How to write Delphi apps to run and look great on Windows, macOS and Linux

Last Wednesday I presented an Embarcadero webinar “Cross Platform to Windows, macOS and Linux with Firepower”. Participating in the live Q & A after the demo was Roy Woll of Woll2Woll Software. I think we had a lot of fun doing it and there were tons of questions about Roy’s great components as well other subjects such as making your own components be available for multi-device apps when the user swaps to the FMX Linux target, for example.

Here’s the official Embarcadero replay of the webinar complete with the lively Q & A…

Roy also mentioned a code you can use at check-out for the Woll2Woll components too. The coupon code to use is IBFIREPOWER15 – which should save you 15% on FirePower X.

The Woll2Woll site has demos and a trial copy of the Firepower X components you see me using in the video so you can try things out for yourself.

The first demo app is based on part of a commercially available Delphi program which I work on as part of my ‘day job’. It is a “key personnel display” or “In/Out Board” which shows the in/out work status of employees. We quickly produce a brief version of this module running on Windows and Linux. We then swap to deploying one of Woll2Woll’s demo apps and show it running on Windows 32 and 64 bit, Linux and macOS – all from the same piece code. Pretty cool stuff.

If I can do all this in 29 minutes I think it does demonstrate why I call Delphi “my secret superpower”. Honestly, it’s not difficult to target all those platforms – the hardest part is the initial set up of the paServer and SDK but once that’s done you don’t need to do it again and deploying apps cross platform to the various operating systems is literally a matter of selecting the operating system as a target and hitting compile in the RAD Studio / Delphi IDE.

Jim McKeeth, who steered the webinar has also blogged about it on the Embarcadero Blogs site here: https://blogs.embarcadero.com/cross-platform-to-windows-macos-linux-with-firepower-replay/

If you want a copy of the slides or have questions feel free to get in touch; we present these webinars so it might help and to generally educate people about what a great development tool Delphi and RAD Studio is and I hope this comes across – it’s all about Delphi but, most especially, it’s all about you.

Here are some of the key slides…