Monthly Archives: May 2011
Writing applications in Delphi wont make serious money?
| May 11, 2011 | Posted by Lance Rasmussen under Delphi |
It’s always interesting to sometimes here competitor developers state that Delphi is not a serious programming language. It’s sometimes snickered at as if it was archaic and irrelevant as RPGII is today (no offense to RPGII developers). Surely there is no way that a program developed using Delphi can reap serious financial rewards for developers and companies, right? Early this week, a little company called Skype was recently acquired by a company from Redmond, WA that I don’t think anyone would have trouble guessing who. The price tag… $8.5 Billion dollars. I certainly don’t need my MBA education to tell me that this is some serious money. What’s Skype? For the minority who never heard of Skype, it is video and voice communication product that uses the Internet to carry the signal. It’s used frequently in communication among companies, especially for intercontinental conference calls and such. It’s inexpensive and works very well. It’s almost used a term to communicate, such as “I’ll Skype you tomorrow”, very much as saying “can someone hand me a Klenex”. What’s this have to do with Delphi? Well the Windows based client has long used Delphi as the primary development platform. It’s probably one of… [Read More]
Help and Manual 5.6 Released
| May 6, 2011 | Posted by Lance Rasmussen under General |
One of the pains of developing software is creating documentation for the product. There becomes a lot to think about, which includes just letting the end-user figure it out on their own and not even bother. Some of the things to consider for a software product: Do you need a Help File for installed EXE’s? Do you need a Product Manual? Printed or Electronic format? How about a manual which could be referred from a Nook or Kindle? Do you want or prefer help to be viewed via a web browser with the help stored locally or on your web server? If you’re writing development products, do you need to have the file be compatible to install into Visual Studio or Embarcadero’s Delphi or C++ Builder? IDEs? Uggh….. sounds like there’s going to be a lot of writing. And using several tools. Get Word out to write the manual for the printer. Get a tool to make a help file. Get Dreamweaver out to make the web pages. I think it’s time to go back to just writing the program and not even bother. Well EC Software has a great product that puts everything into one tool called Help and… [Read More]
