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July 22, 2022

How To Build A Windows App

Delphi

Every day something close to a billion people worldwide use different Windows apps for one reason or another and knowing how to build a Windows app is a valuable skill. Think, for instance, how modern graphic designers use apps for photo editing, illustrations, designing vector graphics and a host of other uses. It’s almost impossible to imagine the millions of businesses around the world not using the many different apps and devices for collaboration, task management, communication, and more. Despite strong competition from Apple and the constant pressure from the Linux community, Windows still thoroughly dominates the desktop. Hence, there is a huge demand for windows app development. Once the preserve of a select few ‘computer geeks’, programming is now much more accessible with software design skills being taught widely to students from a broad range of backgrounds. This greater competition means developers need to find ways to build functional apps faster. But, how to build a windows app quickly with less coding? Using the best native app builder software! If you’re looking for the best native app builder, RAD Studio is what you need. RAD Studio is a powerful IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that offers all the features you need for quick app development. In this article, we’ll discuss how to build a windows app efficiently and quickly. We’ll also show you why RAD Studio is the best apps builder software. What is app builder software and how can we use it to build a Windows app? App builder software provides an easy and efficient way to build apps. The purpose of these tools is to simplify the app development process and enhance the productivity of developers. Different developers use different types of app builders, depending on the development approach. For instance, usually, people with little knowledge of coding use no-code app builders or low-code app development platforms. These platforms come with a drag-and-drop interface, allowing users to drag an icon onto the screen quickly. However, if you want a complete development platform that gives you a comprehensive set of tools required for writing and testing code efficiently, IDEs are best for you. IDEs typically consist of a code editor or text editor, a compiler, and a debugger. The code editor is where developers write and edit the source code. The compiler then translates this code into another programming language that a computer can understand. The debugger is helpful in testing the software. Some efficient IDEs like RAD Studio also offer additional features, such as auto code completion, allowing developers to find references to other resources, comment on lines of code, and many more. Why should you use application builder software? If you’re a developer wondering how to build a windows app faster, an efficient app builder is what you need. App builder software for PC offers several benefits: Speeds up time to market App builders and IDEs help businesses bring their products to market faster. The efficient GUI makes it easy to create an application quickly. Collaboration Efficient app builders like RAD Studio offer collaboration features allowing you to work with your team members on an app. Better Code Quality Developers and engineers test codes to eliminate defects and improve software quality. With a powerful app builder like RAD Studio, you can test your code at any time […]

July 21, 2022

TMS Web Core and More with Andrew: Miletus Desktop Intro

TMS Software

Motivation If we’ve got an excellent web application development tool, why do we need desktop applications at all? It’s a good question. And the answer, quite often, is that we don’t. This is what has made the web such an important platform, after all. And also what makes products like Chrome notebooks as popular as they are. You can accomplish quite a lot using just web applications, and for many people, it is now possible to get by exclusively with web applications alone. Products like TMS WEB Core are making this easier all the time by being able to develop substantially better applications with access to more data and more systems than ever before. And without question, web technologies have come quite a long way in a relatively short period of time. However, there are still many situations that come up where the browser sandbox is too restrictive to accomplish certain tasks. And I’m sure we’re all well aware that the browser sandbox and its rules are in place for very good reasons. So while web technologies will continue to evolve, there are some places it just isn’t going to be going anytime soon, and that’s where desktop apps come in. Here are a few examples where a desktop application solution might win out over a web application solution. An application needs access to directly read and write to a local filesystem. Application data is not permitted to leave a location (IE, saving to ‘the cloud’ poses unacceptable security risks). An application needs access to hardware that does not have an equivalent (or performant enough) web interface. Access to the application needs to be more strictly controlled. Application changes need to be more strictly controlled (i.e., SOX, ISO9000-type stuff). Users work in an environment where web browsers aren’t well-supported. Users work in an environment where desktops are strictly locked down in terms of application access. An application needs access to OS-level functionality that a browser does not have access to. Desire to standardize the application interface (avoiding non-standard browser ‘chrome’ or plugins that might interfere). Granted, there are many kinds of complexity at work here, and no doubt there are just as many ways to address certain problems. For example, a web application could be served up within a local network that has no external access at all, ensuring that data doesn’t leave that location. And there’s even an evolving web standard for accessing serial ports. Crazy, really. But in any event, there may be solid reasons for having a desktop version of a web application (or even a mobile version beyond what can be accomplished with a PWA-compliant application). Whatever the rationale, Miletus is here to help address it. Getting Started For our example application, we’re just going to carry on with the Leaflet example that we covered a couple of days ago, an almost minimalist interactive mapping web application. It has been updated slightly to fix a few minor internal errors, to be more ‘responsive’ and resize to fit its container, and also to have a slightly improved geofence data entry interface, where you can cancel the entry, see the points as a polyline while you’re entering them, change the color of the geofence created, as well as delete geofences. To get this all working, we start by creating a new TMS […]

