This blog post is based on published information from Embarcadero only.
First, the "debut" video from their site:
My two top favorite things mentioned from this video:
1. Rad Studio XE3 supports the latest mac OS X (Mountain Lion) in Firemonkey 2 (FM2)
2. Rad Studio XE3 FM2 supports non-client area (fancy title bars) theming just like VCL Styles did for XE2. A nice parity-feature for Firemonkey, and something that was actually making me not want to use firemonkey. Nice!
Exciting stuff, but perhaps less here than some people were hoping for. Stay tuned for more updates. I know that JT blogged at Embarcadero's blog site, about how some mobile features will be released after XE3 releases, perhaps as a separate product.
There's also been a lot of hand-wringing about WinRT. Personally I am about as interested in WinRT as I am in .Net, Silverlight, and WPF, which is zero. They're about as interesting to me as the JVM, which is, "yeah, that works, fine, but it's boring". The world I like is the native code world. It's fast, and it doesn't depend on gargantuan binary frameworks. If you're following the Java world these days, you'll see that this is what is "the worst problem right now, in Java land"; Project Jigsaw is the plan to move forward, but that's going to be a long time yet until it's ready. Framework hell.
WinRT is about as ready for primetime as .Net was when it hit 1.0. Which is not very ready. While I'm upset that Microsoft has denied non-WinRT apps the "right to run a live tile within the new start menu, that's just one more reason for me to completely ignore the Win8 "WinRT" world, and live purely in Win32 land. There's a simple way to force microsoft's hand here. Let's just wait until Win8 releases to retail, and then let's watch as someone makes a million bucks with some replacement start menu that works just like the one we know, and probably love, from Windows 95 until now. Frankly, I've played with the RTM and the various previous milestone releases, and I'm unimpressed with the UI-formerly-known-as-Metro, and with WinRT in general. I am much more impressed with the latest Office365/Office2012 release.
But since XE3 will ship with less functionality than XE2 in the box, I expect to hear lots of whinging from various "nattering nabobs of negativity" out there, but as for me, I'm still amazed that we have a multi-platform Delphi. Everybody who buys XE3 gets all the XE2 level features for free anyways, since XE2 is included for free for everyone who buys XE2, as per JT's blog.
Yeah, so if it takes longer to build than people wanted it to take for the next level of Mobile app building technology, and you want to learn Cocoa and XCode, and build completely separate apps (Java for Android, C# for Windows Phone and Windows, Objective C for Mac) and share zero code between those systems, then you're more than welcome to do so. I'm not taking a "holy war" approach to mobile development. I'm learning lots of things, and doing whatever works. I am quite excited about Delphi-on-mobile-platforms, as a future for Delphi development.
It's a great time to be a big fat Delphi fan. Go team. Go Delphi. Go Embarcadero!
Why yes, I AM a fan boi. Fine.
First, the "debut" video from their site:
My two top favorite things mentioned from this video:
1. Rad Studio XE3 supports the latest mac OS X (Mountain Lion) in Firemonkey 2 (FM2)
2. Rad Studio XE3 FM2 supports non-client area (fancy title bars) theming just like VCL Styles did for XE2. A nice parity-feature for Firemonkey, and something that was actually making me not want to use firemonkey. Nice!
Exciting stuff, but perhaps less here than some people were hoping for. Stay tuned for more updates. I know that JT blogged at Embarcadero's blog site, about how some mobile features will be released after XE3 releases, perhaps as a separate product.
There's also been a lot of hand-wringing about WinRT. Personally I am about as interested in WinRT as I am in .Net, Silverlight, and WPF, which is zero. They're about as interesting to me as the JVM, which is, "yeah, that works, fine, but it's boring". The world I like is the native code world. It's fast, and it doesn't depend on gargantuan binary frameworks. If you're following the Java world these days, you'll see that this is what is "the worst problem right now, in Java land"; Project Jigsaw is the plan to move forward, but that's going to be a long time yet until it's ready. Framework hell.
WinRT is about as ready for primetime as .Net was when it hit 1.0. Which is not very ready. While I'm upset that Microsoft has denied non-WinRT apps the "right to run a live tile within the new start menu, that's just one more reason for me to completely ignore the Win8 "WinRT" world, and live purely in Win32 land. There's a simple way to force microsoft's hand here. Let's just wait until Win8 releases to retail, and then let's watch as someone makes a million bucks with some replacement start menu that works just like the one we know, and probably love, from Windows 95 until now. Frankly, I've played with the RTM and the various previous milestone releases, and I'm unimpressed with the UI-formerly-known-as-Metro, and with WinRT in general. I am much more impressed with the latest Office365/Office2012 release.
But since XE3 will ship with less functionality than XE2 in the box, I expect to hear lots of whinging from various "nattering nabobs of negativity" out there, but as for me, I'm still amazed that we have a multi-platform Delphi. Everybody who buys XE3 gets all the XE2 level features for free anyways, since XE2 is included for free for everyone who buys XE2, as per JT's blog.
Yeah, so if it takes longer to build than people wanted it to take for the next level of Mobile app building technology, and you want to learn Cocoa and XCode, and build completely separate apps (Java for Android, C# for Windows Phone and Windows, Objective C for Mac) and share zero code between those systems, then you're more than welcome to do so. I'm not taking a "holy war" approach to mobile development. I'm learning lots of things, and doing whatever works. I am quite excited about Delphi-on-mobile-platforms, as a future for Delphi development.
It's a great time to be a big fat Delphi fan. Go team. Go Delphi. Go Embarcadero!
Why yes, I AM a fan boi. Fine.
I think you are correct, Delphi is still am amazing environment to work in. When I introduce students to it they quickly get up to speed. My only wish is that the Company were more engaged with the community since there is a lot of talent that could be made use of.
ReplyDelete> "Everybody who buys XE3 gets all the XE2 level features for free anyways, since XE2 is included for free **for everyone who buys XE2**, as per JT's blog."
ReplyDeleteDid you perhaps mean to say "...for everyone who buys XE3"?