by marc hoffman, September 1st, 2010,
Categories: radio, rotv, short
We’ve made some tweaks to RemObjects TV and RemObjects Radio integration with the web sites, today. For one, new podcast episodes and videos will now show aggregated in the main blog feed and here on the blogs website.
We’ve also updated remobjects.com/radio from the static page it was to be driven by actual content from the podcast RSS feed, and embedded a player in the website (using the HTML5 Audio tag on Webkit, and falling back to a Flash player on IE and FireFox (the latter of which does not support mp3. An even odder choice than not supporting H.264, IMHO).
Also, remobjects.com/tv has the embedded player tweaked as well, to fall back to Flash on FireFox (as it already did on IE). As Jim mentioned in his previous post, Ogg didn’t really perform that well, and having to render two versions of the videos is a pain — with the current setup, a single H.264 version will play (and smoothly so) everywhere.
by Jim McKeeth, August 31st, 2010,
Categories: rotv
Hopefully everyone has had a chance to check out our new RemObjects TV we launched with the Summer 2010 release of our products. The goal with RemObjects TV is to create short (10 minutes or less) training videos covering the topics of interest to developers. The videos are divided into channels based on products. Each channel has a feed available as RSS or via iTunes, and there is a main feed for all the channels. Each channel has its own color theme.
One of the objectives in creating this video resource was to make it available on as many platforms as possible. For us, that meant using the latest HTML 5 Video tag support, so we are not dependent on Flash to play the videos. This means it will work on iPhone and iPad and other platforms that do not support Flash. Unfortunately the current status of HTML 5 Video tag support requires encoding the videos with two different codecs. We currently have h.264 MP4 videos, which work in Chrome and Safari, and the Ogg Theora Vorbis OGV videos for Firefox. Internet Explorer doesn’t support HTML 5 yet, so it gets Flash, which displays the MP4 file. All the videos are 1280×720 for that 720p HD experience.
What we learned along the way:
OGV is not as efficient as MP4 – slower, poorer quality and larger file size, but hey, its free!
iPad and iPhone seem to like specific encoding for the MP4.
iPad doesn’t support the poster property on the Video tag (makes it not play).
HTML5 means you are browser depended for if it offers full screen viewing.
We are curious what everyone’s experience is with RemObjects TV.
Does the HTML5 embedding work for you, or do you prefer Flash still?
Suggestions for future videos?
Do the videos stream for you (bandwidth, etc.)?
We may not be able to implement everything suggested, but we will be improving and optimizing the process and experience in the near future, so any feedback you give us now can greatly impact that.
This is just a quick post to let you know that Delphi Prism XE is available now.
XE is a pretty minor update to Delphi Prism over the Delphi prism 2011 release we shipped in May, but it does contain quite a few fixes, tweaks and enhancements, so it’s an update we are very excited about getting out to users.
If you already have Delphi Prism 2011 (whether standalone or via a recent purchase of RAD Studio or a RAD Studio with SE), your existing serial number will work out of the box, and you can grab the trial download to upgrade. No need to wait for that email from Embarcadero. If you have RAD Studio 2010 without SA, you will need to upgrade to XE (or get SA) – but on the plus side, that means you’re currently still on Delphi Prism 2010, which makes the XE release much more exciting for you, as it will bring you a lot of new stuff, starting with VisualStudio 2010 and MonoDevelop IDE support.
You can find a complete list of changes in Delphi Prism XE at http://remobjects.com/changelogs (check also the Delphi Prism 2011 section, if you are coming from 2011. Yes, you will need to scroll down quite a bit!)
And, of course, you can grab the trial version from http://remobjects.com/trials. Note that there’s a separate download for the edition that integrates onto MonoDevelop/Mac (the regular Windows installer includes support for MonoDevelop/Windows).
Day 2 was busy and eventful. We started out with Sebastian‘s presentation of Hydra, our cross platform plugin framework that allows you to mix and match code written in Delphi/Win32 and in .NET (preferably of course Delphi Prism, but also C#, VB or any other CLR language) in the same application. Sebastian built an application from scratch that hosted a WPF based Telerik gauge control in a native Win32 application. He also showed how to communicate bidirectionally between the managed plugin and the host, by creating interfaces that are shared by both sides of the equation.
Sebastian’s second session later that day focused on language features that are specific to Delphi Prism, including class contracts, the colon operator sequences and iterators, future types and much more. The session quickly developed into an interactive workshop, where Sebastian write code on the fly to illustrate various aspects of the language based on questions from the audience, and it was my impression that all attendees were quite intrigued by the capabilities offered by Delphi Prism (both compared to native Delphi, and compared to C# and other .NET languages). Many times, we heard the question “when will we get this feature in native Delphi?” ;)
Jim rounded off the day with a short introduction into Silverlight (with Delphi Prism), a talk that he would repeat the next day with more detail in the form of an intensive 3.5 hour workshop. Jim gave a thorough introduction to the platform, from basic concepts such as XAML and layouting to more advanced topics such as data bindings (including a sort excursion into Data Abstract with a demo on how to connect a Silverlight client to data from our PCTrade sample server). Most of the attendees were new to Silverlight (or even .NET) and, from the feedback we got, found the two sessions intriguing and were looking forward to work with Silverlight, more.
Over the course of the day, two other sessions by Ray Konopka of Raize Software (who’s CodeSite Express is now included as part of Delphi Prism, by the way) and Cary Jensen rounded of the Delphi Prism coverage, with Cary presenting ASP.NET development and Ray providing an excellent and thorough introduction to WPF. After Ray’s talk, even i was tempted to take a closer look at playing with WPF, again. And that’s saying something ;).
