C++Builder Developer’s Journal – CB2010 Special Issue free

The C++Builder Developer’s Journal have made their latest issue free and open to everyone to download. It focuses on more recent features that maybe people haven’t had time to play with, and includes articles on Datasnap 2010 by Bob Swart, Unicode migration by Josh Kelley, changing the default C++Builder directory by Curtis Krauskopf, multi-touch by ByeongCheol Nam and Ki-Tae Bae, and porting from BCB6 to CB2010 by Curtis Krauskopf

The CDJ guys put a significant amount of work into each issue, so if any of the above grab your interest please go and show your support by downloading the issue.

You can find it here http://bcbjournal.org/?loc=special or here http://cc.embarcadero.com/item/27769

Delphiday.com – Daily deals on Delphi tools and components

Glenn Crouch from ESB Consultancy just posted about this on the ADUG list. It’s basically a “deal of the day”-type site for Delphi-related tools and components. Right at the moment it has LMD DockingPack at 50% off (for the next few hours anyway). Seems to have a few different vendors promoting their products on it. Worth keeping an eye on I think.

New Google Docs looks quite interesting. Kind of what Wave promised but didn’t quite deliver.

The new features in Google Docs look quite interesting. The real-time collaboration pieces look similar to Wave but will probably come with less head-scratching about what to use them for. Were these done in parallel, or should we now assume Wave was just a research project and pieces of it spin off into their real public homes? The new spreadsheet also seems to address some of the things I missed when I first played with it.

App-centric vs doc-centric. Consumption vs Creation?

Sorry, this is a bit of a rambling post, but partly I’m organising my thoughts after reading this article. The basic premise is that we’re heading towards a world of two different types of operating system: a Document-centric OS for “Professionals” and an App-centric OS for everyone else. Not sure I agree on the categorisation of end-users (I’ll come back to that) but the essential idea has some merit.

Read On…

Learn 7 languages in 7 weeks: Clojure, Haskell, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, and Ruby

Quite interested in this. Somehow doubt I’ll keep to the timeline, nor learn them in any serious depth, but as a tasting platter of a bunch of languages from different families I am considering it. Not sure of the whole beta book thing though. Guess it depends on just how “beta” the content is that they release.

Did Telstra really just say that out loud? /via @zdnetaustralia

There have been some exec changes at Telstra, including the announcement of Kate McKenzie as CMO. Nothing unusual, or terribly noteworthy about that, but I was struck by one sentence in the announcement, regarding the new CMO appointment:

"For the first time, Telstra’s product developers will be brought together with those people responsible for the strategy, pricing, promotion and market analysis of those products."

Read that a couple of times. Essentially, for the first time in Telstra’s history, those responsible for product strategy will be working with those responsible for product delivery!

Strategy and implementation talking to each other? No good can come of this!

Does beg the question, though, what happened before this?

Don’t misunderstand, I’m not shocked that this is true. I suspect it’s true at lots of companies. What shocks me is their honesty, even if it might have been unintentional.

Using WPF for good and not evil #ux

Quite an interesting UX examination of the Family.Show WPF Sample App by David Platt. I especially liked his summary of his 3 Programming Principles: “Users don’t care about your program in and of itself. Never have, never will. Your mother might, because you wrote it and she loves you, and then again she might not; but no one else does.”

C++Builder Developer’s Journal – Call for Papers out for May 2010 issue

The C++Builder Developer’s Journal is a great magazine run by some really dedicated guys. I’ve been a subscriber for quite awhile and find it almost always has a couple of articles I’m interested in. They are very often applicable to Delphi as well. Anyway, the May 2010 issue will be an open one, meaning it will be freely available to anyone, not just subscribers. They are running a Call for Papers right now, so if you’ve had an idea for an article burning away in the back of your mind, or just like the idea of the fame and fortune that comes with being a published author (yes, I kept a straight face while typing that. Getting good at this, aren’t I?) go and check it out.

Battery charges itself from wifi signal

This is extremely interesting. It’s technology that uses a wifi signal to produce electricity. There are two places they are planning to use it so far: 1) a USB charger and 2) built into a battery itself. I assume the plan for the latter is to license it to manufacturers, but I’m interested in the former as well. Carry it around in your bag/pocket, anywhere it picks up a wifi signal it starts replenishing itself, when you’re phone/camera/whatever starts to run low, plug it in and charge it up. If they produce an iphone adapter, and succeed in getting this to market for $40, they’ll make a fortune.

Searching in Delphi Part 1 : Regular Expressions

Being able to find elements in your code quickly and easily is critical to being productive in any IDE. Spend too long looking for things and you start to lose your train of thought. Over the years Delphi has introduced lots of different ways to search your code, some of them simple text-based matching, some of them much more capable search engines that actually understand the structure of your code. However, I regularly meet developers who aren’t aware of many of them, beyond doing a simple search using the Search | Find (Ctrl-F) menu option, or the same across multiple files using Search | Find in Files (Shift-Ctrl-F).