There are still many of the Delphi faithful that cling to the belief that Borland is committed to the future of Delphi. I admire their devotion in spite of what Borland executives have actually said recently.

A lot of things have been going on at the higher levels of Borland's business. Dale Fuller, the CEO for 6 years, has resigned. Borland has posted 2 consecutive quarters of losses. Robert Coates, former Board of Directors member and large shareholder is publically calling for a divestiture of the IDE businesses. Borland's interim CEO Scott Arnold and CFO Ken Hahn conducted a quarterly earnings conference call on August 2nd (I have transcribed a bit of it here). JBuilder revenue has declined more rapidly than previously expected and is going to be based on the Eclipse framework rather than the PrimeTime IDE core.

CodeFactor is my new favorite Delphi tool. I like it because it provides the core elements I need to write Delphi code. It's fast, simple and not bloated. It provides Code Insight, Code Completion and Refactoring capabilities. The author James Jacobson (not to be confused with John or Jake or Captain or Admiral) is extremely responsive and helpful. He continually adds features and fixes bugs in a timely fashion.

It's been a week since I put up the Delphi 2005 survey and I'd like to share my thoughts about it. First and foremost, I'd like to say "thank you" to all the participants; I really enjoyed watching the numbers over the last week.

At the Wednesday night Delphi User Group meeting, Alessandro Federici was kind enough to show RemObject's new dotNET language Chrome. Up until now, I've been watching Chrome from afar and deferring any kind of serious consideration.

Maybe I'm an old school developer who's past his prime (I still code and like to code in Delphi), but for application configuration I prefer INI files rather than XML files; I also like batch files and command line apps.

About 8 months ago I switched keyboards. I had been using an old-skool 101-key standard keyboard. A long time ago I had tried some of my friend's ergonomic keyboards: the Microsoft Natural keyboard and the Kinesis Ergo keyboard. I didn't like either of them.