Embarcadero has announced some great growth numbers of Delphi and C++Builder in 2011: 54% growth over 2010 in worldwide sales. Considering the 15% growth of previous years, it means the Delphi sales have double since Embarcadero took over the "CodeGear" business unit from Borland. I have to say that as a re-seller, I saw similar numbers, so this is not completely surprising.

In the press release there isn't much else in terms of numbers, only a general description of the relevance of the Mac and iOS ecosystem in companies. There is also a summary of the last quarter events, which saw over 10,000 registered attendees.

Well done Delphi (and Embarcadero): Once again, rumors of your death were greatly exaggerated. This sale numbers are a nice birthday present!

PS: Two more weeks of discounted registration for London and Amsterdam Delphi Developer Days 2012: Sign up now!

I've finally posted on my public Subversion repository devoted to Delphi REST clients two of my geo-coding and mapping demos, and particularly the Google Maps Delphi client.

The first is rather simple Geocoding applications, returning the latitude and longitude of a given city you enter or of all the cities in the classic customers.cds database. Code at http://code.marcocantu.com/p/delphirestclients/source/tree/HEAD/GeoLocation.

The second starts with the same data, but lays it out graphically on a map, as you can see below. It embeds the Geocoding code to create a list of cities and positions, but it also creates a fully working Google Map (not a static image) customized with the positions of the various customers in the database table. Since Google Maps is browser based, the Delphi application embeds a TWebBrowser, but rather than connecting to an external web server, it embeds one. The application is a Web client that uses itself as a server, passing a fixed HTML file and a dynamic XML file with the data taken from the DbGrid and its dynamic ClientDataSet.  

Both applications require to sign up on Google, create a developer id, and add it to an INI file named like the program itself in the user's home folder (or "AppData\Roaming"). 

The command for getting all of the REST clients is:

svn co -r HEAD http://code.marcocantu.com/svn/marcocantu/delphirestclients

Finally, this repository is open for contribution: if you have Delphi applications connecting to the web for getting data and that can be considered REST clients, you are more than willing to share the code over my repository, keeping full credit and copyrights (but making the code available for free, of course). Similarly, if you have any suggestion, correction, or improvement, feel free to comment on the code site, here on this blog, or send me an email. 

David I of Embarcadero is inviting everyone to celebrate Dellphi's 17th birtday on... Valentine Day, February the 14th:

Delphi v1.0 was launched at the Software Development Conference on February 14, 1995. Several thousand developers gave the team a standing ovation during the launch. 

I was there... and I'm certainly going to join the webinar (likely the first time slot) and celebrate. Will also blog, stay tuned.

Three cities in Northern Italy will see three Live Delphi events in 2 weeks including a session of mine on FireMonkey. For the Italian Delphi developers. or at least developers who speak Italian.

The event is organized by Embarcadero, with BitTime and Wintech Italia (my company). Main focus will be FireMonkey and DataSnap (with a session by Daniele Teti).  The same event will be held three times in three consecutive days (February 20th to 22nd) in Bologna, Padua, and Novara (halfway between Milan and Turin).

More information and registrations on http://forms.embarcadero.com/forms/EM12Q1ITRADXE2inActionevent.

I've been on a trip to the US last week, and quite busy, so I didn't post to the blog for quite long. Trying to catch up now, but first a short summary of the trip.

Last week I was for 5 days consulting in Birmingham, Alabama, at OneDomain. Very nice and successful company, fully focused on Delphi, and looking forward to migrate to XE2 and a DataSnap architecture. This was my second visit, since I had already been there a few years ago, and I really enjoyed it. Since I had to spend the Sunday in the US, I took the opportunity for a (free) stop over in New York (I thiink I'm getting quite good at buying flights, could set up a travel agency if things go wrong in software). As you can see from the images below, I had time for a short visit to Manhattan downtown, nice under an inch of snow. From left to right, "Construction at WTC", "Under Brooklyn Bridge", "Defenses at Wall Street", "Statue of Liberty from Battery Park". 

