How are you Delphi programming skills? Want to visit Fortaleza, Brazil? I’m sure it is especially nice if you are in the northern hemisphere right now since Brazil is enjoying summer while we are stuck in winter.
Next week Hack’n Fortes is hosting a Delphi hackathon / programming marathon. Registration is closed, but you can always head down to watch. If Brazil is a little far away, we have an online Code Battle planned for Wednesday the 15th as part of Delphi Week 2015! #DelphiWeek
Have you ever had some code you wanted to run outside of the event handler that causes the code to run? If not, then this blog post isn’t for you. I’m not here to debate why you would want to do that, or if it is a good idea or not. I just know there’ve been times I’ve needed my code to run outside the event handler, or just a bit later.
One use case example: You are calling a slow routine (Network I/O maybe) and don’t want to freeze the UI while you wait for it to execute.
Still with me? Good. What I used to do was drop a TTimer on the form and set the Interval to 1, then enable it to trigger the code to run later. This worked, but it was messy. You had a timer to deal with, and you had to remember to disable it in the event handler, so it didn’t run multiple times. You also could have used a TThread, which may have been a better solution, but still seemed kind of messy, especially if you wanted to update the UI from your code.
Thanks to the new System.Threading library introduced with XE7, I’ve created a simple procedure that makes this a breeze to do. I call the procedure NonBlocking, but you could just as easily call it RunALittleLater, RunOutsideHandler, etc.
uses System.Threading;
procedure NonBlocking(const Proc: TThreadProcedure);
begin
TTask.Create(procedure begin
TThread.Queue(nil, Proc);
end).Start;
end;
All this does is create a task, and then inside the task queue an update back to the main thread to execute the code that is passed to this procedure as an anonymous method. You could easily just write this code inline, but I thought it worthwhile creating a procedure to handle it for me.
Lets look at a normal execution scenario:
//...
ListBox1.Items.Add('Before Handler');
EventHandler;
ListBox1.Items.Add('After Handler');
//....
procedure TForm1.EventHandler;
begin
ListBox1.Items.Add('Inside Handler');
end;
When this is run, our ListBox1 will look like
which is what we would expect. Now when we introduce a call to our new procedure in the EventHandler:
//...
ListBox1.Items.Add('Before Handler');
EventHandler;
ListBox1.Items.Add('After Handler');
//....
procedure TForm1.EventHandler;
begin
ListBox1.Items.Add('Inside Handler 1');
NonBlocking(procedure begin
ListBox1.Items.Add('Outside Handler'); // This will run last
end);
ListBox1.Items.Add('Inside Handler 2');
end;
Our ListBox1 will look like
Notice that Outside Handler was the very last line added, even though it is written between Inside Handler 1 and Inside Handler 2. It even occurs after the After Handler line. Also, this works across all platforms: iOS, Android, Windows and OS X.
Everything before and within the call to NonBlocking will execute in order, but the code within NonBlocking will execute after the code that comes after that anonymous method.
If you have a ShowMessage or something else that blocks the UI thread in the event handler, then the code you passed to the NonBlocking procedure will be executed early, which is fine since the UI thread was already blocked.
The Twitter #Code2014 ranking have become a bit of a tradition. At the end of the year everyone votes for the programming languages they used, or were their favorite for the year. Then they all get tabulated up to see how they rank. Once again Delphi did quite well, coming it at #9, just ahead of other mainstream languages like C and C++ as well as niche languages like Objective-C and Swift (developing for only one platform is so 2013). It was neck and neck with C#, ending with only 11 votes different.
There are actually still people voting, but the deadline was Friday, so the votes don’t count. I still appreciate the enthusiasm. Watching Delphi climb the charts was a real treat, and shows two things:
I believe this second point to be the most important one. The community really came together to vote for Delphi and move it up the rankings. Makes me happy to be part of such an amazing community.
| # | Language | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | javascript | 2414 |
| 2 | python | 1355 |
| 3 | java | 1317 |
| 4 | ruby | 1044 |
| 5 | sql | 936 |
| 6 | php | 882 |
| 7 | bash | 871 |
| 8 | c# | 814 |
| 9 | delphi | 803 |
| 10 | c | 692 |
| 11 | c++ | 598 |
| 12 | go | 566 |
| 13 | clojure | 504 |
| 14 | haskell | 452 |
| 15 | scala | 449 |
| 16 | objective-c | 375 |
| 17 | swift | 343 |
| 18 | livecode | 280 |
| 19 | coffeescript | 262 |
| 20 | f# | 246 |
Looking at the top languages, they mostly have a web development theme. I’ve heard before that Twitter seems to have a web development bias, and this seems to reinforce that. Also since you are allowed to vote for more than one language we see SQL with a very high ranking, even though I imagine it had very few votes just for it (I may be wrong, but it seems like the kind of language you use with a general purpose language).
