Sideloading for Delphi on Windows 8?

Tim Anderson wrote about what Embarcadero are planning for Delphi and Windows 8 after meeting with Embarcadero’s John Ray Thomas and Jason Vokes, I encourage you to go over and read his article about what they’re planning, and his reservations.

In short, since Delphi XE3 can’t pass validation as a WinRT app and be fully accepted on the Windows Store, they aim for a combination of having only a shortcut to the app vendor’s site in the Windows Store (like other vendors will do), and using a PowerShell script to sign the app. As Tim outlines, this isn’t exactly what you would call a smooth ride, and will require the Windows 8 Entreprise SKU apparently (thus ruling out consumer apps, i.e. would it even be possible to write the next Skype in Delphi?).

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Fiddling with L-System (part 2)


Part 1 left us with a large cryptic looking string (a recursively applied grammar applied to an axiom, for the purists).

In part 2 we’ll go from that big string to a visual representation, by making use of that string as a set of commands for a turtle language.

Turtle graphics came to fame in the days of Darwin’s voyage to the Galapagos the Logo programming language, and in many ways are the grand-daddy of vector graphics languages like SVG.

For more details, read the turtle graphics article in wikipedia, it’s (at the moment) short and to the point.

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Fiddling with L-System (part 1)

The class of grammar-based fractals known as Lindenmayer system allows generating an interesting variety of geometrical and botanical visuals.

To the right is a representation of a “Fractal Plant”, which is generated from just two simple (if cryptic-looking) rules applied recursively.

In simple terms, L-System starts from a string (called an axiom), to which rules are applied recursively. Rules are a set of substitution strings for characters in the original string.

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