All our current software is developed in Delphi using the VCL. But we are now planning to seriously move over to Firemonkey as this offers the possibility to target multi-platforms. Firemonkey however means learning something quite new.
When I travel I always carry my MacBook Air of more than one year old. I wanted to be able to do some Delphi development while being on the road thus increasing my possibilities to get experience with Firemonkey. But a Mac is not a Windows pc and the Delphi IDE runs on Windows.
My MacBook Air was then a high end model; 256 Gb SSD harddisk and 4 Gb internal memory. I decided to install Parallels Desktop and Windows 7 Professional. Parallels is great. Installation is fast and setting up a new Virtual machine is easy. I found an official ISO set of Windows 7 and managed to install this on my new virtual machine. Maybe it was my imagination but it looked much faster as on my regular Windows desktop. After this I installed Delphi XE4.
So far only trial versions but in a relative short time I managed to compile my first Hello world in Windows on my Mac.
After this it became more difficult as I had to set up the PAServer that Delphi needs, but needs to run on the Mac. This was a bit more technical as I had to find the IP address of my Mac. Luckily I have a great book and some online sources which guided me through. Important is to remember that I you set up a password in Delphi, you will need to use this in the PAServer. Using a password is advisable as I read on discussions that without it will not work without problems. So I stick to using PAServer with password. Disadvantage is that you need to enter this every time you run PAServer.
After this I was able to instruct my Delphi to compile my Hello world (made in Firemonkey) for Max OS X. And without any problem I got the program with exactly the same lines of Object pascal code to work on Mac OS.
After this of course I wanted to try to compile for iOS as well. For this you need to get even more technical. I will not get in to the details. Important is to remember that XE4 has no support for iOS 7 and it is best to install an older Xcode. I used version 4.6.1 and the command line tools 4.6.2. After this I did manage to build a special iOS app in Firemonkey and compile this directly to the iOS Simulator.
Tomorrow I will try to do this on my iPhone as well. But to do this I need to even get a bit more in to the details of Apple iOS development.
I am really surprised and pleased that I am able to run Windows including Delphi XE4 on my MacBook Air. Of course there are some setbacks like a Mac does not know about right click, but I can live with that.
I am now able to develop on the road for several platforms and I am thus able to learn more about programma in Firemonkey. After starting out with Turbo Pascal 4, upgrading all the time, moving to Windows development with Delphi 1 and now multi-platform in XE4 and using Firemonkey.
P.S. As we first need to learn to make effective use of Firemonkey, we decided not to upgrade to XE5 or XE6. XE6 even supports Android, but let's first learn how to make good use of Firemonkey.
