Tutorial

How do you make your great app ideas come to life quickly with the least amount of pain, frustration and wasted budget? The answer is by creating a solid development plan that follows the three stages of application prototyping: wireframing, prototyping and production. While pen and paper is still an option, utilizing digital tools makes you and your apps competitive and agile, and offers the clearest path to success.  Last week, I held a joined webinar with Cindy Zablockis (Twitter: @cind...

The Delphi language in 10.3 has a fairly core change in the way it allows far more flexibility in the declaration of local variables, their scope and lifetime. This is a change that breaks a key tenet of the original Pascal language, but offers a significant number of advantages, reducing unneeded code in several cases. Old Style Var Blocks  Since Turbo Pascal 1 and until now, following classic Pascal language rules, all local variable declarations had to be done in a var block written be...

A few years back, when Embarcadero started building new Delphi compilers for platforms other than Windows there was a lot of discussion how compatible the new Delphi should have been with the current language, in terms of core language features and overall perception of the language. Eventually the decision that emerged was to do keep an extremely large degree of compatibility, with a few significant and bold steps towards a language more capable of attracting a new generation of developers.  ...

Microsoft has released a new update of Windows 10, continuing with their now 6-month release cycle. The version 1809 was initially distributed, and then put on hold (twice, actually) because of issues, first with files on OneDrive and later with ZIP operations. But that’s not the point of my blog post. I have personally installed it and not experienced any issues. It appears to be a good update overall to the existing Windows 10 experience. You can see a good summary of the new features at https...

Over 20% of users abandon an application after using it the first time (per Localytics). How can you design your mobile app to avoid being one of these casualties? Start out by designing your application with mobile in mind. You can’t just replicate your desktop application and expect it to make sense on a smaller form factor. Each platform already has existing patterns your users are used to: iOS tab bars are on the bottom and include glyphs but Android tab bars are at the top and are text-on...