After that I flew to Atlanta, and from there I drove a nice car (thanks to another good offer) to Birmingham. Spent a full week training and consulting (see images below) in a great weather, and had a little time for shopping Lego for kids. From left to right: "Car in front of Office", "Training", "Training", "Food break", "Shopping for Lego".

Full set of pictures on Google+ at https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/109099686252303180605/albums/5703813642509841169.

PS. My next US trip will be for Delphi Developer Days 2012. Want to join our Delphi classes? Visit  http://www.delphideveloperdays.com/

Verity Stob has released on The Register Very a new amusing new piece on "The Sons of Kahn and the Pascal Spring", which has already been twittet and blogged, but it is worth noticing. 

In the first part, there is an interesting assessment of the failure and troubles of competing technologies (" Sharpers of Dotnet were also troubled, especially the cult of Silver Light" and "the Sharpers were laughing compared with the fate of the tribe of Flashinites"), as an explanation of the success of Delphi XE2 and the gang of "discotheque of Embarcadearohdearohdearyme" who "bought in stuff from Europe and Russia".

Interestingly enough, the last part is devoted to the fact the Delphi factions instead of rejoicing are fighting around the use of FreeAndNil... something I tried to avoid blogging about, but might not resist.

Great job, as usual, Verity:  "if this is the Second Coming, then it is not quite as I had imagined it."

Delphi Developer Days is the yearly conference/training class I organize with Cary Jensen in the USA and Europe. We are planning 2 US + 4 European stops (in 4 different countries) this year.

Very Early Bird

The very early bird signup for Delphi Developer Days 2012 (with 25% discount) expires on January 20th, for each and all of the dates (March through May). If you are interested in participating, book ASAP for the extra discount. Previous attendees will still get a good rate, but not the general public. Did I tell you this is one of the best (and most well attended) Delphi training events of the year? Details at  http://www.delphideveloperdays.com/ . 

Book Early, Might Get Full

Another reason for booking early (before or after this first deadline) is that some of the locations are filling up quite nicely, and might as well get full. If a location gets fully booked, you'll have to pick a different city and date. First come, first served, of course. Seems Rome is still quite empty, though.

Guest Speakers List

Finally, we do have a complete guest speakers list:

London, United Kingdom:  Stephen Ball, Embarcadero Technologies

Amsterdam, The Netherlands:  Bob Swart,  Bob Swart Training & Consultancy

DC/Baltimore area, USA:  Jim McKeeth,  RemObjects Software

Chicago, USA:  Ray Konopka,  Raize Software

Frankfurt, Germany:  Bruno Fierens TMS software

Rome, Italy:  Daniele Teti,  BitTime 

Of course, I'll take the advantage of this blog post to thank all of these Delphi experts, who've accepted our invitation. 

As I mentioned on twitter, I've been doubling as a travel agent, to get my various flights. Most are booked now, See you at Delphi Developer Days!

Was working on a Delphi server used to build a Facebook application, when I bumped into an odd Base64 decoding issue. If you look at the Facebook page documenting their Signed Request parameter, you can see it has a first part with an encoded signature (which I won't really mention here) plus some JSON data encoded in Base64. This looked trivial, but as I started using Indy's TIdDecoderMIME class, the result would be correct... but only at times. Other times, the final } of the JSON string was missing. Now, since there were three closing braces at the end of the specific error situation, I didn't spot the error immediately, the JSON string apparently looked good:

If you look at it carefully, you'll see that the third final brace is missing. So now I could figure out while the JSON parser was crashing badly on me (by they way, I'm using JSON SuperObject for this specific project, nice class). Back to the Facebook documentation. They did say "a base64url encoded JSON object", with a link to Wikipedia, but the link doesn't really explain much:

"modified Base64 for URL  variants exist, where the ' + ' and ' / ' characters of standard Base64 are respectively replaced by ' - ' and ' _ '," and " Some variants allow or require omitting the padding ' = ' signs "

Saying there are some variants of an algorithm is not really the best way of documenting it. Facebook doesn't really say which "variant" it is implementing, but, well, at least you can guess among a few options. Moreover, the demo simply calls a PHP function, base_url_decode, and doesn't offer much advice.