July 21, 2022

How we improved on-call life by reducing pager noise

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To monitor the health of GitLab.com we use multiple SLIs for each service. We then page the on-call when one of these SLIs is not meeting our internal SLOs and burning through the error budget with the hopes of fixing the problem before too many of our users even notice. All of our services SLIs and SLOs are defined using jsonnet in what we call the metrics-catalog where we specify a service and its SLIs/SLOs. For example, the web-pages service has an apdex SLO of 99.5% and multiple SLIs such as loadbalancer, go server, and time to write HTTP headers. Having these in code we can automatically generate Prometheus recording rules and alerting rules following multiple burn rate alerts. Every time we start burning through our 30-day error budget for an SLI too fast we page the SRE on-call to investigate and solve the problem. This setup has been working well for us for over two years now, but one big pain point remained when there was a service-wide degradation. The SRE on-call was getting paged for every SLI associated with a service or its downstream dependencies, meaning they can get up to 10 pages per service since the service has 3-5 SLIs on average and we also have regional and canary SLIs. This gets very distracting, it’s stress-inducing, and it also doesn’t let the on-call focus on solving the problem but just acknowledges pages. For example below we can see the on-call getting paged 11 times in 5 minutes for the same service. What is even worse is when we have a site-wide outage, where the on-call can end up getting 50+ pages because all services are in a degraded state. It was a big problem for the quality of life for the on-call and we needed to fix this. We started doing some research on how to best solve this problem and opened an issue to document all possible solutions. After some time we decided to go with grouping alerts by service and introducing service dependencies for alerting/paging. Group alerts by service The smallest and most effective iteration was to group the alerts by the service. Taking the previous example where the web-pages service paged the on-call 11 times, it should have only paged the on-call once, and shown which SLIs were affected. We use Alertmanager for all our alerting logic, and this already had a feature called grouping so we could group alerts by labels. This is what an alert looks like in our Prometheus setup: ALERTS{aggregation=”regional_component”, alert_class=”slo_violation”, alert_type=”symptom”, alertname=”WebPagesServiceServerApdexSLOViolationRegional”, alertstate=”firing”, component=”server”, env=”gprd”, environment=”gprd”, feature_category=”pages”, monitor=”global”, pager=”pagerduty”, region=”us-east1-d”, rules_domain=”general”, severity=”s2″, sli_type=”apdex”, slo_alert=”yes”, stage=”main”, tier=”sv”, type=”web-pages”, user_impacting=”yes”, window=”1h”} All alerts have the type label attached to them to specify which service they belong to. We can use this label and the env label to group all the production alerts that are firing for the web-pages service. We also had to update our Pagerduty and Slack templates to show the right information. Before we only showed the alert title and description but this had to change since we are now alerting by service rather than by 1 specific SLO. You can see the changes at runbooks!4684. This was already a big win! The on-call now gets a page saying “service web-pages” and then the list of SLIs that are […]

