Delphi

In Delphi I used TActionList with lots of TAction items to implement the various actions in an application. These actions can then be linked to menu items and buttons. An action can have an OnUpdate event handler which is responsible for activating and deactivating the action depending on the current state of the application. This is a very useful feature which is also available in Lazarus but unfortunately it is somewhat broken in current Lazarus version (At least up to daily snapshot 20081231) because the OnUpdate event handlers are not called correctly for actions which are only linked to menu items. This bug is already reported and hopefully it will be fixed soon. But for now I have created a little workaround for it.

It's pretty difficult to find information about how to write a multi-lingual application with Lazarus. I've been through this and I hope that this article helps others to get on the right way. I'm not 100% sure the way I found is the right way but at least it works great for me. So it can't be totally wrong.

Currently I'm again involved in developing GUI software for Windows. In the past I always did this with Delphi so I thought it would be nice to use it again. I searched for a free version of it which was quite hard. How the hell is it called today? Borland Delphi? Code Gears Delphi? Turbo Delphi? Which is the newest version? Delphi 2006? Delphi 10? Where are the Personal Editions? Is there still a Kylix out there for cross-platform development? Wasn't there an announcement that Borland will switch to Eclipse for Delphi development? Very confusing situation...

FreeReport is the free version of a commercial reporting software for Delphi. It is very powerful but it has a problem: It needs the VCLDB-Package which is not included in the Personal Edition of Delphi (At least Delphi 6 Personal, maybe Delphi 7 Personal is also affected).

During my work on a mission editor for Lucasarts X-Wing Alliance I fiddled a little bit with the images stored in the CBM file format. Thanks to the specs from Code Alliance I was able to read these files. I have written a small viewer which can display the images and animations and save them as Windows Bitmap files.