Delphi 12 Athens has been out for nearly a month now and there are many fixes and improvements over its predecessor. It's still not perfect but I'm moving all projects I had in Delphi 11 up to the latest version.

Coming in Delphi 12 is very cool feature that will save cross-platform developers a lot of time.  But first, a reminder:  This blog post is based on a pre-release version of the RAD Studio software and it has been written with specific permission by Embarcadero. No feature is committed until the product GA release.

As I've been going through the Delphi 12 beta, I'm delighted to see many fixes and enhancements in the IDE to help the programming experience feel more fluid and intuitive. As with all beta versions being discussed, this blog post is based on a pre-release version of the RAD Studio software and it has been written with specific permission by Embarcadero. No feature is committed until the product GA release.

The author of Code Faster in Delphi has just released his second book, Code Better in Delphi--and it is just as packed with useful coding techniques that will improve the way you write software as the first. The book is an easy read with short, clear examples that illustrate the concepts presented.

There have been several iterations of the Delphi IDE's Welcome Page, or the first page that you see by default when you start Delphi without a project. This space has been used for keeping a list of favorite projects for convenient loading, marketing of related products by Embarcadero, and quick links to tutorials and resources. Delphi 11 introduced, in my opinion, the best interface yet as it's completely customizable by the user and provides an API for writing your own plug-ins to provide additional functionality.

Over the last few months, I've been studying and working on getting a website up with Hugo, a static site builder based on Markdown files. It doesn't take months to learn Hugo--it's pretty straight-forward and there's a great YouTube video course that gets you up to speed quickly.

Admittedly, text editors isn't a terribly important topic to blog about but since I wrote a public comparison of UltraEdit vs EditPad just over a year ago and since my preferences and stance on these have changed, I thought I should explain my new perspective. My license for the UltraEdit package was the All-Access Subscription, which means I had a full license to use all of the products in the suite for a year after which I would need to renew the license in order to keep using them.