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?
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?
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