If you code in Delphi, then be sure to Tweet Delphi #Code2014 to have your vote counted. I’ve made it really easy for you, if you just log into Twitter and click the link you cast your vote. You can see the rankings on Code2014.com or just check the list of all the tweets for Delphi.
Vote, and tell your friends to vote. They filter to one per Twitter account.
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Last year was my first visit to the Embarcadero Conference in São Paulo, Brazil and I loved it. So I am going back again this year. As an added treat I’m be joining Marco Canto, the Delphi product manager. We both speak together on Delphi Present and Future, then Marco does The Fun Side of Delphi and later I’ll cover Internet of Things, Bluetooth and AppTethering when I will also show some Delphi powered Brain-Computer Interface demos and a lucky volunteer will fly a quadricopter with their thoughts.
The Embarcadero Conference in Brazil is huge with a lot of great sessions. I always consider it a treat when I get to see Marco’s Fun Side of Delphi presentation. I wonder if he will show off the Elf & Wizard classes that are new in XE7?
I really like my Moto 360 watch. It looks fabulous, and does great as an extension of my Android phone, but of course the most important question is how to make an app for it. Turns out it just works with RAD Studio X7, Delphi or C++. Thanks to the new FireUI Multi-Device designer I can actually create a custom view in the UI to make designing the perfect user interface a breeze. Here are some of the details of what I discovered along the way, followed by a download of my sample and the custom view.
The bottom line is it just works, which really isn’t a surprise. Most new Android devices use ARMv7 and the NEON instruction set. (NEON is kind of like the MMX standard on the Intel platform. At first not everyone used those instructions, but once they caught on, everyone did.) So it is no surprise that the Moto 360 does too. Unlike some of the other watches, the Moto 360 does not have a micro USB port. So you have to use ADB over BlueTooth. This requires a few extra steps to setup, and is really slow to deploy over. So slow I canceled the first two deployments because I thought I set something up wrong.
First of all, the Moto 360 display is not perfectly round. It has a flat area on the bottom. If you look closely you can see the light sensor there. Not sure if that was why it wasn’t round, or if there was another design reason. In any case, the screen resolution is 320 x 290 pixels at 213 Pixels Per Inch. This means at design time you have a usable area of 240 x 218 pixels. This is the information we need to create a custom view. Just put the following code in a package.
TDeviceinfo.AddDevice(TDeviceinfo.TDeviceClass.Tablet, ViewName,
// The Moto360 is 320x290 phyiscal and 240x218 logical with 213 PPI
TSize.Create(320, 290), TSize.Create(240, 218),
TOSVersion.TPlatform.pfAndroid, 213,
True); // Exclusive
The Device class enumeration actually has a Watch class, but looking in the code that detects the class at runtime and it doesn’t know how to detect a watch yet. So it defaults to Tablet. It makes sense if you think about the fact that XE7 was released before the Moto 360. I imagine an update will address this.
The requirement to get the custom view to show up in the IDE is you need to update the XML file found at %AppData%\Roaming\Embarcadero\BDS\15.0\MobileDevices.xml to reference the new view. Inside the MobileDevices element, add the following:
<MobileDevice>
<Displayname>Moto360</Displayname>
<Name>Moto360</Name>
<DevicePlatform>3</DevicePlatform>
<FormFactor>2</FormFactor>
<Portrait Enabled="True" Width="240" Height="218" Top="102" Left="29" StatusbarHeight="0" StatusBarPos="0" Artwork="C:\Users\jim\Documents\Embarcadero\Studio\Projects\HelloMoto360\Moto360.png" />
<UpsideDown Enabled="False" Width="240" Height="218" Top="0" Left="0" StatusbarHeight="0" StatusBarPos="0" Artwork="" />
<LandscapeLeft Enabled="False" Width="240" Height="218" Top="0" Left="0" StatusbarHeight="0" StatusBarPos="0" Artwork="" />
<LandscapeRight Enabled="False" Width="240" Height="218" Top="0" Left="0" StatusbarHeight="0" StatusBarPos="0" Artwork="" />
</MobileDevice>
You’ll need to update the path to that Artwork to point to the correct location of the PNG on your system. Or you can just leave it blank. Here is what it all looks like when setup in the IDE.
