You don't MK the customer

Your reviewer found gems on FL Studio's forum.

Remember the issue about 64-bits where your reviewer wrote:
"2) Video/Sound editors. Did you see that cool 64-bit Video/Sound editor that had no 4gigs limitation, could work twice as fast on 64-bit PCs and outsells every stupid 32bit application on the market? This is reality now. " (Link)

The people at FL Studio (written using Delphi) have been deleting all the complaints on their forums and posting nasty replies to customers who deeply complain about their products.

Rule #1 in customer service: You don't MK your customers.
When it comes to customer service, the people who use Delphi treat their customers like utter garbage and do all sorts of bad things to their customers, like false advertising (or misleading claims on website), refusing to honor refunds, renewing subscriptions without customer's permissions (what's that charge on the credit card from?) and the usual same kind of shabby treatment your reviewer received.

This small video segment from TruTV.com (link) tells it very nicely what happens to staff who heckle customers - they get fired and laid off.

Les Gold (owner) says: "You don't MK your customer, period".

In a bad economy, this kind of behavior is not tolerated at other software development companies. If there's an issue with the software - they listen to customers and get issues resolved.

With software written with Delphi, it's no wonder the Delphi developers complain they have no job, or cannot find a job or have few customers - They do the usual practice of "one-time-only"customer - the customer buys software with misleading or on pretense of false claims written on their website, or have very buggy application (either way) and then don't refund the customer back. When customer complains, they go and say abusive things to their customers.

Such as:

and:

Let's face the facts:
1) There will never be a 64-bit version of any Delphi product until the makers of the Delphi compiler produce a Delphi 64-bit compiler. For many people (including your reviewer), that is too-little, too-late. That could be two months from now or possibly, 6 months from now.

(Some people will get their houses foreclosed, lose their job, go to jail for stealing because of no money, etc. in the mean-time.)

FruityLoops studio "claims" to have a migration plan to 64-bits. That will be X days after the 64-bit Delphi compiler is released. Your reviewer does some date calculations on FL studio's behalf:

Best case for FL Studio:Suppose X days = 150 days + after the Delphi 64-bit compiler is released.
Suppose Delphi 64-bit compiler is released on April 1st.
Add 200 days = approximately October 2011 + possibly even more to get everything stable.

Worse case for FL Studio:Suppose Delphi 64-bit compiler is released on Nov 1st.
Add 365 days = approximately November 2012 + possibly even more to get everything stable.

Worst-worst case for FL Studio:Suppose Delphi 64-bit compiler is released on Nov 1st, but unstable and result EXE crashes. New release of Delphi 64-bit compiler v2 is released on Nov 1st 2012.
Add 365 days = approximately November 2013 + possibly even more to get everything stable.



2) The people who promise on 64-bits have jumped ship and moved on. WinRAR, formerly built with C++ Builder is now written in Visual C++ x64 and with some parts in Intel C++ compiler. When they moved on, how confident are they going to go back?

3) The people who moved towards 64-bits have different attitude: they know how to treat their customers with respect and decency to sell a product that works.

4) Visual C++ is not that bad. With Intel Core i7-2600K system retailing at US$1,000 (source: Amazon, others) you can get good affordable development system without too much fuss and Visual Studio C++ 2010 compiles in 1 second on average. On some projects, the Delphi compiler is slower and takes 10 or 20 seconds to compile.

Delphi has i386/i486/Pentium floating point while Visual Studio C++ 2010 have SSE/SSE2/SSE3 optimization which means faster EXEs.

In mean time, sit back and watch the entertainment

:)

Delphi Valentine

[From a friend who asked for advice on money]

Delphi was released on Valentine's day on 1995.
Your reviewer gives a humorous run down things Delphi developers might purchase over the years and suggestions what to do next...

From a different point of view:
Since majority of the Delphi developers on the newsgroups are men who are trying to find a Valentine and most of them are so broke they can't seem to save up any money to get hitched or married...


The twelve days of Christmas Valentine
On the day before Valentine, my true love asked me to help pay for:

One Delphi XE Architect costing US$3,499.00,
IntraWeb Ultimate license costing E249.00,
RemObjects license costing US$399.00,

DevExpress license costing US$1,499.00,
RaveReports Architect costing US$399.00,
WpTools Premium license costing E890,
LMD Complete license costing E349,
TMS Complete license at E695,
AlmDev mega life bundle at US$269,
12 Months of TDM WebHosting at 110 pounds per year
(and if possible, can you pay for the 2nd year renewals?)
(and if possible, buy a 12month subscription the to Pascal Blaise Magazine?)

... and I told my friend to asked her boyfriend to cut his credit card and go for debt counseling, then tell him to learn Visual C++ and ASP.NET and realize there is a wonderful life after Delphi. I told my friend if her boyfriend can't seem to pay the bills and get the latest [tools], then her boyfriend should stop the Delphi delusion.

