Kalisty - [9:12 AM]

A friend has created a new web service for creating lists, Kalisty. This is something list/outliner freaks could be very interested in. It has a complete open API, very complete in fact.

This is one of those things Dave Winer would love. Lists and an API, what could be better.

Labels: Applications, Development

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Adobe Platform - [11:48 AM]

John Nack: "We want to make Photoshop and the whole Creative Suite much more flexible, extensible, and connected. Therefore, we're looking at letting upcoming versions of Photoshop and--as far as I know--all Creative Suite applications be extended via SWF panels (palettes) created in Adobe Flash or Flex." - This would be fun to be a part of. I love doing stuff that allows a product to be extended via third parties. It's fun.

Labels: Adobe, Cross Platform, Development

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iPhone experimentation continues - [9:12 AM]

I've been exploring the iPhone SDK lately, it's been fun. I've finally figured some stuff out so it's really starting to get exciting. My "big" hurdle had been understanding how to take advantage of Interface Builder. I finally figured out how to hookup events now that seems pretty obvious, I knew that would happen, light bulb on, bing!

Here's a question for any Mac developers. Do people actually use the Interface Builder to design visually and hookup events, or do they draw the interface and hookup events in code, or do they build the UI all in code? I know, it's a strange question, and I'm sure I'll get a strange mix of answers, if any at all, but I had to ask. I'd love for Daniel Jalkut, or Brent Simmons to chime in.

Doing Windows C/C++ stuff for years had led to a certain expectation with Mac tools. In Windows I only used the graphical tools to create dialogs (at Visio we didn't even do that), then I'd go hook up event handlers in code. It was very straight forward and after using Interface Builder once I can see how easy it would be to hookup events in code instead of letting Interface Builder generate code for me.

I was very happy to discover a hunk of old C++ code compiled and worked like a charm when mixed with Objective-C. It was a pharmacokinetics library my brother and I created a long time back, and it just built and worked. That is a HUGE leg up for me. I can use my bad habit of writing C++ and slowly move into Objective-C. Very nice.

Next hurdle, gaining a better understanding of Objective-C.

It sure would be nice to build a Cocoa version of the Endura WS5000 software, hint, hint.

Labels: Apple, C++, Cocoa, Development, iPhone, Mac, Objective-C

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Refurb iPhones? - [4:36 PM]

The Unofficial Apple Weblog: "I bought one of these up last time round. This time, you can pick up a 16 GB iPhone for just $349 or an 8GB for only $249. Free shipping and a full one year warranty" - This is a nice way to get a phone, not only for personal use, but for development purposes! Don't want to brick your main phone, do you?

Labels: Apple, Development, iPhone

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No, no, no, not like that! - [4:13 PM]

Macworld: "Sure, why not? Open iCal to the month you want and then press Shift-Command-4, press the Space Bar, and then click on the calendar. The Mac will take a shot of the calendar in .png format. If that’s not compatible with the digital picture frame, open the image in Preview, choose Save As, and in the sheet that appears, choose a format such as JPEG that makes your picture frame happy. Once you’ve done that, it’s simply a matter of placing the image in the frame, using whatever transfer scheme the frame supports." - I want the real thing, with a touch screen, that can display an interactive calendar. One that will allow me to add and remove things, and then, synchronize with my Google Calendar, and with my Mac.

That would be pretty sweet.

Labels: Cross Platform, Development, Dreaming

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New C++ performance weblog - [6:48 AM]

Chris Cox [via John Nack]: "A few weeks ago, I sent the initial release out to select compiler vendors for review. I received responses from 3 of the major compiler vendors, and 2 compiler teams have already found and fixed a couple of bugs based on my code (Yea!)." - Nice new find, thanks John. Subscribed.

Labels: Algorithms, C++, Development

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I really, really, want to go to this - [9:48 AM]

Apple.com: "The groundbreaking innovations of Mac OS X Leopard and iPhone OS offer two revolutionary development platforms for developers and IT professionals. The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is the only place you can receive technical information on these sophisticated platforms from the engineers who created them. Bring your code to the labs and work one-to-one with Apple engineers, applying development methods and best-practices you gain from sessions to enhance your application."

