Bitwise Magazine

RAD Studio 2010 - Delphi, C++ and More...

Embarcadero interview

Tuesday 18 August 2009

As Embarcadero announces the forthcoming versions of its RAD Studio 2010, which includes its Delphi, C++Builder and Delphi Prism products, we talk to Michael Rozlog (Senior Director of Delphi Solutions) and ask a few questions about the direction of Delphi and the future of IDEs in general.

Michael Rozlog is Senior Director of Delphi Solutions and is the product manager for 3rd Rail (and Eclipse-based Ruby On rails IDE and Delphi for PHP). He joined Borland in 1998 and was their chief technical architect for their enterprise software. RAD Studio 2010 is a product of Embarcadero: http://www.embarcadero.com/ Huw C: Hello Michael. Embarcadero has announced a whole bunch of new features in RAD Studio 2010. MICHAEL R: That's right. In this release we've had over 120 IDE enhancements. Huw C: OK, so what are the top three or four? MICHAEL R: One of the top things we've done is implemented what we call IDE Insight. You press the F6 key and it pops up a window. You start typing in what you want to do - ‘compiler' say - and right away it's going to show you all the (...)

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Get To #1 on Google

Book Review

Monday 27 July 2009

Get To #1 on Google (in easy steps)
by Ben Norman
$14.99 / £10.99
http://www.ineasysteps.com
Pages: 216
ISBN: 978-1-84078-382-7

Long gone are the days when a few well chosen ‘meta' tags in a page of HTML might be expected to get your web site ranked highly by an Internet search engine. These days search engines are cleverer - they don't just look at ‘meta' tags, they analyse all kinds of other information in an attempt to avoid being tricked into giving a site an unjustified high ranking; meanwhile, clever site designers have figures out many of the search engines' strategies and come up with even trickier tricks in an attempt to fool them. If you happen to be running a well-known we site - for, say, the BBC or CNN - you will probably get a high ranking without having to put any effort into it. If, however, you are running one of the countless millions of less well-known web sites, all of which (...)

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The Well-Grounded Rubyist

Book Review

Saturday 18 July 2009

The Well-Grounded Rubyist
$44.99 Softbound print book - (includes free ebook)
by David A. Black
Manning http://www.manning.com/black2/
520 pages
ISBN: 1933988657

Just when you thought there were already so many books on Ruby that there could surely be nothing more to be said on the matter, along comes Ruby 1.9 - and changes everything... Well, OK, maybe not everything - but the differences between Ruby 1.8 (currently Ruby 1.8.6 is probably the closest we have to a ‘standard' version) and Ruby 1.9 are significant enough to require some re-learning and re-coding. And that's where David A. Black's book, The Well-Grounded Rubyist, comes to the rescue. The books covers pretty much the range of topics that you would expect from a work that aims to introduce programmers to the Ruby language. If this is your first dip into Ruby, it will guide you through all the basics of variable declarations and method-calling syntax, defining classes and (...)

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Pyrenean Mountain Dog Puppies

Bundles of furry fun!

Saturday 30 May 2009

As I mentioned before, there is a good reason why I have been writing a bit less on Bitwise over the past few weeks - well, nine good reasons, actually!

My beloved Pyrenean Mountain Dog, Bethan, gave birth to nine fabulously beautiful puppies this April. They are growing at a phenomenal rate and they are taking up a huge amount of my time. Hence, not so much time to write in Bitwise... Anyway, here's a picture of one of the pups. She's called Rose... If you want to see more Pyrenean Mountain Dog puppies, go to my Pyrenean Mountain Dog site.

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Foundation Game Design with Flash

Book Review

Friday 29 May 2009

Foundation Game Design with Flash - $39.99 /£31.49
By Rex van der Spuy
Friends of Ed: http://www.friendsofed.com/book.html?isbn=9781430218210
Computer Manuals: http://www.compman.co.uk/
ISBN-10: 1-4302-1821-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-4302-1821-0

So you want to design a game and you want to do it in Flash? This, then, is (or may be) the book you need. First let's clarify what this book is and what it isn't. It is a book for people who want to both design and code a two-dimensional graphical game using Adobe's Flash CS3 or CS4 IDE and the ActionScript 3.0 programming language. It is not a book for people who want to code 3D games, it only has basic advice on creating non-graphical games (e.g. text-based games such as adventures) and it has nothing to say about the Flash Platform's application development framework, Flex, its standalone application runtime, AIR, or code-centric IDEs such as Flex Builder or Amethyst. Its focus on the Flash IDE has benefits and disadvantages. On the plus side, it allows the author to provide (...)

