DelphiDabbler's Blog

If you've got enough years under your belt you'll know the feeling. Someone describes an item as "retro" or "vintage" and you had one when it was new. All of a sudden you're feelin' your age. A while ago someone was looking at one of my guitars and asked where I found such a cool vintage instrument - Bob Dylan played one, ya know. I had to confess that I just walked into a shop in 1982 and bought it new! Bob borrows my guitar Well that nice guy who runs the rather excellent Retro Shack YouTube channel does it to me every time he puts out a video about a Commodore 64 , or a Sinclair ZX Spectrum , or a BBC Micro ...  Retro Shack restores a Beeb He reminds me I owned a Tandy TRS80  model I, a PC XT with 5.25" floppies, a Psion Series 5 PDA (remember them?) and a Sinclair QL (of which more in a later post). Oh yeah, and my first "portable" was like a suitcase - think it was an Amstrad PPC 512 - eek! Tandy TRS-80, Model I. Photo by  Dav...

The last of my projects holding out in a Subversion repo has finally made the move to Git. What was once the DDabLib project on SourceForge is now being developed in Git as the delphidabbler/ddablib project on GitHub. At least for the time being, releases are still hosted on SourceForge - see the Files tab - and bugs and feature requests are still using the SourceForge Ticket System  . EDIT: I've now moved the bug /feature requests over to GitHub Issues . The SVN repo will remain in place as an archive, but will not be updated any further. The library's documentation has been maintained on GitHub for a while now in the delphidabbler/ddab-lib-docs project. I haven't decided yet whether to merge that into ddablib or to leave it be. The GitHub repo still looks a bit "Subversiony". Things still need some tidying up.

The Delphi Tips micro site has at long last been re-integrated into DelphiDabbler.com . It now has its own sub-domain: tips.delphidabbler.com . The site still has its own identity, but I think the URL is a bit more memorable. The original URL ( delphidabbler.github.io/delphi-tips ) and the later URL (delphidabbler.com/delphi-tips) should both automatically redirect to the new URL. The tips microsite will continue to be maintained in the  delphidabbler/delphi-tips  repo on GitHub, separate from the main site which lives in delphidabbler/delphidabbler.github.io . Teething Troubles The change to the new subdomain broke the link to the site's style sheet. This has been fixed now and the site's styling should appear similar to the following picture: But if it looks more like the next picture, you need to force a refresh (e.g. Ctrl+F5 on Chrome): Note: both the above images are in mobile view, not desktop, but it's the colours that are the give away. Right, I'm off to chang...

This is the second in a little mini series where I take a look at some applications that Delphi developers may find useful. Developers please note that I'm happy to blog about other useful development software or libraries that may be useful to Delphi or other Pascal developers. Free of charge. Gratis. For full details see my " Promoting Delphi developers & applications? " blog post. This time I'm focussing on  HelpNDoc 7  by  IBE Software . And this really is a long look! In fact there's so much to describe I've split this over more than one post. Here are links to the others: part two part three part four HelpNDoc 7.7 Home Screen For the sake of transparency I want to disclose that  I received a free license for this product, for which I'm grateful. Introduction Given that HelpNDoc  has a lot  of features, a simple walk through would be way too long. So instead I decided to actually develop some documentation for my relatively new (and simple) Unit2...

First, if you're in a part of the world celebrating the new year then Happy New Year! Secondly, I noticed a bug in the system information unit that TPJOSInfo was failing to detect updated builds of Windows 11. That's fixed in this release, and that's the main reason I strongly advise you to update . Thirdly, there have been some more Windows 11 Pre-release builds since v5.7.0, so I've added detection for those to TPJOSInfo . And finally, I've taken the opportunity to do a bit of refactoring. You can get the new version from my website or direct from  SourceForge  (direct download link).