Initially I though of a problem with the Indy decoding, tried a couple of alternatives, went to nowhere. In fact Delphi has another SOAP-related Base64 decoded, who was doing the opposite, that is adding some garbage at the end of the string. Now that I knew where the issue was, it was easy to google "base64 decoding facebook" and find a nice blog post, http://qugstart.com/blog/ruby-and-rails/facebook-base64-url-decode-for-signed_request/. This is written in Ruby, but having a minimum of description, I could translate it over to Delphi in very little time (see image below for formatted version):

Update: as suggested in a comment below, this is not correct, as when there is one extra byte we need to add 3. However, in case of zero extra bytes, we shouldn't pad with 4, so evern the original Ruby code seems wrong. I've now fixed it with:  (4 - Length (strInput) mod 4) mod 4, as in the image below.

To be honest I have to say there is a Q&A in the Facebook page I didn't initially read. It says "if you are missing a few characters, you are probably using normal base64 decoding instead of base64url decoding. See  wikipedia ." But, again, wikipedia said there are several variants, come on Facebook! Even more surprising it that the provide a sample conversion at the very end of the page ("Do you have any example?)" , but that's actually only half of the what's encoded in the initial string!  

Thanks to some very approximate Facebook documentation I wasted a few hours. I think documentation for online APIs should be much more precise and do't take for granted everyone is using a single programming language in the world!

Android is bigger and bigger every day. What does this mean for Delphi programmers, how can you move knowledge and code? How can you program in Object Pascal for Android? An overview of the current options in a rapidly moving area. 

It is about a month since I first considered writing a post on this topic, but given this is a rapidly evolving area I'm sure this is a better timing. having just seen two / three articles on specific technologies, I think it is time to get this moving. Let me first add a couple of personal considerations:

• I think Android is big and will grow a lot. I've been using an Android phone for over an year, and I like it. Won't trade it for an iPhone or Lumia. I own an iPad, find it much more interesting than I anticipated (this is worth another post), but Kindle Fire, the coming GPad (Google iPad Clone), and more options will open this area to Android as well.
• I think development tools for mobile are still in their initial stage and will grow, landscape will change.
• I'm not generally terribly fond of code converters (sorry for those building similar tools, but I'm negatively biased).

Having said this which are the real and practical options for Delphi developers who want to build Android applications? These are the options I've noticed, let me know if I miss any, and if I missed any key information (feel free also to add more details, here I'm trying to provide summaries).

Before we look to the available Delphi-oriented tools, let me try to summarize the options for building Android applications:

• Writing Java applications for the Delvik virtual machine, generally using Eclipse and the Android SDK and plug-ins. This is the standard and mainstream appraoch.
• Writing HTML + JavaScript Web applications optimized for the device, maybe using a library like jQuery Mobile. You can simply point users to URLs, or embed the page in a true Android Web App, and even interact with the device using a library like PhoneGAP. What's interesting in this model is that you can use the same application also on iOS.
• Write native applications using the NDK, generally in C or C++.

It is interesting to notice that different tools that bring the Delphi language (or Object Pascal) to Android follow each of the three models above. Here is a summary:

