Wednesday, September 11, 2013

XE5 Trial Download and Install Experience

I haven't received any SA emails, but XE5 is up and the trial is downloadable now, so go try it out folks.

I downloaded the trial and it installed and activated the trial flawlessly. The android stuff you need is all automatically installed, and even somewhat configured. (An emulator profile for XE5 is created, for example. Nice!)

A launch webinar is planned for Thursday September 12, go sign up now.


I haven't been able to test XE5 with my real Google Nexus 7 yet, because my wife is addicted to Scrabble, and I haven't got the heart to steal it from her. Tomorrow evening I will, however.

Tonight I just used the emulator, and I have to say, that the Android EMULATOR is a piece of crap, and that this is not Embarcadero's fault.  I have already long lamented the crappiness of the Android EMULATOR technology that comes in the Android SDK/NDK.   If you want to try this out, please please please save yourself some grief and just skip the damn emulator completely.



Also, the emulator appears not to properly implement OpenGL/ES, at least not on everybody's computers. It doesn't work at all on my windows 8 computer, which has a high end workstation graphics card.  That means I can't even launch a hello-world firemonkey-android app on my emulator.

I have the Android Studio (new Java toolset from google, based on IntelliJ IDEA), I have the classic Eclipse based Android stuff, and I have Delphi XE5 trial.  I have used the Android emulator with these two IDEs for a while now, and I find the speed absolutely atrocious, and I'm running on a quad-core Xeon box with a lot of RAM, and a very fast hard disk.    So, go get a real Android phone or tablet, before you even start playing with Android.  I recommend the Google Nexus 7.

Anyways, can I just say that I hate Java, and I hate the Android SDK and its intents and its intent filters, and its XML UI building system.

Am I ever excited that, without learning how to properly bean your proxy-factory-intent-filtered snicker-snacks and make them reverse-deionize in a co-variant fashion, while simultaneously generating your user interfaces in giant swaths of hand-coded, XML you could just .....

stick a damn button on a damn form, and run the damn thing. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Go Delphi.

Sorry if that makes me a troglodyte, but that's how I feel.

1 comment:

  1. You can have a look in the AVD manager, edit the profile Delphi created and add "GPU emulation" with value "yes" under hardware. Then you should have hardware acceleration.

    If you want an even faster emulation you should have a look at the Android simulator from Intel.

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