July 21, 2022

How product managers can get more out of user calls

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One of the core jobs of product managers is to speak with users to better understand their needs, pain points and the context in which they operate and use our products. But not all user calls are the same. There are 3 prominent types of user calls: Discovery or problem validation calls Roadmap discussions Solution validation calls Here’s an in-depth look at how we approach the three types of user calls at GitLab. Discovery calls Discovery or problem validation calls are product managers’ most crucial conversations with users. Discovery calls are typically set up to learn about our users in a targeted way. These calls help build a better understanding of users’ pain points. For discovery, we need a recipe for repeatable, comparable user calls. For this reason, we should create an interview script and follow that script on all the user calls. This does not mean these calls are robotic and devoid of improvisation, not at all! The script should provide the backbone of the discussions. We can adjust it either during the call or in advance based on prior knowledge about the user. Good discovery calls typically take the form of a deep-dive conversation: we know the script by heart and can run back and forth around it, always asking the questions that fit the conversation. Finding the right users is one of the most challenging parts of discovery calls. Thankfully, with GitLab, this is relatively easy. We can always reach out to the most active users on issues and invite them to a call. Another technique I employ is to find users in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Kubernetes communities’ Slack channels and articles on Medium. This way, I can also find non-GitLab users, a set of people likely more valuable to interview than existing users. Finally, we can recruit users with the support of the account managers. They are always helpful in connecting PMs with users. Asking the users about their needs shows them that we genuinely care about them. There are at least two distinct discovery calls: PM-led or UX-led. UX research typically works on projects with a strict scope. For PM-driven calls, a great framework is “Continuous discovery” calls by Teresa Torres. With continuous discovery, we build a deep understanding of our users and get well-understood opportunities. The technique allows us to get a broad view and to dive deep into specific aspects of our problem space when needed. Roadmap discussions Roadmap discussion calls are typically initiated by sales or account management teams. Product managers are asked to join the prospect/customer call to strengthen our positions and show how much we care for the customer. To prepare for roadmap discussions, PMs should have an effective way to present the roadmap. This typically happens in the form of slides. A diligent PM might even prepare something specifically for the client. During these calls, the user/customer/prospect will typically ask the questions, and the PMs respond. Our role in these calls is to represent the truth. We might be tempted to paint a rosier picture about the current or expected state of the product than is actually true, and we should avoid making time-bound promises. What are the expected outcomes of roadmap discussions? They can help strengthen our position with the user. Remember that these calls […]

July 21, 2022

How to quickly (and successfully) onboard engineers

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No one ever said hiring was easy. As a matter of fact, talent hiring and retention are some of the hardest aspects to get right for any software company. According to a recent article at Developer Pitstop the average engineer will only stay at a job for an average of two years before moving on, and this tenure is shrinking as time goes on. When we look at the average timeline for engineers in a new role we usually see something like: Learning and adaptation (3 / 6 months): Coming to grips with the new company, team, and their processes. Creating value for the organization (6 / 12 months): Adding value to the business by becoming a functioning member of the team. Becoming a role expert (6 / 18 months): Owning the role completely and helping to shape the direction of the team. At GitLab we pride ourselves on an outstanding onboarding process to reduce the amount of time an engineer will spend in the learning and adaptation bracket and accelerate their evolution into the creating value for the organization bracket. We do this for two main reasons: Quicker integration: We aim to have engineers ship production code in less than one week, and fully onboard them in less than three months. Reduce turnover: Engineers who have an awesome onboarding experience tend to stay with the same company longer. The bottom line is that with these benefits, investing in an amazing onboarding process gives you the highest ROI on your hiring initiatives. So, now that we know why we need to ensure we onboard quickly and correctly, let’s talk about how we do it at GitLab. Overview 💯 Before day one 💥 It’s all about the onboarding issue 🥂 Pick the right onboarding buddy 👌 Pair, pair, and more pairing 🖐 All the coffee chats 🤘 Tailor the experience to the role 🚢 Ship some code in a week or less 💬 Let’s get (and give) some feedback 💯 Before day one The best onboarding processes start as soon as the candidate has officially accepted the offer. This is done in a few ways: An onboarding issue is created with tasks for the hiring manager, their buddy, and People Experience (HR). The hiring manager selects the right onboarding buddy for the engineer and communicates expectations (more on this later). The engineer’s accounts (Email, GitLab account, Okta, etc) are created and their hardware is shipped. GitLab reaches out via email to let the candidate know what the onboarding process looks like. The hiring manager reaches out to the engineer via email to set up a coffee chat on Day 1 as the initial process might seem overwhelming. For us, the most important aspect is communication with the engineer to ensure they are set up for success. We provide them with access to their onboarding issue, helpful video guides for getting started, and a primer on how to navigate our handbook like a pro. The reason this is so important is that we know if we stop communicating with the engineer after signing, we are at risk of creating uncertainty, introducing inefficiency, or even losing them to another offer during that time. 💥 It’s all about the onboarding issue At GitLab, our onboarding issue is the most effective tool we have for […]

July 20, 2022

What Is The Best Graphs And Network Visualization Tool On Windows?

