Category: News

There are a lot of interesting Delphi projects showing up on GitHub. GitHub offers a convenient Download ZIP function, not to mention a very easy to use Windows Desktop Client that has full support for managing local repositories, syncing them to GitHub and accessing GitHub projects via Cloning in Desktop.

Sometimes it is nice to just open the project in your IDE of choice directly from GitHub. Turns out this is just as easy as 1-2-3. Right above the Clone in Desktop and Download ZIP buttons there is a checkout URL with support for Subversion. Simple click Subversion, then click copy URL and your can then open the GitHub project directly from the Delphi or RAD Studio IDE.

This maintains the revision history locally so you can browse it from the history tab, but it doesn’t appear to allow checking changes back in.

You probably want to update the SVN client RAD Studio uses. This is easy enough too. Just download and install the Colab SVN 32-bit Windows client (don’t get 64-bit or Edge) and install it normally. Then edit your Registry and browse to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Embarcadero\BDS\14.0\Subversion” and add a string value named SvnDllDir. This value of SvnDllDir should be the path to your SVN client install. Something like “C:\Program Files (x86)\Subversion Client” (without the quotes).

If you don’t like the fact the Colab Subversion site requires a login, there are other sources for download the Subversion command-line client. Just be sure you get the 32-bit version since the IDE is 32-bit. You may have luck with with the command-line tools that come with TortoiseSVN, or I’ve tested it with the Command-line client from Assembla and found it worked fine.

Remember the demonstration I did showing how Delphi works great with Ouya? Well, there is a new set top box in town, the Amazon Fire TV. Just like the Ouya, it is a Android powered set top box. So, does it support everyone’s favorite Android development tool? Turns out it works great with Delphi XE6. It uses a wireless ADB connection, so you just need to follow their simple steps to Connect ADB and it shows up in the IDE as the Android device AFTB (not sure what that stands for). After that you can develop and deploy to it just like any other Android device.

When you run your app from the IDE it will popup and run on the Fire TV, but after you exit your app you won’t see it anymore. It appears Fire TV only displays apps that are loaded from their app store on the home screen. Not to worry, you can easily launch it from the Settings -> Applications screen. Simply select your app and choose Launch application.

By default your only input device is the Amazon Fire TV remote.

Simply handle the OnKeyUp event on your form and you will receive events with the key codes vkLeft, vkRight, vkUp, vkDown, vkMenu, vkHardwareBack, vkMediaPlayPause and a key value of 0 for the select, fast forward or rewind buttons. The Home and Voice Search buttons are always handled by the OS. If you choose to handle the vkHardwareBack then set the key value to 0 (or any other value) and the system will ignore it, otherwise your app will exit.

Fire TV also supports a gamepad as well as various other bluetooth input devices, like a bluetooth keyboard, which greatly expands the input options. You also could use App Tethering to tether a mobile or desktop/laptop app to your Fire TV app to provide input and display it on the big screen. Like an image receiver that receives pictures from your mobile device to display them to everyone in the room.

If you download the Fire TV SDK it exposes Game Controller and Notification classes. If there is interest I can post some Object Pascal wrappers for those later on.

The useful helper routines StringToJString and StrToNSStr (and other associated ones) moved between XE5 and XE6. In XE6 you can find them in the units Androidapi.Helpers and Macapi.Helpers respectively. But how to find other useful methods? I’ll tell you what I do: Use Windows Search.

You want to go to Indexing Options to set Windows Search up to be useful.

First select Modify and browse to the Source folder and add it to the list of indexed locations. I like to add the source folder as a favorite in Explorer too, to make it easier to get back there.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Embarcadero\Studio\14.0\source

Next click Advanced and go to the File Types tab and select .PAS file and any other file types you would like to have indexed, and change them to Index Properties and File Contents. It uses the plain text filter, which in my experience is good enough, and your only option (without installing a new one).

It takes a bit for the index to rebuild, but after that you can quickly search all of the XE6 source to find APIs, Helper Methods or any number of other useful code to aid in your development process. This is where that favorite to the source folder is helpful. Either search from the root of the source folder, or browse into a subfolder to only search specific source files.

There are other indexed searching utilities, and I’ve used many of them in the past. The advantage of Windows Search (probably it’s only advantage) is that it is built in and already running.

Do you know the song “Video Killed The Radio Star“? It seems like today it is “Twitter & G+ killed the blog post.” I thought I would summarize some of the recent news I’ve posted elsewhere.

• bit Time Lab has a video showing off their multi-touch bluetooth app that controls a very small mini-cooper. They developed the libraries for multi-touch support and bluetooth they used with Appmethod (Object Pascal). Very cool!
• Project Indy has an OpenSSL update for the Heartbleed vulnerability.
• InterBase uses OpenSSL, but was never vulnerable to Heartbleed.
• I’ll be at Delphi Developer Days in Chicago and D.C. and we will have free evening events there too. These are great events full of fabulous content (I’ve attended in the past). I highly recommend you check them out. I’ll be showing Delphi working with Google Glass, Brain-Computer Interface, FireDAC, REST, and anything else I can squeeze in.
• I’m also traveling to India and South Korea this month.
• I worked with Sarina on this Tutorial for accessing Parse.com from Appmethod Object Pascal with the REST components. Great technology.
• Eric compiled a partial list of over 100 Delphi apps in the Play Store.
• Eric Bonilha was featured in the Brazilian News for his work on a DigiFort app for Google Glass that stream live video to and from Google Glass. It is in Portuguese, but you can see some live demos of the app starting at just after 7 minutes in. All the software used to stream video and control cameras in that segment is written in Delphi by Eric and his team.
• Curious about what is coming in XE6? There is a RAD Studio XE6 Sneak Peak event taking place April 16th. It looks really exciting!
• I still get people asking about the new upgrade pricing. Check out the new License Recharge Program – if you own the latest version of Delphi, RAD Studio, or C++Builder then you qualify to save a lot of money when a new product is released.
• David Intersimone and myself are running regular Google Hangout On-Air events. These are informal technical events we share some of the things we’ve been working on recently. Make sure you join the Embarcadero Technologies G+ community so you can be involved in the next one. The first two were experiments, we plan to promote the future ones better (although they will probably remain experimental and informal).