Some Random Dude

App Tethering : Discovery and Pairing

In the previous post, we covered an overview of what App Tethering is and how some customers have used it. We also covered the four conceptual areas of App Tethering:

  • Discovery – finding other apps, including whether you are looking for other apps over BlueTooth or IP Network
  • Pairing – connecting to other apps, once you’ve found them. This includes Authentication.
  • Resources – sharing data with connected apps
  • Actions – sharing Actions with connected apps

Let’s take each of these concepts and start looking in more detail. Read On…

App Tethering : Overview

One of the capabilities introduced in recent versions of RAD Studio and AppMethod is App Tethering. Over a number of posts I want to explore App Tethering further, starting from an overview of the technology and then going further down… down eventually to the network packet level. My aim is you’ll come out with a quite thorough understanding not just how to use App Tethering, but also what you might use it for.

In the absence of anywhere else to start, let’s start with a question.

What is App Tethering?

In its simplest terms, App Tethering makes it easy for apps to find and communicate with each other. Now, I accept that is so generic an explanation as to be almost useless. You could say something similar about DataSnap, or EMS, or plenty of other distributed systems. So let’s shed a bit more light.

Read On…

Git Integration enhancements in RAD Studio XE8

VersionInsight in RAD Studio XE8 has been extended further, with deeper Git integration and also support for Mercurial (in addition to Git and Subversion). In this article I want to quickly highlight the new Git features, as that’s what I mostly use, but you can see more about the Mercurial support here.

As an aside, if you’re not familiar with VersionInsight, I did some videos quite awhile ago that showed how to use it against Subversion, and then another video which shows it working against Git.

blog_gitxe8_gitmenu

Read On…

Changing the XE8 IDE Font, Size and Toolbar Color

When you first start RAD Studio XE8, you should notice some immediate visual differences:

  • There is a new font used in most windows (menus, Object Inspector, Tool Palette, etc)
  • The new font is also larger in many places (look in the Object Inspector in the screenshot below)
  • The Main Menu and Toolbar area now has a blue background.

blog_IDETheme_default

No prizes for guessing that this provoked a strong reaction amongst the beta testers. Some liked the blue, some hated it, Some liked the font, some hated it. Some liked that it was bigger, some hated it. Everyone had an opinion, but about the only thing we didn’t have was a consensus.

As a result, the obvious question was: “How do I change it?”

Read On…