• Oxygene for Java, by RemObjects, is a tool for writing Delphi-like code (or more Delphi Prism-like code) in Visual Studio converting it to Java for Android. Has a nice way to let you refer to any existing Java library, more or less like Prism does with .NET libraries. Read more at  http://www.remobjects.com/oxygene/java.aspx and Brian Long's article at http://blong.com/Articles/OxygeneForJavaIntro/OxygeneForAndroid.htm. With this tool you create Java applications.
• SmartMobileStudio (formerly OP4JS) is a tool to convert Delphi code to JavaScript and create web applications. Official site is at  http://www.op4js.com/. Primoz has a nice article at http://www.thedelphigeek.com/2012/01/first-steps-with-smart-mobile-studio.html. I tend to disagree on the main rationale (JavaScript is low level / not good / too complex / etc), but still this tool might get you to code faster. With this tool you create Web apps.
• Use FPC (Free Pascal Compiler) to build native apps, as detailed by Uwe at  http://www.bitcommander.de/blog/index.php/2011/12/19/fpc-android-boot/. After all, if Embarcadero is using FPC for iOS, it could also be good for Android. Still quite an early version, but interesting. And native.
• Use Delphi DataSnap REST engine with a proper library to build Web Apps, like I did and documented on this blog at http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/mobile_jquery_delphi_rest.html and http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/web_andoird_app_delphi_datasnap.html. Yes, you need to write some JavaScrip, but can also use Delphi to generate some, as I do in my Relax Framework. You can probably use the JavaScript REST proxy also from SmartMobileStudio, but I'm not sure about this.
• Use Eclipse ... and Delphi's Mobile Connectors for DataSnap. You can still write the core code and the database access code in Delphi, and code the UI in native Android Java. Or possibly use Oxygene for the front end, and Delphi for the backend. Or other server plus client solutions. Bittime has written a "Connect Four" app with this model, see https://market.android.com/details?id=com.bittime.connectfour&hl=en.
• Wait... for a future Delphi for Android, and learn FireMonkey for now, as it seems likely the future, rumored, unofficially promised Delphi for Android will have the same user interface of the current Delphi / FPC for iOS, ties to OpenGL. At the 24 hours of Delphi, JT and DavidI promised a webinar for presenting the new roadmap in early 2012... so I'm waiting. Will this be a native / NDK solution? 

Again, there might be more options and alternatives, particularly in the Web App arena, but this offers you some alternatives... to get to Android or get ready for it. Awaiting your comments (better on the blog than on Facebook, but anything goes).

This page on Quora about Skype is quite old (two years, which in the Internet age is a lot!), but wasn't linked much and wasn't linked by myself although I did blog about Delphi and Skype several times. Came to my attention last month, and now that I'm doing my new year email cleaning up, find it is still worth sharing.

Original link on  http://www.quora.com/Skype/What-programming-language-was-Skype-originally-written-in?mid=55546 . I think it is very relevant for Delphi, even if the decision appears somewhat casual. 

I've written new articles on Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) from Delphi for the latest issues of Blaise Pascal Magazine (http://www.blaisepascal.eu/). That's specifically issue 19 and 20.

The source code of the two projects has been added to my Delphi REST Clients repository (http://code.marcocantu.com/p/delphirestclients/), specifically at:

• http://code.marcocantu.com/p/delphirestclients/source/tree/HEAD/AmazonS3_XE2 for the VCL application using the native Amazon S3 classes, new in XE2
• http://code.marcocantu.com/p/delphirestclients/source/tree/HEAD/AmazonS3Monkey for the FireMonkey version, which also uses LiveBindings, despite some issue.

I'm still trying to figure out why the Amazon S3 components seem to crash on the Mac, as this would be a nice project to move over.

Going to publish quite a bit of FireMonkey code this month, will create a specific code project... this is just a start.

Что же такое — общество доверия в Сценариях 2050, в котором экология отношений людей качественно лучше, чем сейчас? Это общественные отношения, строящиеся на том, что их участники доверяют друг другу, потому что точно знают уровень надежности друг друга.

В современном обществе и бизнесе чрезвычайно велики затраты на управление, притом, что всё это управляется ну... не очень хорошо.

Затраты на работу управляющих систем настолько велики, что поглощают большую часть прибавочного  продукта систем управляемых. Они (затраты) составляют до 50%  от производимого продукта (смотрим на совокупную ставку налогообложения, в разных странах она до боли одинакова). То же самое и в бизнесе.

А еще 400-500 лет назад,  в дремучем феодальном мире, на всё управление хватало 10-20% ВВП (королевская/церковная  десятина или  день барщины). С учетом роста населения и производительности труда, затраты на управление, в абсолютных величинах, выросли за период модерна в СОТНИ (!) РАЗ.
Внимание, вопрос! Как же  выгрызть бюрократизм снизить затраты на управление? Я уже над этим думаю несколько лет. Одна технология понятна - это ускорение оборота информации, через внедрение ИТ. Чем быстрее и полнее проходит информация по «нервной системе» общества, предприятия, тем выше качество решений, тем меньше затраты на преодоление «управленческого трения».

