No one needs to read this site. Publishing this content is meant to force me to research new things, thus helping me to grow as a developer. If you think the things I post about are cool, then well... cool. If not, no big deal.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
So I've read more comments on my post
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
I apparently annoyed some Delphi users
Wow, I really seem to have struck a nerve eh? It doesn't really bother me if people read or don't read my blog. As some of the commenters have said, I have zero comments on anything, which is perfectly fine with me. On the flipside of this, this is the first time I have ever commented on anyone else's blog. *shrug* first time for everything I guess.
To those who have at least attempted to educate me, I thank you. I'll read the links you sent, hopefully that will mitigate some of my annoyances with Delphi.
To those who just called my post crap.... if expressing your e-rage helps you, do whatever you feel you need to do.
While it doesn't bother me if no one reads my blog, I *did* post it online where anyone can read it, so fair is fair, anyone should be able to comment on it. I originally had moderate comments on and I didn't get to them quickly - my apologies. If your comment isn't up there, that means I missed it, comment again and I'll catch it this time.
While I now understand that some of my post isn't true (from reading the comments), I stand by my assertion that Delphi is annoying. However, I will at least attempt to learn otherwise.
So my 4th point and my 5th point may be erroneous, but that still leaves many things to be annoyed about. And to the dude who said I was an MS fanboy, haha if you read one more post down you'd see that I'm a newly minted Apple fanboy. In any case, I don't mean to be abrasive, if that's the way it sounded.
My Annoyances with CodeGear RAD
- When you select a block of text, hitting the tab key actually replaces the text with a tab char INSTEAD of moving the selection one indentation level over. I mean come on. Visual Studio does it, I'm sure Eclipse does it, even Microsoft Word does it. Get with the times.
- Weird bug where RAD will crash. Upon restart, all of the frames that make up the MDI interface of RAD are all undocked and floating freely. Not a major thing, but annoying nonetheless.
- If you launch your application from within RAD, it must be managed within RAD. If you use the Windows Task Manager to change your applications status because let's say.... your app is stuck in an infinite loop and you need to close it down, RAD will crash.
- You have to pay 3rd parties for extra widgets. That makes absolutely no sense to me. Visual Studio and the Windows API provide me all the widgets I could want. I know that Delphi has access to all of the Windows API, but for some reason, Delphi developers like to make their own widgets and sell them to each other.
- There is no free version of CodeGear RAD. Visual Studio has several excellent free versions, and Eclipse is absolutely free as in beer. I would think that providing a free entry level IDE would be a good way to get new developers using Delphi, and would be a segue into purchasing a license for a higher version of RAD. But what do I know....
- You can only write Delphi code using RAD, which costs money to own. There is absolutely no way to write Delphi code for free. There are properties and objects that are COMPLETELY HIDDEN from the developer, and the only way to access them is through RAD's wysiwyg editor. Wait a minute you say... doesn't Visual Studio do the same thing? No. Anything you can do in Visual Studio's wysiwyg editor, you can do in code. As a matter of fact, ANYTHING that Visual Studio can do, you can do in code, which is what you expect from any language and platform. If you were so inclined, you could grab a free C# .NET compiler and use notepad to write code just fine. This is impossible in the Delphi world, you must purchase an expensive piece of software to write "Hello World".

Saturday, June 14, 2008
Delicious Library
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Addendum to OSX apps I use
Parallels: It's a toss up between Parellels and VMWare, both are good. I can run my bootcamp partition as a virtual machine from within OSX, which is nifty, and Coherence mode tries to make it appear that the Windows apps are running natively in OSX.
Google Notifier: I use gmail and google calendar to organize my life. I figure iCal and Mail.app have gotta be slick, but I can't think of a reason to force myself to use either. iCal+Mail has a smart text functionality, where it can parse your emails for contact info, dates, etc., and makes those actionable items. However, I can send an sms to my gmail account, and I can sms a new entry to my google calendar, which is extremely nifty. Perhaps with Apple's new mobileme service they might be comparable to Google Apps, but seeing as Google Apps is free..... I dunno. Google Apps still wins with me.
NTFS-3G: I WOULD be using this every day if I could get it to work properly. I'm not a *nix noob, I'm perfectly fine with manually mounting and unmounting volumes, but I think having my NTFS formatted drive mounted while I installed ntfs-3g is causing me to have problems. So it's either reinstall ntfs-3g, or reformat my external drive.