You’ll notice a red circle on the design surface. I added this to see where the corners are (since the display is round). At runtime you can just barely see the red if you hold the watch right. In production I’d hide this at runtime. I placed the TCircle at -1, -1 and set the size to 242 x 242. This way the circle follows the bezel and not the display area of the screen. I suppose if I bumped it out another pixel it would disappear completely at runtime.
To get the Moto 360 to show up as a target device you first need to enable Bluetooth debugging.
Then you connect your phone that is connected to the Moto 360 via USB and run the following commands (assuming ADB is on your system path) to connect via Bluetooth. I made a batch file.
@echo off REM optional cleaning up adb disconnect localhost:4444 adb -d forward --remove-all REM this is the connection adb -d forward tcp:4444 localabstract:/adb-hub adb -d connect localhost:4444 REM these lines are to see if it worked echo Here is the forwarded ports . . . . adb forward --list echo. echo Wait a second for it to connect . . . . pause adb devices
The ADB Devices list should show something like
List of devices attached 123456abcd device localhost:4444 device
Now the Android Wear app on your phone should show
Be sure that your Moto 360 app uses the unit that defines the Moto 360 device (from your package). This way your app can select it at runtime. If you do all that, you’ll see something similar to this with it running on the Moto 360:
My camera had a hard time focusing on it, but rest assured it looks fabulous! I tried C++ too, and no surprises, it works as well. More experimenting to do, but it is nice to know I have a tool that will take me everywhere I want to go.
If you don’t have a Moto 360, you can setup an Android emulator (AVD) instead. I did that before mine showed up. You need to download the Android 4.4W (API20) SDK Platform and ARM System image.
Then create an AVD with the new Emulator.
It actually gives you the rectangle screen with a round bezel. Also it is 320 x 320 (so completely round) and 240 PPI. This means the view I created (since it was exclusive) won’t work on the emulator. You’ll need to create a new custom view for the emulator, but I’ll leave that up to to.
you can download all of my code for the custom view, Bluetooth ADB batch file, and sample apps from Github. (Update: Added a view for Galaxy Gear Live & LG-G) BTW, XE7 adds local Git support, which is another great new feature. Download the trial and check it out.
Here are the slides and downloads from my mobile summer school session on REST & BAAS. If you just want the slides they are on Slide Share. I’ll post the video and more details here later.
For more information on BaaS, check out Sarina’s excellent series of blog posts.
I substituted for David I. yesterday for Developer Direct Mobile Summer School on Lesson 5: Connecting Mobile and Desktop together using App Tethering. The Summer School landing page and David’s blog maintain a list of downloads for all the previous lessons, but here are the resources from my session in the meantime.
I’ll post the replay videos here when they are available too.
You can download my slides and code samples from Code Central. I believe I fixed the issue where some people were not able to download it.
Here are the links to more information on App Tethering:
Here is the Developer Skill Sprint I did previously on App Tethering
And this is Al Mannarino’s C++ Mobile Day session on the topic
And some blog posts on the topic too:
There was some interest in the code sample that bypasses App Tethering’s autodiscovery to connect directly to a specific IP address. I’m working on getting that tested before posting it. Leave a comment if you are interest and I’ll see that you are notified when it is ready.
For my Developer Skill Sprint I was originally scheduled to show how to do a Google Glass Voice Trigger. That is pretty cool because it allows you to launch a Google Glass app with your voice, but I decided to expand on that to also show how the Google Glass app can be launched with the results of additional voice input, as well as how to take dictation and do text to speech everywhere else in Android.
I’ve still got a lot of work to do on the components, but they work as is for now. If you want to modify the component code then take a look at my Skill Sprint and blog post on the Android JNI Bridge.