Delphi

Did you know that it’s simple to use some truly excellent Python libraries to boost your Delphi app development on Windows? These libraries are very easy to use and produce wonderful ways to produce graphs and network visualization. Adding Python to your Delphi code toolbox can enhance your app development by bringing in new capabilities that allow you to provide innovative and powerful solutions to your app’s users, combining the best of Python with the supreme low-code and unparalleled power of native Windows development that Delphi provides. Are you looking for how to build a GUI for graph and network visualization library? You can create, manipulate, and study the structure, dynamics, and functions of complex networks with NetworkX on Delphi. This article will demonstrate how to create a Delphi GUI app dedicated to the NetworkX library. Watch this video by Jim McKeeth for a thorough explanation of why you can love both Delphi and Python at the same time: Get to know with Embarcadero Python Ecosystem Before we dive in more into the NetworkX4D GUI prototype, let’s get to know first about Embarcadero Python Ecosystem: And here are the Embarcadero Python Ecosystem licenses: Which you can know more about them from the following webinars by Jim McKeeth: What do we mean by graphs and network visualization? In mathematics, and more specifically in graph theory, a graph is a structure consisting of a set of objects, some of which are “related.” The objects correspond to mathematical abstractions known as vertices (also known as nodes or points), and each pair of related vertices is known as an edge (also called a link or line). A graph is typically represented diagrammatically as a set of dots or circles for the vertices, joined by lines or curves for the edges. Graphs are one of the topics covered by discrete mathematics. Graphs are the fundamental subject of graph theory. J. J. Sylvester coined the term “graph” in this context in 1878, referring to a direct relationship between mathematics and chemical structure (what he called chemico-graphical image). Networks are all around us, and they are extremely important in our lives. Communication networks, social media networks, biological networks, and so on are all examples of networks. Here are to name of a few examples of graphs and network visualizations: The World’s social networks shown as a network graph A protein interaction network Coauthorship network of 2014 breaking news articles What is the NetworkX graphs and network visualization Library? NetworkX logo. Image source: networkx.org. NetworkX is a Python package for creating, manipulating, and studying complex networks’ structure, dynamics, and functions. NetworkX provides: tools for studying the structure and dynamics of social, biological, and infrastructure networks; a standard programming interface and graph implementation suitable for a wide range of applications; a rapid development environment for collaborative, multidisciplinary projects; an interface to existing numerical algorithms and code written in C, C++, and FORTRAN; and the ability to work with large nonstandard data sets without difficulty. You can use NetworkX to load and save networks in standard and nonstandard data formats, generate many different types of random and classic networks, analyze network structure, build network models, design new network algorithms, draw networks, and much more. What are the prerequisites for the NetworkX Library? You will need […]

July 20, 2022

Check Out This Fascinating AI Brain Data Measuring Device!

Delphi, Noutați

A few months ago, Jim Mckeeth and Yilmaz Yoru discussed the rapid evolution of technology and how Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are shaping the future. Those that are once a concept are now being materialized through various innovative technology with the help of modern ide software, programming languages, and libraries. During the webinar, Jim Mckeeth demonstrated a brain data measuring hardware known as the EMOTIV EPOC EEG Hardware, a gadget that is designed for scalable and contextual human brain research and provides access to professional-grade brain data. How does this innovative gadget work? As shown in the video, the gadget works by placing the electroencephalography (EEG) sensors on the scalp. This picks up and records the electrical activity in your brain. It gives a 3D real-time visualization of what parts of the brain are active. The records may not be as accurate as Elon Musk’s Neuralink, Emotiv still effectively shows which part of the brain is active as well as the wavelengths that can be manually configured using the Emotiv software. The reason why Mckeeth included this demonstration as part of the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence webinar is that the concept behind it is very much the same as the neural network. An artificial neural network is an attempt to simulate the network of neurons that make up a human brain so that the computer will be able to learn things and make decisions in a human-like manner. This is the same technology used in facial recognition software. While our brain is still more complex than all the computer hardware we have today, in theory, we can still achieve the same level of complexity with better computing power and better hardware. To see how this amazing device works, feel free to watch the demo video below.

July 20, 2022

Introducing the new Adobe Substance 3D plug-in for Unity

Noutați

Whether you want to create an immersive world, establish your portfolio, or bring fresh ideas to life, optimized material workflows can help you accomplish your goals quickly. That’s why we’ve teamed up with Adobe to present the new Adobe Substance 3D plug-in on the Unity Asset Store. With the Adobe Substance 3D plug-in, artists can save time typically spent switching between tools. This works by leveraging exposed parameters on a Substance material (.SBSAR file) right in Unity, to achieve a wide variety of looks for stronger overall visuals. Substance parameters enable real-time texture updates in-Editor and at runtime. Such parametric materials can be created either through Substance 3D Designer, which supports both Unity Standard and Standard (specular) shaders, or online via Substance 3D Assets and Community Assets libraries.