Labels: Apple, Cocoa, Development, iPhone, Mac, Objective-C

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Learning Objective-C - [5:25 PM]

Cocoa Dev Central: "Objective-C is the primary language used to write Mac software. If you're comfortable with basic object-oriented concepts and the C language, Objective-C will make a lot of sense. If you don't know C, you should read the C Tutorial first." - Very nice, easy to follow, tutorial for the beginning Objective-C developer, like your truly.

Labels: Development, Mac, Objective-C

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Yes, that stuff is fun IMHO - [12:27 PM]

Jason Bock: "There will be a nice .NET API I'm going to make around this with unit tests so the rest of my code doesn't have to deal with monstrosity." - I'm kind of weird like that. Integration projects are fun to me. I had the opportunity a few years back to write a .NET assembly on top of a component for collecting PLC data. It was extremely fun and I was able to use it on a few different projects.

Labels: .NET, Development

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Getting Started with Ruby on Rails - [10:13 PM]

A List Apart: "ou’ve probably heard about Ruby on Rails by now. Your developer friends are raving about it—talking about how they wrote an application in less than half the time it would have taken using some other technology—how they really enjoyed themselves instead of stressing out, and then spent their extra time on the beach. Rails sure does sound like a pretty compelling technology. But what is it, and how does it fit into the big picture of web development?"

Labels: Development, Ruby

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Yes, it's that important - [5:44 PM]

Gizmodo: "The meeting ended with Jobs and Razlaff, now a creative at Frog Design, figuring out how to fix the UI issues, and Jobs asked for the mockups to be made into prototypes. Three weeks later Jobs dropped a compliment on the man." - I've run into folks that don't understand how important the User Interface really is, yes, they actually do exist. The User Interface is the User Experience is the Application. Yeah, you can have really cool algorithms under the hood but if the UI to those algorithms stinks the user won't use the application. Folks will actually live with speed issues as long as their work life is improved.

Labels: Apple, Development, Mac

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Idea for Visio - [10:49 PM]

Ok, it's a strange idea, but what do you expect for free? Who knows, maybe you can already do this, and I'm just so out of touch with Windows development, and Visio, I've missed it?

Anywho, here goes...

Wouldn't it be nice as a Visio developer to be able to perform queries against a drawing, page, or shape?

Visio.Shapes shapes = from Shape s in Page where s.Height = "1.75in." select s;

... Or something like that.

Labels: Development, Microsoft, Visio

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Mixing Objective-C and C++ - [9:19 AM]

A couple of weeks back I linked to John Nack's discussion of the 64-bit port of Photoshop, it's not a trivial task, but I'd forgotten you can mix C++ and Objective-C. This will make it easier for the Adobe crew to port Photoshop, but it's still going to be one heckuva chore!

Here's a VERY simple example. The Objective-C file, main in this case, is using the C++ class named CPPClass. Please note I had to rename the main.m file to main.mm so the compiler would treat it properly. I've also heard you can name the file '.M', or find a specific compiler setting that'll do the same trick for you. I don't know what that setting is, sorry.

Anywho, here's the simple sample.

#import 
#import "cppclass.h"

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    CPPClass* c = new CPPClass();
    c->Method1(99);
    c->Method2("Rob was here");
    delete c;
    
    return NSApplicationMain(argc,  (const char **) argv);
}

Labels: Adobe, Apple, Development, Mac, Objective-C

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Interviewing @ Google - [11:05 AM]

Steve Yegge: "I've been meaning to write up some tips on interviewing at Google for a good long time now. I keep putting it off, though, because it's going to make you mad. Probably. For some statistical definition of "you", it's very likely to upset you." - This doesn't only apply to Google. When you come for an interview at Pelco you're going to get hit with all kinds of questions; algorithms, code, games. Be prepared. Steve's post is a great starting point for any tech interview.

Labels: Algorithms, Development, Tools

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Drawing Glass in Visio - [8:39 AM]

Visio Guy: "Now, maybe you’re thinking; Visio is not Adobe Illustrator, and Visio diagrams are supposed to be simple, boring, and utilitarian. A quick glance at this site might bring you to question that notion.