To close the day of, Jim, Sebastian and i got talked into the In-N-Out Burger experience, so we went along with David I, Mike Rozlog and Al Mannarino to have a round of Double Double Animal Styles (well, most of us). Fun was had, although i must admit that i, myself, was underwhelmed by the burgers…
David I getting ready to go “Animal Style”. Still from video, so apologies for the quality.
Day one of Delphi Live has been great, here in San Jose. After the morning Keynote with David I, Michael Swindell, Tony de la Lama and Mike Rozlog and the official launch of RAD Studio XE, Andreano Lanusse gave a whirlwind tour of the cross platform capabilities in Delphi Prism XE — which included creating a ASP.NET web service in Visual Studio 2010 and deploying it to his Linux VM to run in Apache with mod_mono, and using MonoDevelop on the Mac to create an iOS application for the iPhone using MonoTouch (creating a web browser seems to be the Hello World of the iOS platform).
The highlight of the day most definitely was the return of Jim McKeeth‘s Delphi Bots Live, a hands on session where the audience was invited to program a bot for the Unreal Tournament ego-shooter game to fight and hunt down Jim’s real-live player. The battle raged on for over two hours, and participation was great, with people using Delphi Prism in Visual Studio, MonoDevelop and even in Notepad with the command line compiler to create their bots. In fact, Michael Swindell was so successful developing his bot with the command line compiler that we have decided to pull Visual Studio support from the product, and to concentrate our development efforts on Notepad, moving forward.
San Jose City Hall; collage of multiple exposures shot with the iPhone 4 and “See This“
Jim is telling a story at BJs in Cupertino; with Sebastian, marc and Robert Love. (Sorry, only H.264 video, Firefox and IE users, pls use the download).
This is just a short reminder that yours truly will be at Delphi Live in San Jose this upcoming week, along with Jim McKeeth and Sebastian Gingter. If you’re attending as well, or just are in the general vicinity of SJ, we’d love to meet you.
As Sebastian put it — go look for the guy with the hat. That’s me ;). Drop me a mail or a message via twitter if you can’t find me.
We’ll also be blogging, podcasting and hopefully posting photos and videos from the conference as well, so iy you cannot attend, stay tuned to this blog for details (and make sure to subscribe to our Podcast at remobjects.com/radio.
Now that the MonoDroid preview is out, I thought I’d experiment a little with Oxygene (aka Delphi Prism), so I ported the “Button” sample to Oxygene. Here’s a taste of what I came up with:
As you can see, there’s not a lot of difference from the C# version.
Obviously, this won’t be in the build that we RTM’ed last week, and will soon be available from our friends at Embarcadero, but it will work with said release. So if you’re a Delphi Prism customer, or just have a fondness for Pascal syntax, keep an eye out here – more info will be available soon, including templates & other support files.
method Activity1.OnCreate(bundle : Bundle);
begin
inherited OnCreate(bundle);
// Create your application here
var button := new Button(self);
The past few weeks have been very busy, here at RemObjects, and today we’re finally ready to share many of fruits of the work we’ve been doing. Let’s see what we have.
The brand new “Summer 2010” releases are finally out. Initially we merged the planned May and August releases to bring you one big release at the end of July. We then decided to delay another two weeks, to cross the last Ts and dot some more Is, and it’s been well worth the wait, as we have lots of exciting new features and enhancements for you. I won’t go into all the details here, but make sure to check out our updated What’s New page and Change Logs. The new builds are available as Trials and for licensed users.
We’ve started a podcast, entitled RemObjects Radio, that will keep you, our customers, up to date with latest developments, news and information about our products and related technologies. The first episode is up now, with Jim and myself discussing the coolest new features in the “Summer 2010” Releases, but we already have more episodes in the pipeline, and topics will include technologies such as DA SQL and Relativity, interviews with various members of the product teams, live reports form conferences such as the upcoming Delphi Live, EKON and 360|iDev later this year, and more. We’d also love to get customers on the show as well, to talk about their experiences with our products, so if you’re interested, drop us a mail. Check out the RemObjects Radio home page or subscribe via our Podcast Feed.
As if that wasn’t enough, we’ve also started (long overdue, i know) making and publishing some screen casts, available under – fittingly enough – the RemObjects TV moniker. As i’m writing this post, we have three videos ready, two on new Data Abstract features from the “Summer 2010” release, and one introduction to Delphi Prism in Visual Studio (linked from the new Everwood Welcome Page of Delphi Prism XE). These are just the beginning, we have lots more planned. All the videos are published using standard-compliant HTML5, and they will also work well of viewing on iPad or Apple TV, for those of you not fond of watching while sitting at the computer.
We’ve also launched a new Events page, to keep you apprised of upcoming conferences, roadshows and other events that might be of interest to you. Right now, this lists a handful of conferences we’ll be presenting at, as well as our first ROadshow stop in Denmark that Jim blogged about.
Last but not least, we gave our entire website a small overhaul, to go along with the new changes and to present our new company logo and corporate revised identity. We explored a lot of options with our friends at Clever Starfish, and we felt the “hand-drawn” look fit best with the kinds of logos and images we’ve already been using for other areas of the website, so we extended that to the company logo itself – i hope you like it.
Oh, and i almost forgot: today we also RTMed the next release of Delphi Prism, called Delphi Prism XE. The new version is mainly a bug-fix release over the recent release from May (after all, we only had a good 2 months of product cycle), but we’re pretty excited about it. It will ship with RAD Studio XE and also be a free update to all current Delphi Prism 2011 customers, and should be available within the next couple weeks, or so.