А какие еще есть пути? Значительная часть управленческого ресурса тратится на проверку поступающей информации. Это вынуждает дублировать информационные каналы (плодить штаты), перепроверять отчеты (еще плодить штаты), вырабатывать сложные процедуры принятия решения (затягивая принятие до бесконечности). Причина здесь в том, что нет точной уверенности в качестве источников информации, каналов связи, исполнительных элементов. Причем доля достоверности/ неуверенности тоже заранее неизвестна: мы не знаем заранее, кто точно передал информацию, а кто ее исказил. Изначально, «до первого залёта» - нет данных, качественный ли конкретный сотрудник элемент системы или нет.

То есть, еще один резерв снижения "управленческого трения" - это как раз оптимизация личностных рисков, то есть — повышение ДОВЕРИЯ между участниками системы.

Как же определить меру доверия к конкретному человеку? На уровне «ты меня уважаешь?!» вопрос риторический. Но сколько вешать в граммах?

Мне пришла в голову такая схема.

Начнем с того, что создадим игру в существующих социальных сетях: "Сеть доверия", где каждому участнику предложим определить, сколько денег он готов доверить каждому из своих друзей, поп-звездам, политикам. То есть, рейтинг каждого участника Сети доверия будет определяться кредитом доверия - количествомденег, которые доверитель (я, Вы и любой участник сети ) могут доверить другому участнику (доверенному). Это реализуется возможностью безакцептного (без моего согласия) списания этим доверенным человеком указанной мной суммы с моего игрового счета.

Так мы измерим доверие в конкретной величине — сумме денег, которую я/мы/вы готовы доверить конкретному человеку.

Если человек не оправдал вашего доверия, подвел, кинул, вы с него свой кредит доверия СНИМАЕТЕ. То есть, чем больше конкретному человеку доверяет других людей, тем большими средствами он может распорядиться. А если он необязателен, переменчив, лжив — то его кредит доверия быстро упадет до ничтожных размеров.

На большом  масштабе уже можно институализировать такие обязательства, например, разрешить участникам привязывать свой «доверительный» счет к реальным счетам в соцсетях и распоряжаться уже реальными деньгами.

Тогда и получается модель «общества доверия», где наибольшими суммами денег распоряжаются наиболее этичные, честные люди, а не как сейчас. И далее уже новые пользователи будут вступать в  "сеть доверия", чтобы:
1. получить и повысить  свой рейтинг доверия,
2. посмотреть рейтинги доверия деловых (например) партнёров.

А это уже создает новый рыночный продукт — «рейтинг доверия», с которым, например, можно прийти в банк или к инвестору. Действительно, инвестору никакого риска вложить деньги в проект человека, если он видит, что эти деньги покроются «сетью доверия» этого человека. Ну а если человеку никто не доверяет, то и … ясно...

Так возникнуть «зоны доверия» - вокруг каких-то проектов, идей, людей. Некоторые люди будут включены в несколько зон доверия, будут «мостиками доверия» между различными зонами.

Благодаря этому, можем выйти на новое качество экономических отношений- «экономику доверия», где уровень надёжности партнёра заранее известен, по доверию к нему других людей. То есть, внутри "сети доверия", будут многократно снижены личностные бизнес-риски, что сделает ведение бизнеса внутри сети более выгодным, чем вовне, что и привлечет еще новых участников.

Ну и далее -  это откроет перспективы для "новой честности", сравнимые только что с «междупланетным шахматным турниром в Нью-Васюках...» :)

Конечно, «сети доверия» уже существуют в разных вариантах: в семьях, в компаниях друзей. «Сетью относительного доверия» можно назвать любую бизнес-корпорацию, определенный уровень доверия существует и внутри профессиональных ассоциаций. Важно сделать доверие измеряемым, а существующие сети — соединить между собой.

К идее «Сети доверия» меня подтолкнули идеи «зон доверия» Д.Пескова aka Sartac.

… А делов то — игру написать для соц.сетей. Займусь этим после Нового года, приглашаю участвовать.