But don’t just take our word for it…" - Chris Roth is a Visio Master, without a doubt the best Visio Shapes Developer in the world. He continually proves you can do amazing things with a product intended for mere mortals.

Labels: Development, Visio

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Visual Studio Debugging Tip - [8:10 AM]

Sara Ford: "if you double-click on any error or warning in the output window, you will jump directly to that location in the file (or the closest equivalent)" - Good tip. If you're interested in taking advantage of this sort of functionality in your own code, it's very easy.

Please note, the code below is very simplified, and for demonstration purposes only. You'd want to wrap this is a way that makes sense for your application. ATL and MFC provide this sort of stuff, but you can roll your own.

char buffer[MAX_PATH];
// Yes, I know this is an unsafe CRT call. :-)
sprintf(buffer, "%s(%d): Debug Message\n", __FILE__, __LINE__);
OutputDebugString(buffer);

So what does that do? It will dump something similar the following to the Output window...

c:\yoursource\yourfile.cpp(99): Debug Message

Now if you follow Sara's tip it will jump you right to the code that dumped out the message.

Labels: Development, Visual Studio, Windows

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Silverlight, IronRuby resources - [9:43 AM]

rubydoes.net: "There are other people that have blogged about silverlight and IronRuby before, it might be a good idea to check them out as well." - Tagged for later.

Labels: .NET, Development, Python, Ruby

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What the heck is a Vorby? - [9:24 AM]

Vorby is a Google AppEngine Movie Quote site! How cool is that? Now I can link to it for Movie Line of the Week answers and you can hear the spoken word.

Very nice!

Labels: Development, Python

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Michael Geary on his Google Talk - [8:47 AM]

Michael Geary: "I want to thank everyone who came to my Mapping the Votes talk at Google last night. I hope it was worth your while. The talk will be on YouTube soon, and I will follow up with several articles with more details on the topics I talked about." - This would've been great to attend! That, quite frankly, is one of the bummers about living in The San Joaquin Valley instead of The Silicon Valley. I miss great stuff like this. Oh well, at least we get the benefit of this great post and the coming YouTube video!

Thanks Michael.

Labels: Development, Open Source

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64-bit Photoshop - [10:48 AM]

John Nack: "At the WWDC show last June, however, Adobe & other developers learned that Apple had decided to stop their Carbon 64 efforts. This means that 64-bit Mac apps need to be written to use Cocoa (as Lightroom is) instead of Carbon. This means that we'll need to rewrite large parts of Photoshop and its plug-ins (potentially affecting over a million lines of code) to move it from Carbon to Cocoa." - This is a mammoth undertaking, and quite frankly, I'm not so sure it'll be worth it in the end. It's very rare for a team to sit down, rewrite a gigantor application, and succeed. Why? Think about it for a few minutes. You have a VERY successful product, millions of users worldwide. Those users expect a certain amount of continued support for the product, meaning new features, bug-fixes, etc... So, how do you split your team to deal with that effectively? Now, Adobe may already do that to a certain degree. Two teams, one working on this release, one already exploring and working on the next, then they switch positions, but what about the talk of going from being a Carbon application to a Cocoa application? These are different frameworks, written in two completely different languages. Adobe has a couple of choices here, as I see it, and probable a few I haven't considered. One, they can essentially write their own version of Carbon accounting for just the Carbon features they need, two, they can keep a portable core and write a new Cocoa front end around it. Either way, it's going to be a ton of work. The selfish, techie, side of me says "Yeah, do it, it would be awesome to work on this sort of problem. Go for it!" The reasonable side of me says "Will you sell enough 64-bit native bits to justify the cost? In the end it'll be a business decision and someone will figure out the technical hurdles, that's the way things work in the engineering world. The Sales and Marketing types always ask "Can you do this?" The answer is "Of course we can silly Sales and Marketing people, how much time and money do you have?"

I'm a bit jealous. Whoever works on this is going to have a lot of fun.

