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What’s cooking………..Long time, no see?

  • 22/04/201822/04/2018

Well my dear readers, let me first apologize for being missing from action for a significant amount of time

But belieive me, I do hope to make it up

God willing, I shall spend some time during this weekend on another multi-device project using Delphi/FireMonkey and come up with a newest version of famous “Game Of Death Life” which could be working on all sorts of platforms…. well at least on Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android and yes on Linux too …..

For any one curious as what is “Game of Death Life” ….you can surely get initiated and get some background info from following link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

If I may take the liberty to quote from website of Stanford University,

The Game of Life was invented in 1970 by the British mathematician John Horton Conway. Conway developed an interest in a problem which was made evident in the 1940’s by mathematician John von Neumann, who aimed to find a hypothetical machine that had the ability to create copies of itself and was successful when he discovered a mathematical model for such a machine with very complicated rules on a rectangular grid. Thus, the Game of Life was Conway’s way of simplifying von Neumann’s ideas. It is the best-known example of a cellular automaton which is any system in which rules are applied to cells and their neighbors in a regular grid. Martin Gardner popularized the Game of Life by writing two articles for his column “Mathematical Games” in the journal Scientific American in 1970 and 1971.

Well that is it for now, I am keeping my fingers crossed and hope to come back soon with something worthwhile to share more on this, so do come back soon

 

 

 

 

Well its 23 years since Delphi 1

  • 15/02/201815/02/2018

Well it still seems like yesterday, but believe it or not, Delphi 1 was released 23 years ago on February 14th 1995, during the Software Development Conference 95 West. Borland has a vendor presentation followed by a party at the Exploratorium.

And I was lucky that a friend who returned to India, from San Fransisco in mid 1995, brought a big box containing a few books/manuals and a few 3.5″ (or was it 5.25″ ones?) floppies and fortunately or unfortunately, he himself was not able to spare time to explore the bundle and instead handed it over to me to see if it could be of any use to me! Since than, for almost 23 years I have never been able to overcome the WOW factor and rest is history!

I know, if you are even remotely related to or interested in Delphi then there would be tons of Blogs and articles published on the web within last day or two so I would not bore you all with my thoughts on same but instead let me share a few historical material related to this  …….

Of course, like always, you all are very welcome to share your thoughts and any feedback/comments at the bottom of this page please.

 

Related Links:

  • Delphi Product Definition 3rd Draft (incomplete) May 13, 1993 Zack Urlocker
  • Visual Component Library First Draft (Incomplete) May 24, 1993
  • BDNradio: 24 hours of Delphi (Audio)
  • Historical Documents: Delphi 1 launch demos source code, launch script, and marketing video

CodeRage XII coming

  • 04/11/201704/11/2017

CodeRage XII is the online developer conference with the focus on Delphi, C++Builder and more. This year CodeRage XII will cover more platforms, more technology, and more learning. Join us for 3 full days November 7th through 9th and register at
https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/7990350396754529539

Rejuvenate with Delphi in Nature’s Lap

  • 06/10/201706/10/2017

Waiting Excitedly for the subject Delphi retreat in Shillong starting late Jan 2018 …. more here

Migrating an old Delphi 3 game to Firemonkey

  • 30/08/201719/09/2017

Recently one Sr. Delphi Professional and Maths Teacher, Omid Motahed  requested in a Delphi related forum, if any one of us having access to newer Delphi version can convert/migrate a very old Delphi 3 based open-source game project (a Chess like mind/calculation game) by  Prof. Dr. G. Keith Still  (who has been kind enough to allow me to bring this to multiple devices including iOS & Android) over to Firemonkey (Multi-Device) project.

This Project mainly used lot of calculations and canvas drawing APIs. Initially, I thought that it should not involve any significant work and took it on as a sort of OJT or practice project for myself. But I was in for a huge surprise because almost all the drawing APIs have been changed in Firemonkey implementation from old and simple VCL APIs. Then of course there were several inherent limitations of Multi-Device project like hugely differing sizes of screens from small mobile phone screens of 3 inches to big wide screens of Desktops, having mouse with 2 or more buttons in Desktop but just a finger touch/tap to a few gestures in mobiles. Also there were limitations related to Asynchronous messaging and non availability of blocking dialogs in Android/iOS and so no modal dialogs 🙁 .

But, by now I was enjoying once again of exploring, trying and learning after long long gap of several years. So with the help of widely scattered info across the web and some of hit and trial works, I was able to Migrate the project to Firemonkey after spending almost 12 hours on it (originally I expected it to take at the most 4-5 hours). Here is an screen shot of same game running on a small Android Phone

 

And here is a screenshot from my Mac

Anyone interested in trying out the project can download the Android “apk” file from here (updated after fix for Firemonkey bug due to which Square/lines were not getting drawn in Android).

I still have to optimize and clean it out a bit and hopefully improve the GUI also a bit and after that I shall publish the whole project source for public on GIT soon. I also plan to publish my experience/understanding/learning which I went through during this migration in addition to list of Commands/ Syntex differences between VCL and Firemonkey framework, which were required to make this project work like for example a button and other such controls have a property called “caption” in case of VCL but in Firemonkey they have property called “Text” and instead of plain old property called “Font”, in case of Firemonkey this is embedded inside “TextSettings.Font” ….. These are easy to find and to an extent pretty obvious ones but there are many which are not that easy or obvious …. hope to list them out soon ……. keep tuned

Your comments and feedback are solicited please…….

 

Recent Posts

  • What’s cooking………..Long time, no see? 22/04/2018
  • Well its 23 years since Delphi 1 15/02/2018
  • Best season wishes for first festival of season 14/01/2018
  • Welcoming 2018 01/01/2018
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