64-bit truths.

On the enterprise side, one developer is standing up against Embarcadero's cash-cow policy and constantly having to release one Delphi version (due to SA) every year.

http://64bitdelphi.com/index.php*

Quoted:
"We call on developers, sign the petition, protest at Embarcadero events and refuse to buy anymore products from them until they deliver on their promises and deliver a roadmap they will follow. We are sick of the lies and this circus is hurting our businesses and our future."


* Update: goes to invalid website now.

Evolution of Delphi Help: Conferences instead

Your reviewer is quite amused over the latest conferences (virtual or real-world) held in various places around the world.

Help Wanted... Conferences available insteadThe biggest problem in the Delphi community is getting people to pay for help files, documentation, and other ways to assist them... the latest solution is to get them to pay for expensive conferences and workshops instead.

In Marco Cantu's book, there's even advertisements from two Delphi vendors about their products, in the same vein as the older DelphiMagazine product inserts that used to be distributed with every copy of Delphi.

High costs of DocumentationThe problem with help documentation is that most of the people who write the help files, documentation and such charge quite high prices, like US$2,000 for one project, or US$50 per hour on average. Do the maths. In order to get US$2,000 in profits, one component developer must work like a dog to make components, then build a website... and then lose all profits when the work gets pirated. For example, get US$1500 in sales..., that's barely enough to scape by living expenses, car, food, and such and soon, poverty takes over and everything goes downhill. Would a component vendor expect to get US$199 paid for his components or library? In this day and age, many developers went out of business or gone bankrupt.

Developers in other languages...In the end, the person who develops in Delphi would be better-off using other languages, like PHP, Ruby or even Objective-C...

For example, your reviewer wrote some iPad apps. 10,000 people downloaded your reviewer's apps. That is US$2 x 10,000 = US$20,000 (around US$16,000 after expenses) and it continues on daily basis. I get few customer feedback because my QA person did a good job.

On the Delphi front, if someone downloads a component 10,000 times, the person gets US$0/- (or maybe deduct US$250 for server hosting) and if it goes on ... the business will collapse soon. Of course, you ask a Delphi developer to program in Objective-C, the person just shuts his brains out and says he cannot program in Objective-C or it is too difficult or too hard.

Delphi Help 3.0: The Conference and Workshop instead.The latest fad is speaking on conferences and organizing expensive seminars.

[One person who will be sorely missed from the speaking circuit is Chad Hower. He is low-profile and fugitive. Your reviewer would like to see him speak, provided he does not get arrested at the airport or get into further troubles :)]

Instead of spending ages writing help files, the speaker write maybe, 20-30 pages and put them on a power-point (the speaker notes seems to be always hidden from view) and the hand-outs are so brief that after the conference, nobody knows what to do with them except put them on the shelf.

These speakers seem to have this bad habit of using their products with subscriptions so the speaker gets all the money first whether or not the product succeeds. If the project goes multi-year without any fruits, the speaker/vendor will still want the more and more money. The best way to stop this is to replace it with codes that are not cash-hungry, like everyone replacing RemObjects with PHP or ASP.NET RESTFUL API, or for that matter, replacing IntraWeb with PHP MVC or ASP.NET MVC or Ruby MVC. (Damn! there is no good Delphi MVC!)

What do you get after these conference? An indirect way to get educated on the latest trends (although somewhat expensively) and some head knowledge. But when you ask for documentation how to do this or go beyond the conference and develop real-world product, the documentation is ... missing.


It also works good. Those who get the conference notes are less likely to share their notes (unless they spend time scanning it and uploading it) and those who do not come to the conferences do not get the speaker notes (depending on situation) or materials handed out at the conferences.

Expensive Help
In some way, conferences and workshops are ways how Delphi documentation have evolved. Mr. Marco Cantu prices his Delphi 2010 (and other handbooks) at very low prices while conferences are 2 or 3 day events where money is present and speakers are paid highly to speak.

In some ways, it is a good thing for Delphi, that people are paying money to get informed and documentation. In a bad way, press F1, where's the documentation or even 3rd party documentation?

Nightmare on Delphi Street

Subscriptions takes a turn for the nasty.Your reviewer stayed quiet for a while and seeing this, had to blog about it.

The idea of subscriptions, was to give vendors an annual upgrade fee. Rather than spend ages developing and then showing new features, many vendors now just say, oh, your subscription expired and you need to renew soon or lose out on benefits.

- The newer trend is to start to back-date your subscriptions to when it expired and then force you to pay for it.[1]

- Some vendors are even nastier to link the subscription to ShareIT (not easily to cancel the subscription or well hidden so that when a year passes they charge your credit card again).