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Amethyst Flash Platform IDE, beta 5

Flex, AIR and ActionScript in Visual Studio

Tuesday 26 May 2009

My company, SapphireSteel Software, today released the fifth beta of our Visual Studio IDE for programming Adobe Flash Platform applications.

This beta adds refactoring plus a whole bunch of other goodies. For more information and to download a copy go to our web site: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Amethyst-Beta-5-Flex-Refactoring.

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Flex on Rails

Book Review

Wednesday 20 May 2009

Flex on Rails $31.49 / £31.99
(Building Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex 3 and Rails 2)
by Tony Hillerson and Daniel Wanja
Addison-Wesley
ISBN-10: 0321543378
ISBN-13: 978-0321543370
http://www.flexonrails.com/book.html

The default ‘front end' for Ruby On Rails applications takes the form of dynamically created web pages defined using HTML. In fact, it is not that difficult to create much slicker front ends rendered in Adobe Flash. This book explains how to get Flash talking to Rails with the help of Adobe's Flex framework. Assuming that the reader already has some basic knowledge of Ruby, Rails and Flex, the book moves rapidly on to the fundamental techniques of querying Rails from Flex and transferring data to and from Flex and Rails. It discusses testing and debugging, data visualization, source control and a broad range of other topics. This is not the only book to cover Flex and Rails. The best known work on the topic is Peter Armstrong's Flexible Rails. While these two books inevitably (...)

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Snap Art 2 - review

Photoshop plugin

Saturday 16 May 2009

Snap Art 2 - $199
(upgrade price $99 for registered users of Snap Art 1)
Alien Skin Software
http://www.alienskin.com/snapart/

Snap Art 2 is a Photoshop-compatible plugin which can help you turn photographs into (apparently) ‘hand-drawn' or ‘hand-painted' artwork. We reviewed Snap Art 1 a couple of years ago. The recently released Snap Art 2 is essentially “the same but better”. The set of filters provided are the same as those in the original Snap Art but the user interface has been changed, some additional features have been added and the effects have been improved - in some cases, quite substantially. Here's an oil painting which I did earlier... OK, so I cheated! My ‘painting; started out as this photograph. I just let Snap Art 2's ‘oil' filter do all the hard work I could have drawn it in coloured pencils (above) just as easily. The Snap Art 2 Settings panel on (...)

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Pyrenean Mountain Dog Pups

The softest type of software...

Sunday 3 May 2009

I’ve been using my old Hewlett-Packard laptop recently, sitting here on the table in my kitchen. It’s been a while since I used it and its 16Gb disk is no longer quite as massive as once it seemed. How time flies!

It doesn't seem so long ago that I was sitting here in the kitchen with the same HP portable to look after my new pup, Bethan. At that time 16Gb seemed massive. In fact, that was about four years ago and now Bethan (a beautiful Pyrenean Mountain Dog or ‘Great Pyrenees') is sitting here surrounded by her own pups and I'm hard pressed to get all the software I need installed onto this ‘tiny' 16Gb hard disk! It took me a whole day to install all the latest updates to Windows, Visual Studio and MSDN, and by that time the disk had precious little free space left. The reason for my decamping from my office into my kitchen is shown below... As I mentioned before, Bethan had her pups a couple of weeks ago. This followed a brief but meaningful relationship with an American dog (...)

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Flex 3 In Action

Book Review

Friday 1 May 2009

Flex 3 In Action $49.99
Tariq Ahmed with Jon Hirschi and Faisal Abid
Manning: http://www.manning.com/ahmed/
ISBN: 1933988746
576 Pages

There is a boom in Flex 3 books at the moment. Flex is Adobe's framework for developing rich internet applications, typically using Flash graphics for creating the user interface elements. Tariq Ahmed's book is (according to the publisher) “an easy-to-follow, hands-on Flex tutorial. Chock-full of examples, this book goes beyond feature coverage and helps you put Flex to work in real day-to-day tasks.” In twenty-four chapters the book quickly goes through the basics of Flex and its programming language, ActionScript. By chapter 4 it gets onto some of the specifics of application development such as creating user interfaces using Flex layouts and containers. Other topics relating to the design and programming of Flex using components, validators and formatters take us up to (...)

