Thursday, May 15, 2014

XE6–Links for the presentation

On today’s presentation I promised listeners a bunch of links so that they didn’t have to write them down. Here they are:
By the way, RAD Studio XE6 was well excepted. People really liked not only the focus on stability (although that was the favorite by far) but also the new additions – tethering, BaaS and support for advertising and in-app purchases.
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Photo was taken during the PhotoWall demo and is blurry, as I was more focused on describing the simplicity of app tethering than on taking the shot. Sorry!
BTW2, the app tethering is way way cool! Check it out!

Monday, May 12, 2014

Adding Borders to Pictures

Besides being a programmer, I like taking pretty pictures (and working with wood, but that’s another story). And from time to time I like to print some pictures and hang them on a wall.

Because framing pictures is expensive and, frankly, most of them don’t deserve it, I like to print a “virtual frame” – a thin black border followed by a wide white border – around each photo. Until recently, I was adding them in some stupid program I found on the Internet (it doesn’t deserve to be named), but I was always having problems because you had to specify border width in pixels – and if I wanted to set the same border (for example, a 1,5 mm black border followed by a 20 mm white border) for a set of pictures in a different resolutions, I had to calculate pixel sizes for each photo, which was a pain.

So I sat down and wrote a border-adding program. It allows you to specify border sizes in “real” measures, it can process one picture or a folder full of them and it can add a suffix to processed pictures (plus it will skip files containing this suffix if they are found in the source folder) and that’s about it. It is small, simple, solves a real problem and – what I found the most impressing – I wrote it in a single working day. Truth to be told, I needed about a month of work – an hour here, 15 minutes there – but all together I needed less than eight hours. That is the power of Delphi!

If you have a need for such tool, go ahead and download it from my Dropbox. You can also get the source, which is released to a public domain (i.e., do with it whatever you want). It depends on few external libraries, which are all released with an open source license: JCL, JVCL, GpDelphiUnits, OmniXML. At the moment the GUI is written in VCL, because I really didn’t want to spend too much time on this project and I know VCL by heart, but if somebody wants to go ahead and rewrite it in FireMonkey, I certainly won’t stand in his/her way.

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Friday, May 09, 2014

XE6 Launch in Slovenia

Join me in Ljubljana on May 15th when I’ll be showing all the goodies that came with recently released RAD Studio XE6.

Register here.