So I live G+ed my way through the whole Sydney ADUG event. Quite tiring really, trying to focus on what was being said and simultaneously summarise it for 4 hours.

Here’s a few of my highs and lows of the morning. Take all of this with a grain of salt though. It was a whirlwind morning and it’s highly likely I’ve misunderstood or mispresented at least one or two things.

The Good

• LiveBindings have received a major revamp and should no longer require enormous walk-throughs and additional lines of code just to replace a few getter and setter methods.
• Android support is coming with the iOS support.
• To my untrained eye (I don’t run Win8) the Metropolis style applications appear very similar to other Windows 8 application screenshots I’ve seen. In particular the LiveTile of a Metropolis application is an actual WinRT LiveTile the same as any other.
• Metropolis applications can run on the Intel and Atom chipset mobile devices such as the Surface Pro tablets and have access to all the hardware of the device.
• Converting a VCL or FMX form to a Metropolis form is done in just a few clicks. I’m interested to see what it would be like for more complex applications though.
• FireMonkey is receiving native OS controls “where it makes sense”.
• FireMonkey has a sensors and services API to access hardware on mobile devices.
• Actions, Anchors and Layout Managers for FireMonkey.
• The HTML5 Builder IDE looks pretty sexy.

The Bad

• Still no frames in FireMonkey
• Premium styles for FireMonkey being sold separately – surely they can’t charge a lot for these and if that’s the case won’t it be more trouble than it’s worth.
• Mobile Studio (iOS and Android support) will most likely be sold separately and a Delphi license won’t have it bundled. As yet it’s not clear if it will be bundled within a RAD Studio license.
• HTML5 Builder jQueryMobile applications replace the default flow layout behaviour and adaptability of regular jQueryMobile apps with the same absolute positioning and screensizes found in RadPHP

The Missing

• Any mention of VCL enhancements – to be honest though I’m not sure what I’d like them to do to the VCL that hasn’t already been done by a third party vendor.
• No new language features for Delphi apart from what is required to support mobile devices.
• iOS support – FMX and the Delphi language enhancements required for mobile support have moved past what FreePascal supports. It’s a shame the new “Mobile Studio” isn’t ready yet but I certainly wouldn’t want them to waste time trying to bring FreePascal up to the level they need just for this release.

These are just the highlights that spring to mind right now, tomorrow if they haven’t already been covered elsewhere I’ll go back to my G+ posts and find some more for you.