Wow – I would never have thought so many people would download the beta! Or should I say alpha. It really was a disaster to find out that the auto-complete on monkeynews replaced our new 0.5.x build zip-name with the older alpha zip-name. So almost 100 people downloaded the wrong zip. Thankfully we corrected it, so the wast majority of users got the right version.
So please double-check: If the title of the IDE does not say “build 0.5.x” then you must go to your email (we issued a correction message) and download the beta version! I have been cursing since friday because of that mistake.
Make sure your copy have this title
Although this blunder put a shadow over the whole release experience, the weekend ended as a small victory due to all the positive feedback we got (obviously from people who got the right download link). My personal favorite was “It bloody works! Awsome!”. That comment made my day 🙂
Ok let’s wrap it up
I am happy to say that a huge chunk of the proposals and bugs have been fixed. I have also started on smarting up the IDE a bit, so right now I’m adding the final touches to “CTRL + CLICK” functionality like we have in Delphi. It already recognizes unit-names, class-names and method-names from the entire RTL – so it looks good. Not sure how to get synEdit to play ball though, but i’ll find a way.
So all in all we have the following chores left:
- Finish the designer with common editing functions
- Finish the globals editor
- Get rid of the buggy synEdit search/replace dialogs (!)
- Write property editors for font, border etc. so they show up in the inspector
As far as the RTL goes I have a couple of items on my list:
- Global key hook for full screen apps
- Add code donated by friends to the RTL (gestures, sound-api etc.)
- Speed fixes, better error management and more compile options (css as external file etc.)
And that’s basically it for version 1.0 in terms of features. So it’s time to tie up the last lose ends, double, triple and quad check everything – and then it’s done.
The future
- Databases and datalists
- Support all browsers
- webGL
Paying customers will receive updates sequentially (which includes IDE enhancements, new units, updates to the RTL, platform files and compiler updates) of-course. I already have around 200 items on my “must add” list for version 1.1 (including support for remobjects services) so don’t think we will be resting on our laurels 🙂
Datalists is really going to surprise you. It’s actually very close to the old TDataset terminology (I will probably call it TDataset to make it more familiar).
Jai Jai Ganesha!
Great job guys. Brilliant concept. Quality realization. The download glitch was nothing.
Let me know as soon as you have pricing sorted out and I’ll send you a cheque 🙂
One question, will events be added to the properties inspector so handlers can be easily created as they are in Delphi?
Thanks Andrew! We have to do something with events, but i am still pondering the best solution. The challenge is that there are some events that can be handled via delegates, but a couple of events that have to be set “old school” depending on the browser (the IE thing again).
The short answere: Yes, it will be handled, but for version 1.0 some manual labour is required. But setting events in code is not that bad – when you press “.” the suggestion box comes up, then type “on” and you have all the events in a row.
But it’s definitely in place for version 1.1 (first update)