Delphi 10.1 Berlin Starter Edition
Straight to the point! Delphi is expensive! Though you can get you hands on cracked versions of Delphi (that’s not good BTW!). So I was thinking how use Delphi for building apps. So I shot a mail to Jim McKeeth and he was very generous to inform me about Free download of Delphi 10.1 Berlin Starter Edition.
The first look at the shiny new IDE
- Logo Pretty neat!
It has been quiet some time that I used Delphi (3 months 20 days! at the time of writing this), so it feels great to use Delphi again. This is actually an starter edition, so it doesn’t have everything that mighty Delphi can do.
Also this is the first RAD studio 10.x version I am using and its already making me fall in love with it (all over again!).
GetIt Package Manager
Finally a package manager! I always wanted a way to get packages from the IDE itself instead of hunting the web for recommended tools for the IDE. I guess this is like the NuGet Package Manager for Visual Studio and NPM for Nodejs. There are couple of filter for the app, so you can view the packages which are either free or paid or already installed or purchased (nice)
Pros:
- Thank God, Delphi finally has a package manager! Cons :
- It hangs a lot!, need to improve on the UX.
Messages, Q&A, Forums and Events links?
I am not sure why they thought of adding these to the IDE (Copied from Visual Studio?). I feel these are unnecessary additions to the IDE. They are distracting.
Multi-Device applications
If you didn’t know Delphi can be used to target mobile devices too (iOS and Android). Since I am using the starter edition, I do not have the luxury to create mobile apps, so I cannot really comment on that (Xamarin Visual Studio wins here). Though I have created mobile application in Delphi (XE4, XE5 and XE7), I was not too impressed with the size and performance of the apps. So really looking forward to check out mobile application development capability of RAD Studio 10.x
Over all ?
I am impressed!
PS : Thank you Embarcadero!