Ah, it’s been released… The May 2013 release of Oxygene, released on 27th May 2013, brings us Oxygene 6.0, and Oxygene 6.0 brings us the official release of Oxygene for Cocoa.

The Oxygene language now gives ways of coding for all the currently interesting platforms using the three available editions of Oxygene:

• Oxygene for .NET (formerly also known as Delphi Prism) – targets the .NET platform, allowing you to build Windows applications, Windows phone applications, Silverlight applications and so on, using the relevant .NET frameworks. Also targets the Mono platform, allowing applications to go to the many places where Mono goes, such as Mac and Linux and also Android and iPhone/iPad using Xamarin.Android (aka Mono for Android) and Xamarin.iOS (aka MonoTouch) using those frameworks.
• Oxygene for Java – targets the Java runtime, allowing you to build Java apps, Java servlets, Java applets and also, perhaps most interestingly, Android apps. Java apps will use your chosen Java frameworks and Android apps use the Android SDK framework.
• Oxygene for Cocoa – targets iOS and OS X allowing native ARM applications to be built for iPhone and iPad as well as 64-bit native OS X applications. Applications are built against the native OS X Cocoa and iOS CocoaTouch frameworks.

Oxygene is hosted in Visual Studio 2012 (support for Visual Studio 2010 has now been phased out in Oxygene 6.0). If you don;t have a copy of Visual Studio 2012 the Oxygene installer can set up the Visual Studio 2012 shell first.

For existing users of Oxygene for .NET and/or Oxygene for Java there are some new features added to Oxygene 6.0, including a spate of new conditional defines to help distinguish which compiler built your code or which platform you are targeting:

However the main thrust of the release is Oxygene for Cocoa, which works in conjunction (if you want) with Apple’s UI designer to support visual UI design via nib (.xib) files or storyboard files. It also understands and fully supports multi-part method names so that it fits in directly with the Objective-C naming system and can represent and refer to any existing methods. It support the iOS Simulator, supports debugging there and on-device and offers all the options needed to sign and provision your apps. It supports ARC (automatic reference counting), understands bridging and uses an LLVM back-end to generate good ARM and 64-bit Intel code.

It ships with all the standard frameworks imported and has a tool that allows you to import any additional libraries you need to work with. Because Oxygene always uses the frameworks that natively exist on the target platforms, there is not an awful lot to learn specific to Oxygene when building Mac or iOS apps. Anything you learn on the Internet about how to build aspects of Mac/iOS apps applies directly – it’s just a case of expressing the various local API calls in the Oxygene syntax, which is a very familiar Object Pascal based syntax.

During pre-release development Oxygene for Cocoa was called Project “Nougat” and I worked with it a lot to keep tabs on how it progressed. I’ve built a whole bundle of test apps to keep on top of (mostly) iOS application development techniques by simply following various online Objective-C tutorials, and just entering the code in Pascal instead of in Objective-C.

I’m delighted Oxygene for Cocoa is now released as I’ve been productive with the tool for quite a long time now. I’ve wanted to make blog posts about how I do thing with it, but given it’s just a syntax shift there hasn’t really been much of a need for it. I guess maybe I’ll do one at some point to show the basics of building up an iOS app in the Visual Studio IDE and getting it launching in iOS Simulator, but after that it’s just writing code in the same way any other iOS developer does; just in Pascal.

On June 17th I’ll be demonstrating the product with a talk at a Developers Group meeting in Maidenhead, UK.

You can find more information about Oxygene for Cocoa at these links:

• Oxygene 6.0 release announcement post
• Tim Anderson’s post on the release
• Oxygene iOS platform links
• Oxygene OS X platform links
• Oxygene “Nougat” overview podcast
• Bridging
• Creating a Turn-based Game for iOS: Tic-Tac-Toe
• Custom iOS controls in Oxygene “Nougat”
• Using Instruments Profile Mac and iOS Apps
• .xib and .storyboard files
• What is “Nougat”? – Part 1 – introduction, emphasising and illustrating the native targeting aspects
• What is “Nougat”? – Part 2 – target platforms, ARC, boxing and references
• What is “Nougat”? – Part 3 – the IDE, building and running an app
• What is “Nougat”? – Part 4 – the build & deploy process

Buying Oxygene is reasonably pocket-friendly. If you’re new to it then $699 gets you all three versions. Otherwise there is a $499 renewal price for existing Oxygene for Java or Prism customers, a $599 cross-grade price for any users of Embarcadero Delphi or of older Embarcadero Prism versions (XE2 and below) and also a $99 academic price.

If you want to see how you get on with Oxygene 6.0 without committing you can always pull down a trial version first.

I must have missed this one being announced, but registered users of XE, XE2 and XE3 products can pull down a free copy of Blaise Pascal, the magazine for all things Pascal-based.

