Jacob Thurman

http://www.twodesk.com/castalia

I’m pleased to announce the release of Castalia 2010.3, the newest version of the popular Delphi IDE tools package.

Castalia 2010.3 adds support for Delphi/RAD Studio XE, as well as some other minor bug fixes and enhancements. If you haven’t tried Castalia yet, now is a great time to try!

With Castalia, you can:

• Navigate through code faster
• Understand code better
• Quickly and easily refactor your code to improve its design
• Streamline your coding so you get more done
• Find errors in your code before the compiler does
• Analyze your code to find sections that will be hardest to maintain
• …And more!

Current subscribers can download the latest release at http://subscribe.twodesk.com. Everyone else should try a free trial at http://www.twodesk.com/castalia/download.html.

–Jacob

Castalia 2010.2.1 is now available. This release includes three important fixes:

* Error message appears when double-clicking a line in the code analysis report
* Certain rare situations can cause the parser thread to lock up, causing 100% CPU usage and preventing the navigation toolbar from updating
* Incorrect syntax evaluation for class helpers

Current subscribers can get it at http://subscribe.twodesk.com. Everyone else can download a free trial at http://www.twodesk.com/castalia

I’m very excited to announce the release of the newest version of our suite of Delphi tools, Castalia 2010.2.

This update adds new code metric tools that help you find the areas of your code that would benefit most from refactoring, and help you get a handle on the general quality of your code (http://www.twodesk.com/castalia/code_analysis.html)

In addition, this update includes a number of bug fixes and performance tweaks.

If you’re a current customer, you can download this new release from the customer service site at http://subscribe.twodesk.com. If you’re not, come download a 30-day free trial at http://www.twodesk.com/castalia

I thought I had the next Castalia ready to go out the door, and was just doing some final testing to make sure things worked well in all versions of Delphi, when weird problems started cropping up. In a nutshell, I’ve got some very exciting new features I’ve created, and one of those things requires a large amount of data to be displayed in a grid. I used Mike Lischke’s excellent and ubiquitous VirtualTreeView for the grid, but in the last several days it’s become apparent that that was a bad idea.

The latest and greatest version of VirtualTreeView is incompatible with Delphi 5, so I went back a few versions to the last that was compatible. Unfortunately, that version is buggy (the kind of buggy that brings Delphi to a screeching halt in a wave of access violations) in Delphi 2009 and Delphi 2010.

So that leaves me a little stuck on the data display, and it’s probably going to take a little time to get things sorted out and figure out the right way to do things. Thanks for your patience!

A little while ago I launched a new product called “ScreenSketcher,” which was a tool for creating enlightened user interface mockups.

As of today, the ScreenSketcher product has been sold to Coding Robots. You can find their ScreenSketcher product page at http://www.screensketcher.com.

Coding Robots is already doing some great things with the product. They’ve fixed some bugs, enhanced the design elements and improved the usability of the program. I’m excited to see what they do going forward with what I started!

From the creators of the Flash sensation Boomshine comes a devious new game where hand/eye co-ordination and a lightning-quick reaction time spell the difference between success and failure. Hundreds of colorful particles floating in the ether – and it’s your job to put them all together. Click and hold down the mouse button to make a ring around the dots, and watch them all gather in the center. With every ring you create you’ll get closer and closer to your target… but miss the target, even by one, and the nucleus is ruined. How quickly can you complete all fifteen levels without making a single mistake? The challenge is on…

Danny Miller and I just released a new game for iPhone called Obechi. It’s a native iPhone version of the flash game at http://www.k2xl.com/games/obechi, and it’s quite addictive.

Find it on the iTunes App Store.

I put Castalia 2010.1 out on the servers this morning. This is a bugfix release that fixes a number of Access Violations that occur when closing files.

Current subscribers can get it at http://subscribe.twodesk.com, everyone else can check out the trial at http://www.twodesk.com/castalia.

Castalia 2009.3 is now available. The big deal here is Delphi 2010
support, but I’ve also added a few more “smart keys” that are available
in every edition:

* Smart Parenthesis: Highlight some text and press the ‘(’ key, and the
text will be surrounded with parenthesis.

* Smart Brackets: Highlight some text and press the ‘[’ key, and the
text will be surrounded with brackets.

* Smart Braces: Highlight some text and press the ‘{’ key, and the text
will be surrounded with braces.

As always, customers with current subscriptions can get it from the
customer service site at http://subscribe.twodesk.com.  Everyone else
can try a free trial at http://www.twodesk.com/castalia/download.html.

More information about Castalia is available at http://www.twodesk.com/castalia

–Jacob

Castalia 2009.2.1 is now available. This update fixes a critical defect where switching desktop presets or running a project could cause the IDE to crash.

Users with a current subscription can get it at http://subscribe.twodesk.com, everyone else can try it free for 30 days at http://www.twodesk.com/castalia/download.html.

This one has taken a long time to figure out, and special thanks to a couple of dedicated customers who did some extra testing and helped me narrow it down.

I’m very excited to announce the latest version of Castalia, the ultimate tool for Delphi developers.

The major focus of Castalia 2009.2 has been improving the parser and adding support for many language features that have been added to Delphi in recent years. I’m very happy to say that the Castalia Delphi parser is now fully up-to-date.

In addition, Castalia 2009.2 includes the following improvements over the previous version:

* Fixed: “Index Out of Bounds” error during some context switches
* Fixed: Some Castalia features not available after line 30768 in the code editor
* Fixed: Access violation when firing a code template with an empty scope

Castalia users with a current maintenance subscription can download version 2009.2 today at http://subscribe.twodesk.com.

Everyone else can grab the free trial at http://www.twodesk.com/castalia.