- Using ShareIT is also interestingly effective: When you buy another software product, they tack-on the subscription to your newer credit card,

- Some vendors link the subscription to Debit Accounts, where they ask for your ABN number and checking number, telephone records and driver license. The purpose, it seems, is when you don't pay up, they will harass you for the money or call you up and file a complaint to the credit card bureau that you have unpaid debts and this may affect your credit history.

This is very, very hurtful practice and is telling that you owe someone a living by using their product and to renew the "subscription", you need to pay the amount to renew plus when the subscription last lapsed.

Thus, if you last paid in Nov 2008 and want to renew in Nov 2010, you need also to pay for Nov 2009 subscription as well. Depending on where you live...if you don't pay up, they start to harass you to pay-up.

This hurtful predatory subscription practice deprives people of freedom of choice to choose libraries:

- Newer vendors who are developing competing components will have their revenues reduced because customers have no money to pay for their product.


- Vendors who practice this kind of subscription have no incentive to develop products anymore because their products have a monopoly in the market and this kind of pricing is like putting a tax on software development. Every dollar you earn seems to slip away from your hand.

- Newer people who want to use Delphi will get put-off with this kind of subscription pricing. It's like asking you to be a guarantor for a loan on somebody's behalf.


Lot of Delphi developers will get hurt.


[1] https://forums.embarcadero.com/thread.jspa?threadID=48097

List of vendors who stopped supporting Delphi, Part 2

Rigor Mortis
Rigor Mortis occurs when a person or animal dies, the muscles start to stiffen and you can only move the joints by force, breaking them in the process.

In relation to Delphi, it relates to the number of Delphi vendors who once developed in Delphi and then dropped Delphi, the components and libraries decay and depreciate over time.

The original list is here. The newer vendors are:

Vendors who are out of business:
1) Dream Company (their website now redirects to Atrium/ or no longer available for sale)
2) DictaSoft.com, Layout Components. 
3) CrystalVCL.net, Crystal VCL and other components
4) Cando Framework
5) RHITech.com, Excel Add-in component
6) DScriptVCL.com, Delphi Scripting VCL components
7) CSS-Software.com, CSS Component Suite
8) JB Components/ JB Component Suite
9) CytonResearch.com, VCL Component Packs
10) Codecellerate.com, Drawing Engine,
11) EZCad Soft, EZSoft Engineering
12) ValdSoft, VSLib component package
13) AriseSoft, AriseSoft Shell Component Pack (and others)
14) CoolPaint.com, HTML tokenizer, HTML mini-viewer, Cool Chart
15) ksv.hypermart.net, Handmade VCL Components
16) alphadomino.ru, Gantt Chart components
17) ta4delphi.com, Technical Analysis Charting components
18) praktical.com, Praktical Organic button components.
19) maverick.co.uk, Aqua Mac-looking components

20) FlatStyle.de, Flat Style Components
21) SlickTools.com, InfoMatters office components,
22) MediaPilot.com, Installation components
23) Intag.de, DxComponent Collection

Vendors who stopped supporting one of their Delphi components/ or all of their products:
1) MicroOlap.com, Packet Sniffer for Delphi, end-of-life
2) SciBit.com MySQL Components, end of life.
3) KsDev.com, Block Engine, Office VCL (disappeared from their site)
4) AlphaAsp.com Alpha Corporation, Alpha Units, Alpha Interceptor (disappeared from their site).
5) Djordje Peric, PDJ Packs (their website is no longer available)
6) CodeBot.com, CodeBot library (no longer available for download)
7) SuiPack.com, KeyDB (formerly from SUIPack)
8) Syntetix.com, Theme Control
9) CoolDev.com (All their Delphi products are now freeware)
10) 9spice.net RapidSolutions, RapidTree, 9Rays Treeview,
11) Willmark.ru, WillMark Tree Wizard
12 GeoCities/Stephan Marais - Open Sybase CT-Library Library
13) TekhneLogos.com, PowerCad, supposedly given a non-existent 10% discount on Torry's.
14) Baltsoft.com, ProjectPlus components.
15) Tops.com.pl, SMSC Delphi components (cited as "no demand" or "very low response")
16) Timelesstech.com, all their Delphi components (Lock & Key, Fax components)

 
Vendors who have not updated their site for long time:
1) Borshack (their website not updated since 2004)


Others:

1) LosLab, EZPDFLibrary (the vendor plagiarized QuickPDF Library)

Vulnerabilities

Thy found a vulnerability in thine neighbour's software land. What should dost do?

a) Go ye first to town hall and distribute thine neighbour's goods to thy peasants.
b) Go at night to thine neightbour's plot of land and harvest thine grain from thine neighbour's land.
c) Inform thy neighbour ye padlock (i.e., copy-protection) is flawed and requires amendment.


What should thy do?
Discuss...