Marco Cantù is presenting a webinar on building RESTful clients and servers in Delphi and RAD Studio, at the Asia-friendly time of 3pm AEDT on Thursday the 4th of March. More details here
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).