So I've read more comments on my post

Seriously guys, I never even thought that anyone would read my blog. I assumed that I would just be one of the (probably) millions of boring blogs that no one reads because no one cares. If that ends up being the fate of mine, so be it, it's not a big deal to me. But apparently me posting that I didn't like Delphi was sort of scandalous or something. Perhaps it was the attention given to me by Marco Cantu? 

Overall, I'd have to say that the majority of comments are actually helpful. I'd say in my absolutely unscientific opinion, 15% of the comments are trolls, 75% point out where I was wrong, or how to solve my issues, and 10% actually agree with me (on various points). When the initial bashing began, I figured I'd get flamed even more, but surprisingly, the comments actually started to get more helpful as time went on. If anything gives me hope that I might enjoy using Delphi one day, that would be it.

I apparently annoyed some Delphi users

All I can say is wow! I left a comment responding on the original commenters blog, and I'll add that text below.

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

So lately I've been learning some delphi, and learning the one and only IDE that can run delphi, CodeGear RAD. In short, RAD today is just as good as Visual Studio was 5 years ago. Here's a list of my annoyances.

• 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".

Here's my overall feeling towards CodeGear RAD summed up into one pic.

Delicious Library

Just checked out Delicious Library 2.0, and it's surprisingly fun to manage my physical media in a GUI format.

Addendum to OSX apps I use

Adium: Tabbed chatting, custom backgrounds, what's not to love? Oooohhh that's right, ichat still holds the edge in tele/video conferencing, as well as screen sharing. For straight up text chatting however, Adium is the bees knees.

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.