Mac Development links/info

This week’s instalment of the UK-based Developer Direct webinar series is called Mac Development for Windows Developers, focusing on the Mac aspects of the cross-platform development capabilities of RAD Studio XE2. The following is a set of links and general information picked up during the broadcast.

Links:

• RAD Studio’s FireMonkey demos on SourceForge
• Many collated FireMonkey links on www.tindex.net
• Migrating a FireMonkey HD application into a FireMonkey 3D Application, part of the 31 Days of RAD Studio XE2 Video Tutorials.
• Does FireMonkey support MDI? – Q&A on StackOverflow answered by Simon Stuart
• FireMonkey Tutorial Video Series at http://embt.co/firemonkey31. Many of these videos are focused on FireMonkey.
• Using the FireMonkey TMenuBar's OSMenu Property to Place Your Main Menu for Windows and Mac – part of the FireMonkey Tutorial Video Series showing use of UseOSMenu property
• Developing Cross-Platform Applications – from the RAD Studio XE2 documentation
• From Visual C++ Application to Native Mac in 90 Seconds, short white paper by Jason Vokes
• Building awesome Mac clients for web services built with Visual Studio and C# – article by Paweł Głowacki
• Integrating FireMonkey into VCL, Visual Studio C# and C++ Applications, white paper by Stephen Ball
• Use your Windows C++ and Delphi Programming Skills to Create Mac Applications, on-demand webinar with DavidI dismantling an Xcode Cocoa application

Info:

• FireMonkey (typically abbreviated to FMX) is in essence a cross-platform alternative to the Windows-only VCL. VCL is the Visual Component Library, where many of the components are wrappers around Windows-supplied controls. FireMonkey targets multiple platforms and so doesn’t wrap OS controls or capabilities per se, but creates them from scratch using OS awareness, styles, etc. FireMonkey is described by Embarcadero as a Business Application Platform.
• FireMonkey supports HD or 3D applications. A HD app is like a traditional Windows form containing controls that are familiar in business applications. a 3D app is a 2D view on a 3D world and so is more suited to 3D graphics scenarios.
  When creating either, the choice affects the form created in the application. However a FireMonkey HD form (a TForm) can make use of FireMonkey 3D components (using a TViewPort3D), and a FireMonkey 3D form (a TForm3D) can make use of FireMonkey HD components (using a TLayer3D, as discussed in the documentation). See this part of the documentation for details.
• Ctrl+. is the keystroke to get IDE Insight – the incremental search across much of the IDE’s content including components, environment options, project options and more.
• paserver (Platform Assistant Server) needs to run on OS X to allow RAD Studio’s 32-bit Windows-based IDE to start and communicate with (i.e. launching & remote debugging) an app built and deployed to another target platform, e.g. 64-bit Windows or Mac OS X.
• When compiling a multi-platform project, each target has its own output subdirectory within the project directory tree, namely: Win32, Win64 and OSX32.
• Action lists, audio and video are not currently supported in FireMonkey but these are things that are being worked on for future versions.
• Mixing FMX & VCL integration in an application must occur through dynamic linking; it won’t pan out well if you try and use static linking.