UPDATE: John notes the whole Cocoa vs. Carbon debate toward the bottom of the article. If Carbon is good enough for Apple to use in iTunes, it's good enough for anyone else, don't you think?

Labels: Adobe, Development, Mac

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Dang James! - [11:16 AM]

James A. Robertson: "Micro-benchmarks are pretty irrelevant, and you would think Sun's big honchos would know that. However, when you realize that J2EE is a huge pile of steaming manure weighing down the people unfortunate enough to be using it, I guess it makes sense to shout 'but our arithmetic is really fast!'." - I think that pretty much sums it up.

Labels: Development, Smalltalk

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This sounds like a fun project - [9:04 AM]

Nick Bradbury: "Among the most frequent requests we receive from FeedDemon customers is to enable using Mozilla/Firefox as the embedded browser, and this is something I would love to offer. Unfortunately, I don't see how this is possible." - This is one of those things I'd love to run off and do, but as usual, time is always a problem. I think I'd attempt to write an ActiveX control that implemented the IE interfaces, if at all possible, so you could use the same mechanism to load and use it.

Nick, here's an idea for you, just hire me, and I'll get it to work.

Labels: Development, Windows

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Red-Black Trees - [9:33 AM]

Julian Bucknall: "After my few recent rants, I need to cleanse myself with some hardcore algorithms and data structures. That's what you're here for, right?" - These are the kinds of things I should be doing. If you need to wake up the algorithm side of your brain this should be a good starting point. I was just telling my wife the other day I don't geek out any more and go write code at the lower level. I've become a consumer of algorithms and data structures, not the implementer of them. I used to stay up 'til the wee hours of the morning working on stuff like this, now I've forgotten how to do it. I'm definitely getting old.

Labels: Algorithms, Development

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I started that in 2001? - [9:14 AM]

I've always wanted to work for a company like Pixar or ILM. It dates back to 1977 when I saw Star Wars and wanted to do special effects. Back in 2001 I started playing around with The RenderMan Interface Specification, but didn't get too far along because of my day job and life in general.

I only mention it because I've been going through some old CD's and I ran across a project I started to implement The RenderMan Interface.

It's kind of sad how many things have caught my attention over the years and I can never find the time to dig into them.

Labels: Development, Dreaming

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Why Web Apps Suck - [4:17 PM]

Jackson Fish Market: "Here at Jackson Fish we’re not big on technical religion. We’ll use whatever works best for the experience we’re trying to build. The true state-of-the-art app platform doesn’t exist yet. But its definition is not about a particular set of technologies, it’s about a set of characteristics and behaviors." - Note to self, read this.

Labels: Development

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Programmers Editors - [1:05 PM]

I've been thinking about the Emacs.Net story that surfaced a few weeks back. It's beginning to make more and more sense. In the past I've used Crimson to do quick edits on everything from HTML to batch files so the idea of a quick, lightweight, editor you can hop in and out of makes complete sense.

My hope for Emacs.Net is we'll get a lightweight core editor that is highly extensible, the idea of incorporating the Monad shell is nice. Emacs and Vi fit those requirements. On the PC we had a great editor at the end of the 80's called Brief from UnderWare, yes that was the name of the company. It was an all text mode editor that allowed you to load multiple buffers, split windows in multiple different directions, and was extensible in a Lisp like and later a C like language. It was, for lack of a better term, the cats meow and I used it long into my Windows development career.

On the Mac I've been using Smultron and TextMate, both very good editors, super clean, quick to load, and easy to use. On Windows I've discovered Intype and e, both seem to be efforts to produce a small, quick, easy to use Windows editors.

Emacs.Net should be an interesting product, hopefully it'll deliver a great experience to the end-user. Somehow, I think it will.

Labels: Development, Tools

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Dynamic C# - [2:20 PM]

Charlie Calvert: "All the code that occurs in a dynamic block will potentially support dynamic lookup; even if the accessed members are not known by the C# compiler to exist, it will allow the code." - Does C# have to become a kitchen sink language? Why not let IronRuby and IronPython become the leaders in this regard and keep C# as clean as possible? One of the arguments presented for the inclusion of dynamic support is that PIA's can be expensive. If someone needs to use a COM component generate an assembly in a language that supports dynamic lookup and use that.