Very busy and not blogging much, but I'll catch up. As it is now a tradition on this blog, this is my 2011 in terms of cities I've been to, with a few new entries. I did this in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010. If you haven't seen it in the past, this is a list of cities I've been to in 2011, for either work or vacation. The rule is: Places I've visited in 2011 for at least one night, in chronological order.

• Piacenza, Italy (where I live)
• Arezzo, Italy
• Padua (or Padova), Italy
• Paris, France  -- for Embarcadero meeting
• Washington dc, USA
• Baltimore, USA -- for Delphi Developer Days
• Houston, USA  -- for Delphi Developer Days
• Atlanta, USA
• Frankfurt, Germany  -- for Delphi Developer Days
• Amsterdam, Netherlands  -- for Delphi Developer Days
• Gunzburg, Germany -- for Legoland
• Gropparello, Piacenza, Italy
• Courmayeur Mont Blanc, Italy
• Paris, France -- for CodeWay Tour
• Koln (or Cologne), Germany  --  for Delphi tage
• Ankara, Turkey -- for Delphi XE2 event
• Verona, Italy -- for ITDevCon
• Bolzano (or Bozen), South-Tirol, Italy

Well, it was another busy year, and with a great new version of Delphi. I've already many trips planned for early 2012, including the new 6-cities tour of http://www.delphideveloperdays.com/ between March and May.

I wish you all a great 2012, hoping it will bring us Delphi for Android before ... the end of the world. Cheers.

In an hour or so David I will kick off a new 24-hours of Delphi event, featuring also myself (around 7pm, European time). To sign up visit http://embt.co/Delphi24. The detailed program (a bit hidden, I have to say) it at:

http://blogs.embarcadero.com/davidi/2011/12/16/41441/

As you can read there, the even will start today at  12:00am PST / 08:00 GMT / 9:00 Central European Time . Speakers include Pawel Glowacki, Stephen Ball,  Jim McKeeth, Bob Swart, myself, Delphi program manager JT, Anders Ohlsson, Alister Christie, Bruno Fierens, Cary Jensen, Andreano Lanusse,  Tomohiro Takahashi (speaking in Japanese!). The live interviews will be intermized by CodeRage 6 replays (well, they need to get some sleep after all). 

This is my specific section (but there will be also some replays of my CodeRage 6 session), focused on the client phone app I recently blogged about:

10:00am PST (Dec20) / 18:00 GMT (Dec20) / 19:00 CET (Dec20) – Marco Cantu ( http://www.marcocantu.com/ )

Building a web phone client with a Delphi REST server based on jQueryMobile,  Delphi Developer Days 2012 , Delphi Books, and Q&A

Stay tuned for the next 24 hours, if you can!

Cary Jensen and myself are officially kicking off the new edition of DDD, with 6 stops in Europe and US in March-May 2012. You can read the more official press release at  http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/41923.

This is a two-day event (in between a conference and a regular class) that has both joint session in which we compare views and offer insights, and parallel sessions in which you can pick a topic and listen to either myself or Cary. For the spring 2012 we are going to hit 6 cities, 2 in the US and 4 in Europe:

• London, United Kingdom: March 26-27, 2012
• Amsterdam, The Netherlands: March 29-30, 2012
• Washington DC/Baltimore, USA: April 16-17, 2012
• Chicago, USA: April 19-20, 2012
• Frankfurt, Germany: May 14-15, 2012
• Rome, Italy: May 17-18, 2012

Unlike past years, we are alternating 2 European sessions with the one in the US. This means that developers in Europe can pick two different time frames, depending on their expected workload in the period. Also, while we are getting back to some cities we've been in the past, including London and Chicago that we missed last year, there is a new entry, Rome. The hope is not only to attract Italian developers, but also international developers looking for an interesting destination (and a bit unusual one for IT events). That's why in Rome we picked a downtown location, unlike most other cities. 

