It's a blong, blong, blong road...

Wednesday, 30 March 2011

Google Web Fonts

There appears to be an endless series of interesting things that Google offers developers that I've yet to bump into...

One more to knock off the list now is Google Web Fonts (and the Google Web Fonts API). There’s a great list of fonts there that are easy enough to embed into a web page (assuming you can get at the <head> tag).

Additionally, designers who want to play with these fonts can find a shortcut way of downloading/adding them all en masse in this blog post.

And yes, I should have showed off a few of the fonts in this post, but that involves messing with the whole blog template to get at the <head> tag, so I opted for the easier route of not doing so :)

Tuesday, 29 March 2011

MS Tech.Days Live 2011

Microsoft are touting for attendees at their 4 free days of multi-track technical content from 23rd to 26th May, 2011 in Fulham Broadway.

Tech-Days Live 2011 features sessions on desktop, cloud, web, mobile, rich clients and database.

You can keep up to date by following them on Twitter.

If interested, register fast!

Wednesday, 23 March 2011

In-depth article on iPhone Development with C# and MonoTouch

I’ve put together a lengthy tutorial article on programming the iPhone (and iPad and iPod Touch) with C#, Mono and MonoTouch.
This covers a number of areas and runs through using Interface Builder, outlets and actions, table views, navigation controllers, database access with SQLite, web browsing with the WebView, GPS support through CoreLocation and MapKit, Web Services (only SOAP in this article), splash screens, icons and more besides.
You can find the article by following this link.
The article covers the same ground as the previous white paper PDF on iPhone development using Delphi Prism, but this has been fully translated over to C# and had a few areas of confusion simplified.

Update: This article has been out of date for some while, thanks to MonoTouch having moved from v3 to v5 and Xcode having moved from v3.x to v4.x and markedly changing. I've spent some while updating this extensive tutorial and the updated version can be found here.

Wednesday, 16 March 2011

Delphi Starter Edition March price offer

Following on from the earlier post about special UK March 2011 pricing for Delphi and C++Builder tools, I just received information about more March-only pricing regarding Delphi XE Starter Edition. You can buy it at the March-only price of £105.15+VAT.

This is a useful version of the product for those who want to experiment with Delphi or learn some Delphi programming building regular Win32 applications, or if you’re a hobbyist on a tight budget.

Delphi XE Starter contains:

A streamlined IDE, code editor
Ultra fast compiler
Integrated debugger
Two-way visual designers to speed development
100s of visual components
InterBase Express for connectivity with the InterBase database
A limited commercial deployment license

More information on Delphi XE Starter can be found on the product page. You can buy online direct from Greymatter.

Tuesday, 15 March 2011

IE 9 has arrived

Microsoft have released Internet Explorer 9, touting its Windows dependence as a strength, not a weakness. It runs on Windows Vista and above, so not on Windows XP. It boasts a new JavaScript engine (Chakra), HTML 5 support and support for HTML5, CSS3 and SVG, and taps into the GPU to boost graphics performance via DirectX 3D. You can find it at beautyoftheweb.co.uk or beautyoftheweb.com.

Friday, 11 March 2011

Binding to Objective-C from MonoTouch

MonoTouch is a managed layer that binds onto the Objective-C CocoaTouch libraries using a binding layer. There’s a Mono tool called btouch that will generate a binding layer (or at least do much of the work) of binding an Objective-C API.

In a circuitous way, I recently got vaguely intimate with the MonoTouch binding mechanism.

Borland’s Old Testament Histories

I was just indulging in a spot of nostalgia over Verity Stob’s occasional historical archives that covered the to-ings and fro-ings of Borland and found that some of the old links that people had were no longer working. Also one of them seems to be lost forever in the current version of the Internet.
The Internet Archive Way Back Machine came to the rescue once more!
Here is the full (as far as I can determine) historical archive, which of course will mean nothing to those who weren’t immersed in the trials and tribulations of the life of Borland over the last couple of decades. Rather amusing to those of us who were though :o)

Borland Old Testament Histories

Book of Anders (1996)
Yocam hokum (1998)
Book of Yoc-am (contd) (1999)
Borland Revelations (2004)
Borland's Delphi Goodbye (2006)
A reading from the second book of Codh (2008)
Sons of Kahn: The Apocrypha (2010)