C# doesn't need to be all things to all people.

Labels: .NET, Development, Microsoft, Visual Studio

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On Patterns - [10:15 AM]

John Gossman: "I love the article, but must add I have always struggled with RoutedCommands and CommandBindings. I think the APIs are too complex for what they do, but more importantly I prefer to route commands through my application model, not through WPF's element tree." - Patterns are meant to be used as templates, or here's an example of how do to something. In reality, in the production world, I've found you start off with a pattern only to expand or tweak it to what works for your system.

Labels: .NET, Development

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Coda, never heard of it? - [10:45 AM]

Coda: "text editor + transmit + css editor + terminal + books + more = whoah. introducing coda. grow beautiful code." - This looks like a very spiffy web development tool. One for future consideration.

Labels: Development, Mac, Tools

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Proof of concept - [10:37 AM]

Tom Distler: "The videos are displayed using WPF MediaElement objects, and passing in a URL with our custom protocol type and the id of the camera to connect to. The great thing about WPF is that we get all the scaling, reflection, and overlays you see above for free. Another one of our UI guys (Nick) did a demo with live video playing on a 3D cube that can be rotated by the mouse. I will post a screen shot when I get one." - Yes, this week-and-a-half proof of concept was a great deal of fun. Now we need to get the go ahead to do it for real. I must say Tom's DirectShow knowledge has been a breath of fresh air, he's a great addition to the Endura team.

Nick, Brent, and Abe; thanks for creating some compelling demos. A picture is worth a thousand words. The demos are a heck of a lot better than Tom and I showing people a fully constructed graph in GraphEdit that would display grey video.

Labels: .NET, Development, DirectShow, Windows, WPF

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YUV to RGB and back - [8:39 AM]

FourCC.Org: "There are two specifications, CCIR 656 and CCIR 601 which define standards for component video, and I'm sure other pages on your site refer to them. In any case, CCIR 601 defines the relationship between YCrCb and RGB values:"

Labels: Color, Cross Platform, Development, Graphics

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DirectShow - [11:39 AM]

Mike Wasson: "Incidentally, IAsyncReader is not a very good interface for network streaming, because it assumes you can seek arbitrarily within the stream. For network streaming, it is better to use a push model. If you control both the network protocol and the stream format, you can combine these into a single source filter that does both the network IO and the stream parsing." - A couple of us have been messing with DirectShow filters lately, this post may prove most handy. Thanks Mike.

Labels: Development, DirectShow

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Chandler? - [11:30 AM]

For some strange reason I started thinking about the Chandler Project this week and then I discover it's in a bit of trouble. That's too bad. Some folks are blaming it on Python? That's weird. I don't really think the choice of language would be a factor. I'd tend to agree with James Robertson, it comes down to Management allowing it to get out of control. You have to ship product, and I don't mean ship something riddled with bugs. I mean you have to sometimes pull back on your desired feature set and put that on the list for the next go 'round.

Ned Batchelder: "This is too bad, it was an ambitious and idealistic project, perhaps too much so. I don't really know what was going on over there."

Labels: Development, Python

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New Mac Indy Developers - [11:26 AM]

Daniel Jalkut: "Something is changing. In the past few years, more and more of my developer friends have started talking about “going indie.” That is, going out on their own to develop, market, support, and profit from their own software. Many years ago, while I was working at Apple, the notion of striking out on one’s own was not even on the table for most developers I knew." - Expect to see more great Mac software on the horizon. I'm green with envy.

Labels: Development, Mac

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More on Emacs.Net - [4:46 PM]

Very cool, my post the other day lead to a great comment and a link to more talk on Emacs.Net.

Here's a great article on Dataland, the gentleman that left the great comment with a link, and an article on ZDNet by Mary Jo Foley [via Dataland.]

