Behind the Screen

Making the globe a bit more personal

John Kaster — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:23:02 +0000

During the process of updating our web sites to reflect that we are now part of Embarcadero, we also found time to add a little more personalization to the web site. When you select one of our supported locations, the little globe next to the location changes to approximate your location.

I logged out of our web sites so my personal profile information would not affect our default location presentation. Here’s the default "global" globe when you’re not logged in:

After I change my location to "Australia" I see:

After I change my location to "France" I see:

After I change to "Greater China" I see:

(Note that the language also changes to the "default" language for each location, but that’s the way our location support has always worked.)

Our other supported locations also have globes rendered to display something closer to the location selected.

It’s a trivial tweak, but I think it’s important to acknowledge the importance of our customers in every location on the globe.

P.S. The nice new website design was done by Mark Hannah, and rapidly implemented by Jonathan Benedicto.

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Wiki and social bookmarking support on the Developer Network

John Kaster — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 23:37:42 +0000

We just released support for Wiki format and functionality on CDN. I hope this makes it easier for the community to collaborate on content for all CodeGear products.

Go to http://dn.codegear.com/article/38238 for the details.

We also support tagging for all supported human languages on the Developer Network. Go to http://dn.codegear.com/article/38221 for the details.

See you on the Developer Network soon!

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QualityCentral browser client fixes

John Kaster — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:44:45 +0000

I’ve done some minor updates to the QualityCentral browser client.

Updated QC to the new look
Fixed the Javascript navigation code error by removing that Javascript control
Changed the "about" link to point to the QC documentation
Made the option box gray and ensured it will always appear in the top right column
One of the grids did not have links for the title report, so I changed that and also tightened up the headings.
Yorai fixed the left aligned comments (in IE) a couple hours after I posted these fixes. Thanks Yorai!

I hope you like these minor tweaks. We should be able to show you the Ruby on Rails replacement client in a public beta very soon.

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Embarcadero and CodeGear

John Kaster — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:01:13 +0000

By now, many of you have probably seen the announcement about Embarcadero and CodeGear. I’ve received some messages from people outside CodeGear asking me what I think, so I’ll answer here.

There were many potential outcomes from this "spin-off" effort. I think CodeGear and Embarcadero Technologies fit very well together. Honestly, this outcome is just about the best scenario I could expect. Basically, I didn’t dare to be this optimistic!

The complementary combination of our products and our companies is extensive, exciting, and promising. The two companies have a very large area of interest and expertise overlap, without having conflicting product offerings. The combination of the two product lines will lead to extremely productive development solutions for both sets of customers.

Others have written long posts about this already, so I’m not going to belabor the same points.

I just wanted to provide a public answer to the questions I was getting from people, and reiterate that I think this is a great move and a great day for CodeGear’s customers and its employees.

P.S. As you can imagine, I’m going to be really busy working out the details of integrating our various Internet Services with Embarcadero’s, so I hope you’ll understand if I don’t respond to blog comments immediately.

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Did you get the EKON Spring 2008 email?

John Kaster — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 04:28:16 +0000

EKON Spring 2008 is coming up in Germany, and we’re doing some email marketing for it.

If you received the email from CodeGear that was written in German entitled "EKON Spring 2008 - The Road to Delphi!" and can’t read German, I’d like to apologize. I had several people ask me why they received this email, and that’s certainly a valid question.

I’ve asked our marketing folks to find out what caused that email to have a much broader distribution list than it should have, so we can prevent it from happening again. We are also going to be providing many more opportunities for you to subscribe to information relevant to you without us having to email you about it. David I blogged about some of the prototype links for this.

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A fun Delphi programming contest

John Kaster — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 05:59:56 +0000

Zarko Gajic has a fun contest under way on the Delphi about.com site. Here’s a chance to show your stuff!

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Looking for the silver lining

John Kaster — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 05:57:24 +0000

We’re finally at the point where we’re gathering the requirements and wishes for our tagging system for CDN. So, I’m looking at the current tagging system and tag clouds out there to see what I like and don’t like, which things are essential, which things are optional, and which we shouldn’t do.

What tagging system(s) do you like? What tag cloud(s) do you like? We’ll start working on tagging support soon, so if you use the Developer Network, Support site, CodeCentral or QualityCentral at all, I’d love to hear from you about what you like and don’t like with the tagging systems you might be using on other web sites.

Thanks very much for your opinions and suggestions!

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Farewell, Robert Marquardt

John Kaster — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 01:32:35 +0000

I just learned that Robert Marquardt passed away on December 29th, 2007. Many people in the Delphi community will recognize his name. He was a generous and long-time contributor to the Delphi community, and a member of Project JEDI.

Farewell, Robert, and thank you for your kindness and generosity.

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Chat with your favorite Jabber client

John Kaster — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 19:00:38 +0000

We’ve opened up our Jabber port on the CodeGear chat server for chatting with any Jabber client you prefer. See http://dn.codegear.com/article/37274#9GUIJabberclients for more information.

We hope to chat with you soon!

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Free Camtasia download

John Kaster — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 23:43:37 +0000

Camtasia is one of the tools people use to create Developer Network "TV episodes". TechSmith is now offering Camtasia 3 as a free download. (Camtasia 5 is their latest version and has many nice improvements, but Camtasia 3 is still very capable.)

I discussed Camtasia way back when in this blog entry.

You can download the setup file from http://download.techsmith.com/camtasiastudio/enu/312/camtasiaf.exe.

One of the places to get the license file is http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/pcpls.asp.

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