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The Hunt For Gollum

Gobsmacked is the only word for it!!!

Thursday 30 April 2009

Fan films, like ‘fan fiction’, are not things I generally seek out for my entertainment. A film based on The Lord Of The Rings and which proclaims itself to be “a film by fans for fans” sounds like something that I would avoid like a plague of Orcs.

So I confess that I am surprised, amazed, dumbfounded and, yes, gobsmacked by the trailer I have just watched for a fan-made movie called ‘The Hunt For Gollum'. When I read that this film had been made on a budget of £3,000 (about $4,500), and that instead of filming in the epic grandeur of the wilds of New Zealand, as Peter Jackson did for his Tolkien trilogy, it was filmed in the English countryside, Wales and the popular leafy London dog-walking area of Hampstead Heath, I naturally assumed that this would be an embarrassingly amateurish production which would make me ashamed to be British.... Far from it! If I'd watched the trailers without knowing anything about this film in advance I would certainly have assumed that this was a big budget mega-spectacular with armies of (...)

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UK Prime Minister’s Site Votes Him Out

The perils of online engagement

Wednesday 29 April 2009

The British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is determined to come to grips with the online world. But to date his exploits online have not been entirely happy ones.

First there was the scandal over a couple of his spin doctors plotting to smear members of the Conservative opposition party. Then there was his less than enthralling attempt to launch new policies on YouTube (The Times says that comments to that video were subsequently disabled). And now... Now, the official site of the Prime Minister has a wonderfully democratic online voting system which lets British citizens start a petition and see how many other people sign up to it. In principle, I suppose, the most popular petitions should be expected to get the Prime Minister's most serious and active consideration. A shame then that the most popular petition at the moment is this one... If you feel the urge to add your name, the petition can be found here: (...)

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Free Screen Recorder - BB Flashback Express

Commercial quality for free!

Wednesday 22 April 2009

Blueberry Software has just announced a new free version of its entry-level screen recording tool, BB Flashback Express.

Previously priced at $39, BB Flashback Express is a high quality screen recorder which can also automate uploading of movies to YouTube and other online video sharing sites. This comes hard on the heels of Techsmith's free Jing tool and, since it does not suffer from Jing's limitations, it could prove to be a popular alternative. Martin Green, CEO of Blueberry Software, said: “The reason for giving away our most popular screen recorder product may seem crazy, but it makes strategic sense. There're a number of free screen recorders already available on the Web. Whilst this is good news for many users, some people never make the jump to a commercial product, and we want everyone to see just how good a quality budget screen recorder can be. Blueberry Software also has two (...)

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Free 425 Page Ruby eBook

Now available

Monday 20 April 2009

I’ve finally completed my Ruby programming eBook, The Book Of Ruby. This contains 20 chapters plus appendices and index and comes with over 300 ready-to-run sample programs in the source code archive.

While the book assumes no prior knowledge of Ruby, it is not a book solely for beginners. On the contrary, it was written during the design and testing of my company's Ruby on Rails IDE, Ruby In Steel, and it contains information on many of the twisty byways of Ruby which you might not come across unless you happened to be, well, writing a Ruby On Rails IDE So, whether you just need a simple reference to Ruby syntax or whether you need to learn about some of the more weird any wonderful ‘dynamic' things you can do such as creating classes at runtime, you should find something of use in this book. Incidentally, I will warn you in advance that I (deliberately) do not adopt some of the stylistic conventions preferred by some Ruby programmers for the simple reason that I find them (...)

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Dog Tired...

Why so quiet...?

Sunday 19 April 2009

Regular readers may have noticed that things have been a bit quiet around here lately. Fear not, I shall get back up to speed soon.

The reason is explained below... Nine Pyrenean Mountain Dog (Great Pyrenees) puppies! The mother is my dog, Bethan. She gave birth to her litter between midnight last Wednesday night/Thursday morning and 3:30 on Thursday afternoon (the last pup came as quite a surprise!). Suffice to say, I haven't had a lot of sleep lately and my schedule has gone all to pot. Anyway, both mother and pups and doing well. I'll try to get my work schedule back on track shortly. In the meantime, I have a few other things (nine to be precise) to attend to...