I've been using Microsoft based editors and debuggers for many, many, years. Can you say PWB? If you know what PWB is you're old. I remember the transition from PWB to Visual Studio 1.0. I was pleased to have a GUI based IDE but bummed because it was missing features I had with the console version of the tools. Since then I've been very happy with each release until Visual Studio 2k3 and 2k5, they're really great if you're doing C# or VB.Net, or the like, but for the C++ developer they're a bit slow at times. Don't get me wrong, even with the slowness having a great IDE blows the doors off any Linux solution I've used to date. And yes I mean C/C++ IDE's because it's what I do each and every day.

As for having an Emacs.Net based editor. Ok, I guess. I can't foresee using it because I don't use emacs and don't have a use for it. It's old and arcane, but old developers get used to certain toolsets, and I can't blame them for the desire to create something they'll live in each and every day, but don't expect it to be overly successful, especially if you charge for it. On Linux I'm part of a newer crowd using KDevelop and I like it. Then again, who knows, they may create something so compelling I won't be able to resist it! If it is an IDE I be more apt to use it, I like having an integrated debugger.

Oh, yeah, one other thing. I don't think Visual Studio is built as a .NET program. I think it uses .NET components but I'd be shocked if it were 100%, or even 50%, .NET. Microsoft doesn't like to throw out codebases.

One more thing. I worked with a fella that went to work for the Visual Studio team at one point and hated it. It was so focused on adding features for .Net developers and fit made him sick. The money was coming in from C++ and Visual Basic Classic and they were spending tons of time writing code for the C# developer.

Labels: Development, Microsoft, Tools

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Emacs.Net? - [4:13 PM]

DouglasP: "We are looking for developers/testers to build a tool that I will roughly describe as 'Emacs.Net'." - Who care to work on Emacs? If you want people to come to work for you sell them on something new Douglas. Not rehashing the past, the ancient past to be a bit more accurate. Move on folks, we need the next big thing and something you compare to Emacs certainly doesn't sound very exciting.

Now, it could be I've misunderstood the "Emacs.Net" label, maybe it's meant to say "We're working on something that will do for computing today what Emacs did in 1976." I dunno, your guess is as good as mine.

Labels: Development, Microsoft

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There's plenty of room Nick - [5:20 PM]

Nick Bradbury: "Oh, and I've been infected, too: I'm seriously thinking about buying a Mac Pro after FeedDemon 2.6 is released. Whether I'll develop anything for the Mac remains to be seen, but I have to admit I'd like to escape the DLL and device driver hell of Windows for a while." - I've been a Windows developer since 1992, I've been doing Linux stuff since 2005, and I'd love nothing more than to develop Mac software. Windows is nice, Linux is arcane, but the Mac is over the top elegant. I only wish I could find myself a nice little niche to fill with a Mac client application. That said, come on in Nick, the water's fine!

Maybe someday, when I grow up, I'll be a Mac developer.

Labels: Development, Mac

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Sax on Ruby - [9:42 AM]

Mike Sax: "For the last two years or so I have really enjoyed Ruby. So much, in fact, that I may have become a Ruby-snob." - It would seem a lot of old curly bracers are beginning to embrace Ruby, and why not. In our ever evolving world of computing the net is where it's at, much to my own chagrin. Ruby seems a perfect fit for the server, even with its' reported performance issues.

Labels: Development, Ruby

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I'm now old school - [10:41 AM]

I've been very busy at work lately, doing something I like to do, writing code. For the past year I've been an "acting" Product Engineer, think Program Manager, which limited my coding to after 5PM. Since the acquisition we've been doing some work with a small group that now reports to Pelco. We're trying to get their system capable of displaying Endura video.

Yesterday we were working with one of their video guys discussing how the component we're giving them would be used.

Here's how the conversation went, the kid(him), old guy(me)...

the kid) What's your gmail account name, so we can chat.
old guy) I don't use an IM client, I find them distracting.
the kid) (Laughing) Oh, you're old school, you'd rather talk face to face.
old guy) Uhhh, yeah, I guess, if that's what you call old school.

I never thought of myself as an old guy. Guess I've finally become one of those old curmudgeons I used to make fun of.

I don't really care. I'm having the most fun I've had since my days at Visio.