In terms of content, the goal is to cover all new Delphi XE2 features but also recap recent Delphi extensions and a few classic topics. The joint sessions will be:

• Delphi XE2 Features You Might Have Missed
• Delphi Database Strategies
• Introduction to FireMonkey
• Delphi Internet Applications and Delphi Mobile Applications
• Delphi Tips, Tricks and Techniques

Sessions given by us individually will cover ClientDataSet, DatSnap, more FireMonkey, RTTI, dbExpress, LiveBindings, Unicode, and jQuery. The complete program (still subject to change in the sessions sequence and timing) is available at http://www.delphideveloperdays.com/descriptions.html.

We'll give to all attendees a very large courseware with white papers (not slides) and lots of free software licenses donated by our sponsors, which include Embarcadero Technologies, Sybase, /n software, Devart, Gnostice Information Technologies, RemObjects Software, Sisulizer, TechXtend / Programmer's Paradise, and TMS software. I'll blog again about some of the details of the event, but for now notice that there is a 25% discount in you signup before mid-January. So act soon, and save a lot!

Embarcadero has released Update 3 for Delphi XE2, continuing with an almost monthly update cycle. The new update is a whopping 412 MB and you can get it in the Registered Users page (specifically at  http://cc.embarcadero.com/item/28670) and with the Check for Updates featuer of the IDE. There is also a new ISO with the updated product installation image. As in the recent updates, the PAServer and FireMonkey portions of the installation that you need to install on a Mac must be set up manually.

What's in this new update? A new standard iOS style more complaint with platform standards (a significant feature for iOS developers), a new VCL style, and a ton of bug fixes. There is also an extension for the dialog modal results enumeration (for both VCL and FireMonkey). A very detailed description is at http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/XE2/en/Release_Notes_for_XE2_Update_3 while the list of fixes is at http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/41831/. Among the fixes I noticed:

• Fixes in Version Info in the Project Options
• Fixes in VCL Styles
• Fixes in 64- bit debugger and in the memory manager (for 64-bit apps using more than 4GB)
• Compiler fixes for generics, 64-bit, and more

Of course there are also many expected FireMonkey fixes, including some that were really needed and some relevant ones for iOS. Some of those I was waiting for are:

• TEdit: SelectAll should not be called when clicking on an edit
• TCheckbox should check on Mouse Up
• FMI: bad quality of loading image on iPad
• Having a ShowMessage with short text containing spaces, the text is wrapped but height is not adjusted.

In other words, this is another must-have update.

I've built a simple Web Android Application based on the jQuery Mobile client connected to a Delphi DataSnap server I already blogged about.

The application has only a full screen Web browser control, and behaves exactly like the mobile web page. However, you can activate it with the icon (I know, I've been lazy and left iin the default Android application icon!) and shows full screen, that is, without the browser address bar and other browser elements. I've not even published it on the Google Android Market, don't think it is worth for such a simple demo application, but if you have enabled the installation of custom applications on your Android phone, you can get install it simply following the link below: 

http://ajax.marcocantu.com/android/dsnap_jqmobile.apk

As an alternative, download the file and email it to you phone, the phone GMail client let's you install an APK attachment directly. I know it has quirks (user interface updates are not as smooth as in the browser based version), but my goal was simply to demonstrate this is feasible and not too complex.

Now I'lls tart looking for an idea to build a real Android application with this technology (Delphi DataSnap Server, HTML, jQuery Mobile, Android Web Application wrapper)... waiting for FireMonkey to show up on the platform.

As you know Skype for Windows is written in Delphi (and if you want a further prove, keep reading). Since Skype is likely the most well-known Delphi application and the most used worldwide (with hundreds of millions of downloads), it is obvious that Delphi developers are fond of it, even despite the recent acquisition by Microsoft. Some people though the deal could have forced the Skype client to be rewritten in another programming language.

However  the Job description posted yesterday for a developer based in UK, for working on the Skype for Windows client, dispel the worries and might also be a good opportunity for some of you. Here are some key elements (reported in case this is later removed):

• "The Skype for Windows product is Skype's flagship product, with millions of users around the world. We are expanding our team and looking for talented developers who have a passion for developing user interfaces and being on the leading edge of technology"
• Requires "strong knowledge and substantial commercial working experience with Delphi 2007 / Delphi 2010"

Of course, you can find more reading the full description at http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob&jobId=2239543. Image below for future memory.