July 19, 2022

WPF vs WinForms: Windows Application Development Guide

Delphi

If you’re a developer who wants to create Windows-based applications, you have many development options. Two such options from Microsoft are WPF and WinForms. It can be confusing to choose the best UI library for your project. In this guide, we’ll compare and contrast the two WPF vs WinForms technologies for Windows application development and show you a better alternative. WPF vs WinForms: What is the WPF Windows Presentation Foundation? Windows Presentation Foundation was presented as a revolutionary new presentation framework for Microsoft Windows that would provide developers with capabilities to create what Microsoft believed to be compelling user experiences. It featured a managed code programming model called WinFX (Windows Framework). At the time of its release, WPF was an advancement in building desktop applications for developers using previous Microsoft toolchains such as WinForms. It allowed designers to create XAML-based user interfaces which were adopted by the later UWP Windows application development stack. UWP has now been deprecated. While WPF has some advantages, there are some potential downsides to keep in mind when deciding whether or not to use WPF for your development projects. One such downside is that WPF can be more difficult to learn and use than other UI frameworks. WPF also has a relatively steep learning curve, and it can be time-consuming to create custom controls and layouts. Additionally, WPF can be computationally expensive, particularly for complex applications with large amounts of data. How does WPF relate to UWP? A quick comparison of all the information between the two technologies is listed here: WPF was launched in 2006 as part of .NET Framework 3.0 while UWP was released in 2015 with Windows 10. WPF was targeted at the long-prevailing Windows XP OS while UWP was meant for Windows 10 development. WPF provided support for PC, Notebook, and Tablet while UWP could support PC, Notebook, Tablet, and newer devices including Microsoft Phone, Xbox, IoT, and the Surface Hub. Application models for WPF included the classic Windows (Win32) application platform, for runtime the .NET framework was available and supported programming languages including C#, VB and F# On the other hand UWP was designed to run on various device types, supported the C# or VB languages, and for runtime it used WinRT. As far as the UI technology stack is concerned, WPF was built from scratch and had more than 80% managed code. XAML UI is the complete new native UI stack that comes with UWP. WPF rendering handled the vector graphics UI based on DirectX and UWP offered the same. Customization was very flexible and powerful for WPF to adapt and restyle UI controls, whereas UWP was familiar to WPF but not that powerful. With WPF adaptation of control behavior is possible with the .NET API and with UWP the adaptation of control behavior is done with WinRT API. WPF application distribution has no limitations. It does not depend on an App Store, while UWP only distributes to the Microsoft Store. The performance of WPF compared to managed code is slower than native code and needs more memory. In the case of UWP, apps written in C# or VB are compiled to .NET Native. This way the app resembles the high-performance of native apps. In terms of long-term support, WPF is supported as part of the .NET and UWP […]

July 19, 2022

Everything You Need To Create iOS Cross Platform Apps

Delphi

Here are the slides and links for the “Everything you need to create iOS cross platform apps” webinar presented by Embarcadero MVP Ian Barker and Tech Partner and MVP Serge Pilko on 19th July 2022. When will there be a replay of the “Everything You Need To Create iOS Cross Platform Apps” webinar? The replay will be posted on the Embarcadero social media accounts, and we’ll also update this blog post with a link. It usually takes a day or two for the reply to become available. Links mentioned in the “Create iOS Cross Platform Apps” webinar Official Apple Developer site (to register as a developer and where you need to create the various certificates you’ll need): https://developer.apple.com Read more about the the Firemonkey FMX App Low Code wizard. You can also watch the following RAD Studio Low Code App Wizard video mentioned in the webinar Here is a recent article on “how to build iOS apps without a Mac“: How To Build iOS Apps Without A Mac Copies of the Create iOS Cross Platform Apps webinar slides More information on the PAServer application: https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Sydney/en/PAServer,_the_Platform_Assistant_Server_Application After adding iOS as a platform to the project – right click and select “edit connection” This is where you enter the details of your Mac which is running PAServer After making the connection, the next step is to synchronize the SDK from the Mac onto the PC and into RAD Server You can blame Ian’s wife for the kitten background! Here’s the simple app running on an iPhone – in Dark mode You can download a free trial copy of RAD Studio Delphi right now and see for yourself how easy it is to create iOS cross platform apps! Reduce development time and get to market faster with RAD Studio, Delphi, or C++Builder. Design. Code. Compile. Deploy. Start Free Trial Upgrade Today Free Delphi Community Edition Free C++Builder Community Edition

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