Labels: Development, Pelco

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Hog Bay - [11:16 AM]

Jesse Grosjean: "That reaction is certainly not representative, in fact it's the only such comment that I've seen. But in the interest of full discloser, and because I think it might be fun for some people to read, I've decided to fully document everything that I can remember about TaskPaper's launch, and tell you what I think helped make it a success." - An Indy Mac developer talks his latest creation, TaskPaper.

Labels: Apple, Development, Mac

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SQL Express Life Saver - [2:33 PM]

Note to self: osql is a life saver.

osql -E -S MACHINENAME\SQLEXPRESS
1> EXEC sp_grantlogin 'MACHINENAME\ACCOUNT'
2> GO
1> USE databasename
2> GO
1> EXEC sp_grantdbaccess 'MACHINENAME\ACCOUNT'
2> GO
1> exit

Helpful links:

ASP.Net Forums
MSDN Forums
Microsoft TechNet

These three links just saved me!

Labels: Development, Microsoft, SQL, Visual Studio, Windows

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Upgrade woes in Delphi-land - [10:01 AM]

Cass McNutt: "YES, these are definitely my biggest concerns -- the showstoppers that killed my BDS 2006 upgrade attempt, and still currently prevent me from buying Delphi 2007 for Win32." - I find these types of conversations very valid, but strange at the same time. It would seem Delphi's biggest strength is also it's biggest weakness. Third-party components and libraries are the thing holding Cass up. I say stop using all those third party controls if you cannot rely on them to be upgraded for the next rev of Delphi. I'm sure the CodeGear guys get betas out to the third-party guys making these components so they should be able to upgrade their stuff.

Cass, if you want to have the ability to upgrade to the next release when it hits the streets you'll have to depend less on the third-party guys. I hate to say that but it seems to be true in your case. Find a Delphi third-party vendor that stays on top of their game and use only their stuff if you have to use a third-party solution at all.

On the flip side, how many products are you actually shipping and supporting? If it's mainly for your own use and the code continues to work you may not need to upgrade until forced to do so, meaning your copy of Delphi and the code created by it stop working.

You're not the first Delphi guy I've heard with this complaint. There's a company in Fresno still using Delphi 3, or something like that, and still actively maintaining and enhancing that product.

You've enjoyed the benefits of rapid application development, now you're facing the downside. Hang in there, the CodeGear guys are very good and will find a way to help you.

Labels: Development

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Ain't that the truth! - [9:54 AM]

The Joel on Software Discussion Group [via John Gossman]: "Well, the problem with hammers is that there are so many different kinds. Sledge hammers, claw hammers, ball-peen hammers. What if you bought one kind of hammer and then realized that you needed a different kind of hammer later? You'd have to buy a separate hammer for your next task. As it turns out, most people really want a single hammer that can handle all of the different kinds of hammering tasks you might encounter in your life." - I haven't been keeping up with John's weblog, shame on me. John is a fount of knowledge on all things, but for the last few years he's been living in WPF land. Anywho, the "discussion" he links to is oh so true and funny all at the same time. Sometimes all you need is a hammer to get the job done.

Labels: Development

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Visual Studio 2008 - [7:49 AM]

John Lam: "Well, lots of other folks beat me to the punch about the announcement, but I was busy installing the product yesterday :) It's a popular product *inside* the company as well, and it took about 5 hours to grab from our internal share ... You can grab trial copies from here, and you can download the free (Express) editions from here." - John also links to a poster for C# keybindings, some of us still use an old outdated language called C++, so here is the poster for C++ keybindings.

Labels: Development, Microsoft, Visual Studio

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Mac coding headstart - [7:13 AM]

Apple.com: "Complete with introductory video, lesson guide and sample code in an Xcode project, you'll learn to create new and compelling features in your application using the development languages, APIs and frameworks of Mac OS X Leopard."

Labels: Apple, Development, Mac

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VBA? - [4:08 PM]

Just out of curiosity, who is licensing VBA these days? Anyone?

As a long time Visio developer I loved VBA, yep I'm not afraid to say that. I think the Visio team did a top notch job integrating the environment into Visio as well as delivering a well planned and executed object model for use by third parties; thank you Tom Booster, Mike Frederick, and David Cole for all your hard work to bring scripting Visio to the masses.

