Delphi XE5 for Native Cross Platform Mobile Development

Today I used the demo version of Delphi XE5 to get a cross platform test app working on a Galaxy Note 2, an iPhone 5, and an iPad 4 all using the same source code from the same project. I was even able to perform animation to the dimensions of an image component and have it work across all three devices.

 If you are looking for an alternative to PhoneGap, Titanium, or Xamarin (MonoTouch) then I recommend giving Delphi XE5 a try.

 A few things I like about it so far are:
  1. The resulting app is native, unlike PhoneGap apps that run in a web view.
  2. The button click did not have a delay like HTML apps can have that you might use with PhoneGap.
  3. I was able to re-use 100% of the project for both platforms -- yes even the UI unlike the drawback that Xamarin has.
  4. The animation was very smooth on the iPhone 5 and iPad 4. It was also smooth on the Galaxy Note 2, but not quite smooth as on the Apple devices. I am a little concerned on how the animation would appear on an older Android device. However any animation smoothness issues might very well be the fault of the device, and not that of Delphi.

I ran into a couple hiccups at first but I was able to get the help I needed from their support department.

 Delphi runs on Windows, but in order to compile for iOS you will need a Mac as well for Delphi to connect to remotely.

 Here is a video that Embarcadero published:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Adobe® Flex® Combobox: Selecting an Item Without Using SelectedIndex

In Adobe Flex, in order to select an item in a ComboBox, you use the .selectedIndex property. However, there might be times that you want to specify the item to be selected based on something other than it's position in the list. I have found two potential solutions: ComboBox2 from Ben Forta, Flex evangelist, is a ComboBox component which allows you to specify a "selectedValue" property.   VAComboBox  from Codieron, LTD. (BSD license) Copyright Notice: Adobe, and Flex are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.
Read more

Parameters Sent by TinyWebDB in App Inventor for Android

TinyWebDB is a component in App Inventor for Android that lets your app communicate with a web page in order to set or retrieve values, rather than storing them on the phone itself. I wanted to know what the TinyWebDB component sends to the web page when it tries to set or retrieve values, so I used Kodingen this morning to write a PHP script that takes the form fields and values sent to the page and writes them to a file. Here is what I found: TinyWebDB.StoreValue sends these parameters: tag value TinyWebDB. GetValue sends this parameter: tag So if you write your own PHP page for TinyWebDB to connect to, you can know if TinyWebDB is trying to store a value if the "value" key exists in the $_POST array. If the "value" key doesn't exist in the $_POST array then you know that TinyWebDB is only trying to retrieve the value for the given tag. As an alternative to using the method outlined by Google , you could use TinyWebDB with your own script written in an
Read more