Details are on this edn post by Tim DelChiaro and you can pull down the PDF magazine from Code Central.

The free issue, Issue 24, runs to 120 pages and has a number of articles from notable authors (such as Cary Jensen, Bob Swart and Bruno Fierens) on a variety of subjects including FireMonkey 2, Smart Mobile Studio, HTML 5, Delphi XE3 Styles, Delphi XE3 helper types, and interviews with various industry luminaries, including Marco Cantu, Mike Rozlog, marc hoffman and David I.

Also in the issue is my second article on Oxygene for Java: Supporting new android features in old android versions with Oxygene.

Download the magazine – I hope you like the contents!

If you’ve kept up to date with developments in the world of Delphi, you’ll be aware that Embarcadero have teased us with a multi-step way of targeting iOS devices using the cross-platform FireMonkey framework and then just recently taken it away again (for now…).

It seems almost prescient, then, that RemObjects have just announced Project ‘Nougat’, which is the next incarnation of their Delphi-like Object Pascal based Oxygene compiler.

Oxygene will soon be natively targeting three platforms:

• .NET: Oxygene for .NET (aka Delphi Prism aka Embarcadero Prism) is the longstanding .NET compiler that took over from Delphi for .NET in Borland/CodeGear/Embarcadero’s RAD Studio suite. It was released in 2005 and supports all the platform features such as LINQ and the Parallel Framework and targets regular .NET, Silverlight, Windows Store (aka Metro), Mono, in other words anything .NET can be targeted from Oxygene for .NET.
• Java & Android: Oxygene for Java (previously Project ‘Cooper’) was released in 2011 and supports the targeting the Java Virtual Machine and also fully supports the Android toolchain. This means you can target regular Java apps, Java servlets, Java applets, and also build apps for Android phones and tablets. I’ve posted quite a bit already on Android development using Oxygene for Java.
• OS X and iOS: this is what Project ‘Nougat’ is all about. It is in development, and the beta is expected to start in early October 2012, with release in the first half of 2013. ‘Nougat’ will target:
  • 64-bit OS X apps
  • 32-bit ARM v7 iOS apps
  • 32-bit Intel iOS Simulator apps

  There will be no wrappers involved in the generated apps, so nothing like Mono will be necessary. You will get native apps out of Project ‘Nougat’, coded in Pascal but as native as if you’d used Objective-C.

This is a great move forwards to fill in the gaps in what Oxygene can target and now gives a full spread over the major desktop and mobile platforms in one permutation or another.

If interested in native iOS and OS X targeting using all the regular native APIs as nature intended then be sure to read the series (in progress) of posts by RemObjects’ marc hoffman:

• What is “Nougat”? – Part 1 – introduction, emphasising and illustrating the native targeting aspects
• What is “Nougat”? – Part 2 – target platforms, ARC, boxing and references
• What is “Nougat”? – Part 3 – the IDE, building and running an app
• What is “Nougat”? – Part 4 – the build & deploy process

Additionally (and perhaps importantly), if you buy an Oxygene subscription for $499 (that’s the price for a new subscription – it’s $349 for a renewal) you get all three platforms: Oxygene for .NET and Oxygene for Java (and Android) and Project ‘Nougat’ (you’ll get access to the beta and also the shipping product when it comes out in the first half of 2013).

Anyone who’s glimpsed Visual Studio 2012 has seen it shouting at them and wondered why, given the luxury of having both lower and upper case available, Microsoft has chosen to go for all upper case in the menu bar. Well, if you really want to know, read the post on The Visual Studio Blog as that explains their reasoning.

I read it. To be honest it didn’t seem very convincing. There is mention of All Caps being a strong signature element of styling for navigation in Microsoft UIs. They do point at some upper case in a web site and on the Zune, but given the main UI thrust at the moment is Metro^H^H^H^H^H the Modern UI in Windows 8 and on Windows Phone and those don’t appear to focus on upper case I remain dubious.

I am aware that Office 2013 will also be using the upper case motif (you can see it here). This to me and to many who share a certain sensitivity of eyesight is somewhat regrettable.

Fortunately, with Visual Studio at least, you can instruct it to forget all about the upper case fad and just ‘be normal.’ This involves a little registry hackery. Run regedit.exe and in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE hive navigate to the Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General subkey. Add in the DWORD SuppressUppercaseConversion and give it a value of 1. As you might expect, a value of 0 reverts to the short-sighted choice of upper case again.

This trick is getting reasonably well known around the Arpanet, but I’m posting it to help ensure the message is spread as far and as wide as feasible. I’ll cross my fingers that Office 2013 also offers up a trick available to turn off its SHOUTY MENUS.