Anywho, I'm still a fan of scripting inside applications. There are a lot of really nice things being done daily using VBA and there's a need for an environment that can live within your application. The VBA environment was second to none. I liked the editor and the debugger and the ability to open any type library and hook into other components is very useful.

The question is, are there better solutions available? I want something that gives me a full IDE; editor, debugger, and runtime all sucked into my application. Do others exist I should be investigating? They don't necessarily have to be targeted at the average Joe, maybe targeted at the "casual" developer. I'd like to have something that would allow, let's say, an integrator to customize my application via this built in scripting engine.

I know Lua is out there, but I don't think it has an IDE?
I know Python is a good option, again what about an IDE?
Last I checked Ruby wasn't so great a solution, maybe that changed, but what about an IDE?
There's been talk of being able to integrate Smalltalk with applications, but I don't know what the timeline is for that, or if it's truly going to happen.

Please, I know there are readers out there with great knowledge of scripting solutions. I'm looking for the next VBA like experience. Total integration of tools and runtime.

Thanks.

Labels: Development, Windows

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Big changes on the way? - [8:25 AM]

James Robertson: "The next release is scheduled for Q1 of 2008, so things should calm down by then - and the toolset will be incrementally better" - It sounds like the Cincom gang has some really nice surprises on the way, just in time for Christmas. Okay, so the developer builds will be available, but you get what I mean.

Labels: Development, Smalltalk

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DirectShow Weblog - [12:33 PM]

Mike Wasson writes about DirectShow and related technologies, nice source of information. Thanks Mike, subscribed.

Labels: Development, DirectShow, Windows

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Wanted DirectShow resources - [5:04 PM]

Yes, that's right. I'll take any tricks and tips I can find related to creating and inserting objects into DirectShow's filter graph.

Thanks.

Some for later...

DirectShow: CoreMedia Technology...

Windows Media Developer Center

Labels: Development, DirectShow, Windows

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Sanitizing CSS - [8:29 AM]

Nick Bradbury: "Earlier this week I wrote about sanitizing CSS, and I've been thinking about it a bit more. Like many RSS aggregators, for security and presentation reasons the current version of FeedDemon strips all inline styles before displaying a feed, and I thought this was the best approach."

Labels: CSS, Development, Weblogging

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Windows to Mac development - [3:13 PM]

Now I'm using a Macintosh I have a huge desire to write applications for it.

How do you get a C/C++, Win32, COM guy over to writing Objective-C for Cocoa? I may never find the time to do anything but it would be nice to have a set of references if I ever do.

Thank You.

Labels: Apple, Development, Mac, Tools

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How to create Apple Dashboard Widgets - [9:49 AM]

For future reference, Developing Dashboard Widgets.

Labels: Apple, Development, Mac

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Visio + Kuler == Coolness - [9:47 AM]

Saveen Reddy [via John Nack]: "This code just takes the highest rated Kuler colors and draws them in Visio." - Very cool. I'd talked about doing something like this as a widget to change colors in the Windowing environment, but the idea of doing something with Visio never crossed my mind. How weird is that? Nice job Saveen.

I can't tell by my brief look at the code but it would be nice to use it to take Kuler color palettes and create Visio themes (I think that's what they're called these days? There used to be a color schemes add-on that would apply color templates to the drawing. Unfortunately I haven't investigated Visio 2007.)

Labels: .NET, Development, Visio

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Tools for future use - [1:24 PM]

Note to self: Check out Apple's Localization Tools.

Labels: Development, Mac, Tools

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Windows on a Mac? - [9:52 AM]

James Robertson: "I'm using XP Pro on my MacBook (under parallels), but I might install Vista at some point" - I've been using a Mac for two weeks now, and I love it. While James is using Parallels I decided to use VMWare Fusion to create virtual machines for my development use. I have a complete installation of Windows XP with all my development tools, and a machine running Ubuntu with all my development tools. I'm very pleasantly surprised with the performance, it's very acceptable, and I'm sure I could make it a bit better once I learn how to really use Fusion.

Labels: Development, Mac, Tools