You’re short on time, and cash, so where can you go to learn new skills to improve your app UIs? There are a ton of free, or nearly free, on-demand resources if you know where to look.   Enroll in free, or inexpensive, Online Courses: I love taking classes from Coursera. You can access the same college and university classes taught by great schools for free by auditing classes. (I also use Coursera for non-technical courses like literature.) Design Principles by University of Californi...

FireMonkey is an advanced UI toolkit, capable of great layouts and designs. We'd like to show you what it's capable of, and how easy it is to make great interfaces using it. We've just introduced eighteen example UI templates using FireMonkey and C++ that really show how easy it is to create great-looking apps. These are freely available on GetIt, our package manager, and you can download them and use them for your own inspiration and layouts. What have we added? ...

What is a design pattern? While several definitions can be formulated, they all contain one universal message. In my opinion the most accurate definition is given in the Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design_pattern I would like to draw your attention to two lines: general reusable solution solve common problems Let's consider whether developing application in RAD style (visually), can we use general reusable solution and do we solve common problems? Of course, ev...

Last month Sarina DuPont blogged about loading custom FireMonkey styles on a mobile device at runtime ("How to load custom styles at runtime"). That's a very interesting approach to compile a custom style as a resource into the mobile app. This week there was another blog post by David I about the availability of the new great looking mobile FireMonkey InfoPower grid component for registered Delphi XE5 users and also a demo app available at Google Play Store. I have immediately installed this...