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Thoughts from David Cornelius

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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.

First, the version and the logo align with the new version of Windows 11 coming out next month. The "red orb" now has a feathered/sliced/flower look to it--I'm not really sure what to call it but it's pretty cool.

When the Welcome screen was changed in XE8, a lot of people (myself included) found ways to cut out the stuff they didn't want and put greater access to recent and favorite files and projects; there was even a plugin built that replaced it altogether. With Delphi 11, a completely redesigned and easily customizable Welcome screen is in place--and it's wonderfully easy to manipulate and even supports custom plugins.

The options page comes up much faster now, perhaps not the first time but once they've been loaded once, bring it up again is nearly instantaneous--this is a big deal for me as I often go in and out of the options pages.

Read the blog linked above and search for a replay of the announcement webinar to learn much more about this new version. I'll be exploring it more over the next few weeks. For now, I'll leave you with a screenshot of the new Welcome page, slightly modified, and with a few projects loaded. Notice the heart by some of the projects? That's how "favorites" are designated now. It still takes too much screen real estate in my opinion, but this is a vast improvement to the embedded web page we had before!

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