can fix them in a short time and then I will publish it on the BDN.

Just keep your eyes open, we are getting ready ;-)

DavidI, Michael Swindell and Jason Vokes live

I have told you about the Delphi-Days. I have told you about the Live Video Conference for the keynote regarding Borlands announcement of the spin-out. See for yourself now, online. All videos are for download as EXE file. If you are afraid of EXE files, download 7 zip and use this tool to extract the videos ;-) The DivX video files are using a special Codec which can be downloaded at divx.com.

Keynote with Jason Vokes, David I and Michael Swindell
DivX Codec, AVI (Full Size, 365 MB)
Standard WMV (Small Size, 21 MB)

Delphi is back home at last...

Well, I am back on the way home from the Delphi Days in Frankfurt. It was a quiet interesting event, especially the keynote with Jason Vokes, David "DavidI" Intersimone, and Michael Swindell.

They started of telling us a little about the Borland Developer Studio 2006 and the development cycle of it. Also, they assured us, that the development still continues, full steam ahead and that the IDE team is working on an Update 2 for the current version. But this was, where they stopped talking about the Borland Developer Studio and simply continued talking about the Developer Studio. They dropped the name of a company that is interested in ALM, and ALM only ;-)

So, you are waiting to read some exciting news they gave us? Well... no ;-) It was a great video session and we have heard many facts, but mostly you know them already. The named, for the sake of the keynote, the new company "DevCo" for "The Developer Company", which will focus on those IDE tools in the future.

"DevCo" will have new chances. While Borland will continue to sell its ALM tools mostly directly to big companies having key account managers working for their clients, "DevCo" will possibly follow other ways and hopefully focus on the small developer again. DavidI thinks it possible to push sales channels, like using the Internet for downloadable versions (which Germany already does).

"DevCo" will focus on us, the developer, again. The big company deals are left to Borland and the ALM tools. However, both ways, Borland will support "DevCo"-tools and "DevCo" will include Borlands ALM tools. This, for those of us, who use them already, will be a great chance to get the best of both those worlds.

All three of them emphasized that Borland (for now) and later "DevCo" will stick to the roadmap published last year. Yet, Michael Swindell said, that "DevCo" will have the chance, not only to stick to this roadmap, but to exceed our expectations in many ways.

Let's hope that we know really soon what will happen and hold your thumbs for great times ahead. :-)

Stay tuned for the list of questions and answers from the end of the session ;)

Stay tuned for more information on NewCorp ;-)

I just found out that, we have a slightly changed agenda for tomorrow. Reminder: it is the Delphi-Days in Frankfurt, Germanies largest Delphi Developer Meeting this year.

Jason Vokes will, together with DavidI and Michael Swindell, talk about Borlands plans to spin-out the IDE products. They will answer questions from the audience, as far as possible. DavidI and Michael Swindell will join us via video confernce from Scotts Valley.

Let's see what they've got to tell us ;-)

Community Welcome Page - Translations needed

The Welcome Page update is close to your door step and will arive there within the next few days. However, I would like to have translations for the Japanese and French folks out there too.

How would be willing to translate a few strings from English into those languages?

Further: who would like to cross read the English strings, just so that it does not look to bad inside the Borland Developer Studio IDE? Just fixing needed here ;-)

Thanks in advance. Post here or send me an e-mail to dwischnewski [at] gmail {dot} com.

Update: Following languages are covered as of now ;-)

• English
• French
• German ;-)
• Japanese
  

  ---

• Catalan
• Danish
• Spanish (Spain)
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Portuguese (Portuguese)

Camera RAW Image Thumbnail Viewer - Beta 1

Yesterday, I saw an interesting tool at Microsofts homepage: Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for Windows XP. However, as this tool only supports very few camera types (Canon EOS 5D and Nikon D50, D70s and D200) and I own a Panasonic FZ-30, I took it upon myself to come up with a similar solution.

At this early stage there are not all EXIF data parsed, not all formats supported and errors may come at some times. Presently, some camera RAW formats of Olympus, Canon, Sony, and Panasonic are supported, as well as some JPG/TIFF Extensions.

Be warned though, processing RAW images takes a certain amount of time, so your CPU might spike up to 100% at some points ;-) However, the Windows Explorer plugin works in the background and should not deadlock your computer.

Download: RAW Thumbnail Viewer - Beta 1 (1,6 MB)

Do you have more formats you would like to see supported? Drop me a line. You have RAW samples, contact me as well and we see how to get it done ;-)

Deploying your work with InstallAware 5

Usually we deploy our software by hand. Shocked? Well, we do very few installations only, it takes about half an hour and it has to be highly customized. So there was never a great reason to do it otherwise.

However, times go on and we are looking into the next step with our software. I will not say: I have seen them all; but I can say: I have tested many. I worked with the Wise Installer, I abandoned NSIS, I loved InstallShield, but I have turned them all down when InstallAware 3 hit the market. Next I knew, I still did not have a great demand for installers...

Well so InstallAware 2005 and 2005 SE made it onto my machine, but I never really had to use them, as we were down the development road and did more consulting last year. Was great to, but now, we are getting ready to move on with our software and we will start playing with ASP.NET 2.0 rather soon. So I did take a look at the latest versions of some of the installer tools, once again. Breathtakin'!

But InstallAware 5 Studio just knocked me over! I have it on my machine and almost forgot about Delphi. Okay, not that drastic, but yes, the IDE got much faster, large projects with thousands of Registry settings, DLLs, and so on, still are ligthning fast loaded and administered within the IDE. Sinan has taken InstallAware a long way and creating installers slowly comes back to a place where one could say it is fun ;-)

Take a look at it at www.installaware.com.

P.S.: I do not get anything for this post here, it is written just because InstallAware really became awesome and I want to dip your nose into it ;-)

Delphi 2005 Personal Edition (German) as free download

Borland Germany has offered us, as incentive for the Delphi-Tage, to offer the Borland Delphi 2005 Personal Edition as free download. In case one of you wants to take a look at it, go ahead, but be warned, it is the German edition, only. Service Pack 1 is included, others where never made available for this edition.

Go ahead, get a sneak peak and then go to Borland Developer Studio 2006, if you haven't done so already.

Download Portal and Information (German only)