There are many stories I could tell with this title. It's such an obvious rule when dealing with electrical devices but so often overlooked as a possibility of the source of a problem when everything else works. Here's my most recent experience that took its toll on more than just myself.

Writing REST applications in Delphi is pretty simple with the advanced components we have available these days. The functionality encapsulated allows us to spend time on the business and user interface aspects of development rather than the nuances of connecting to an API and parsing JSON results. When starting a new REST app, I usually use the REST Debugger that comes in RAD Studio to test out an API before building the app itself. There are other REST API tools but this one has a great feature that saves me time building my Delphi app that no other tool has.

At the top of Delphi's code editor, is a Navigation Toolbar with several "jump lists" as I like to call them. They help you find and jump to places in your code quickly by selecting them from lists built by the parsing engine in Delphi. There are also shortcut keys that allow you to use them without taking your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse.

RAD Studio 11 Alexandria was released Thursday. There were webinars, blog posts, and tweets about the many wonderful things in the latest major release of Delphi and C++Builder from Embarcadero. These include High-DPI support in the IDE, design-time style viewing in VCL applications, support for Windows 11, ARM-64 compilation on Apple's new M1 chip, and many other features and enhancements. I installed the update and did a little bit of coding to get a feel for how well it behaves and am quite pleased. I'll be using it more over the next several days and weeks as I shift my development, install plugins and components, and tweak the settings to tune my new work environment. Here are just a few things I noticed right away.

This week's Desktop First UX Summit, hosted by Embarcadero, is a great collection of presentations by leading software development and design professionals sharing the theory and practice of creating great desktop experiences. I really appreciate the focus on desktop app design--not everything is mobile or web. One of my favorite speakers every year is Ray Konopka and he gave another great talk, this year on How Tab Controls Can Ruin Desktop UX.

A couple of years ago, I blogged about my favorite new Delphi 10.3 Rio features, which included two plugins, originally by Parnassus but acquired by Embarcadero. I would like to highlight them again and go into a little more detail to continue in my "Delphi Productivity Tips" series.