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The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 with ActionScript

Book Review

Tuesday 14 April 2009

The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 with ActionScript $46.99 / £36.99
By Chris Kaplan, Paul Milbourne, Michael Oliver
Friends of Ed: http://www.friendsofed.com/book.html?isbn=9781430218111
ISBN-10: 1-4302-1811-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-4302-1811-1
568 Pages

There are books on Flash and there are books on ActionScript but there are surprisingly few books that really get to grips with both Flash and ActionScript. This book is one of those few. Flash CS4 is the latest version of Adobe's IDE for developing and programming Flash graphics. It provides a suite of tools for designing and animating. Many people use it purely as an animation program that lets you place, move, ‘tween' and render images along a timeline. But, in fact, Flash movies may also be controlled programmatically using ActionScript 3.0, which is now quite a powerful object oriented programming language. This book is, in effect, divided into two distinct sections. The first 180 pages or so deal mainly with graphics and animation - how to draw shapes with Flash CS4, how (...)

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Derek Draper and how NOT to blog

Oh what a tangled web...

Sunday 12 April 2009

Earlier I mentioned the inept conniving of two left-wing Labour party spinners in the UK to counteract the influence of some very successful right-wing bloggers by setting up their own ‘rumour’ blog. I now see that one of those successful right-wing bloggers (Iain Dale) has just written a piece explaining what you should and should not do if you want to write a successful political blog.

Derek Draper is one of the two men involved in a plan to smear top members of the opposition Conservative party in the UK by blogging lurid and unfounded stories suggesting various improprieties, predominantly of a sexual nature. Their plan was found out and their nasty little emails have been filling the pages of the UK newspapers today. As I said before, the thing that baffles me is the sheer, staggering incompetence of their plans to create a muck-raking blog in cahoots with one another in the expectation that nobody would ever guess what they were up to. Iain Dale says that he actually offered blogging advice to Derek Draper some months back: “I explained to him patiently the pitfalls of the internet. Indeed, I had to be very patient indeed as his knowledge of online (...)

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The UK Government versus The Bloggers

Sleaze, emails and people close to the Prime Minister

Sunday 12 April 2009

If you live outside the UK, you may not be aware of the current headline news stories about some pretty nasty goings on close to the very heart of the British government.

In short, it concerns some squalid emails passed between a certain Damian McBride and a blogger named Derek Draper. Mr McBride is (or rather was until he speedily resigned yesterday) a publically-funded government adviser with close connections to the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. Derek Draper claims to be an independent left-wing (Labour) blogger who comments on the political scene without taking instructions or contributions from the British Labour party. In other words, he is a left-leaning counterpart to right-leaning bloggers such as Iain Dale and Paul Staines, otherwise known as ‘Guido Fawkes'. In fact, Staines and Draper have crossed swords a few times in their blogs and on TV. One gets the strong impression that they don't much like one another. Staines has previously (...)

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Bokeh Review

Image Processing

Thursday 2 April 2009

Bokeh $199
platform: Windows/Mac
Alien Skin Software
http://www.alienskin.com/bokeh

Alien Skin is well known as the manufacturer of some of the best plugins for Photoshop and ‘Photoshop-compatible' applications. These include a range of ‘Eye Candy' plugins which can be used to change or mutate your images by adding shadows, textures, bevels, ‘glass' and ‘metal' effects. Not all Alien Skin plugins aim to be quite so eye-catching, however. Alien Skin also has a couple of image processing plugins aimed at enhancing photographs in such a way that the viewer probably wouldn't suspect that any image processing had been done at all. I've previously written about Blow Up which helps to enlarge images with the minimum degradation in quality. More recently, Alien Skin launched Bokeh, a plugin that helps to simulate depth of field in photographs - in (...)

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Amethyst Adobe Flex/ActionScript IDE Beta 4

Phew! I’m exhausted!

Tuesday 24 March 2009

Developing software can be tiring but launching it is truly exhausting.

OK, so this is not The Big Launch. It's ‘just' a beta. But even so, tying up all the loose ends, testing all the new features and making sure that we haven't accidentally screwed up the old features - in short moving from an internal build to a public release - never ceases to be a traumatic business. If you've been through this process with your own software you'll understand what I mean. If you haven't, take my advice: stay well clear of a software developer on release day! Anyway, my company shipped the latest version of Amethyst, our Visual Studio IDE for developing Flex, AIR and ActionScript projects today. New features include: auto expanding snippets a dedicated snippet editor context-sensitive help IntelliSense and project management improvements These are (...)

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