Behind The Scenes 2009
A lot has changed since last year’s behind the scenes post. I have a new blog (three actually), a new home with a much bigger office, and a new PC. Instead of a dual core with dual 19″ LCDs I now have a quad core with dual 24″ LCDs.
The era of single-threaded applications is really coming to a close (an article I wrote in 2005!). Intel’s latest i7 CPU is a quad core with hyperthreading, meaning a single-threaded application can’t push the Windows task manager beyond 12.5% of CPU usage. Any developer of CPU-bound applications (i.e. the user has to wait while the app maxes out the CPU) should have at least a quad core CPU. That’s the only way to test whether the application properly scales on multi-core CPUs.
The dual 24″ LCDs are very nice too. While square 19″ LCDs allow you to put two windows side by side (one on each monitor), widescreen 24″ LCDs have just enough space to put four windows side by side. I use a small utility called WinSplit Revolution to quickly put windows into the left or right half of either screen.
On the software front, all present Just Great Software products are being maintained with Delphi 2007. RegexMagic 1.0 was the last major release developed with Delphi 2007. Future new products and major upgrades will be developed with Delphi 2009 (or later), making them full Unicode applications. Though the migration to Unicode is quite straigthforward, I’ve decided to make the migration when a product receives a major upgrade. The main reason behind that is that applications developed with Delphi 2009 require Windows XP or Windows Vista (or Windows 7 when it’s released).
