I've been contemplating this move for a while and as is my want I've procrastinated... alot... but the time is finally here.
It's time to bid farewell to a trusty stead and all the baggage it carries with it and welcome in a new era of content creation.
I'm pleased to announce that I have just released 'BaseTouchPortalInterface' on GitHub.
This is a little utility for renaming windows. The purpose is primarily to provide known titles to allow programs such as OBS to find the window reliably. A couple of examples of where this can be used are Notion and Discord.
Both applications have dynamic window titles which means even if you select the 'Match title, otherwise find window of same executable' match priority OBS may struggle to find it.
Well, it doesn't seem like 5 minutes have passed since I was complaining about case sensitivity in software source code and here we are over 12 months later... time for an update I feel.
My last post was made early in the pandemic after roughly 2 months of having no work. Still, it gave me some much needed time to get back into coding seriously. In the intervening period there have been times where, due to the worries about my business and the issues for it caused by COVID, I've just not felt like doing much at all which manifested itself as binging on YouTube and Twitch, still... this hasn't been without it's upsides.
I watched alot of Harris Heller's content about streaming on Twitch etc. and it's inspired me to get setup to stream again, which has in turn resulted in me learning quite a bit which is great.
So this is where I'm at...
The year, 1995. Windows 3.1 was the current Microsoft operating system running on the family's 486sx 25MHz with 4MB of RAM. Turbo Pascal 7 was my weapon of choice but of course it couldn't produce Windows applications... yes there was Turbo Pascal for Windows and Borland Pascal but they both required lots of boiler plate code to make windows and interact with the OS (Nightmare). And then it happened...
I saw it... a full page print advert for Delphi. OMG!!! No longer would you have to fight with boiler plate code, just drag components onto a form, hit build and hey presto... a fully fledged Windows application. So I saved up, pre-ordered it and waited patiently for it to arrive.
Delivery day arrived... knock at the door... there it was in what, by today's software standards, was a huge parcel. Oh how I miss the library that accompanied it. I installed it and well... it scared me to death. I wasn't ready for the shift in paradigm. I'd had access to Turbo Vision since getting Turbo Pascal 7, but I had avoided it for the same reason. So there it was... Delphi 1... and I just didn't get it, so it languished untouched on my hard drive for a couple of months.
At this point I was looking for my first professional job and I came across an advert in the local newspaper emblazoned with the words... "Delphi experience wanted". A couple of months after release and someone wanted engineers with experience. I updated my CV, wrote my covering letter and fired up Delphi. A few weeks later and somehow I'd managed to talk myself into a position with a company that was looking to rewrite it's current software offering using Delphi and whilst I actually didn't do that much Delphi development for them, I did manage to get over my lack of understanding by developing a suite of components that were to be used to internationalise the new product offering.
And so began my love affair with ❤️ Delphi ❤️
It's been a long time since I did anything here, and in that time quite a lot has gone on, not least software engineering is no longer my profession. The reasons for this are numerous and will probably be the subject of a future post. Suffice to say I now spend my days as a self-employed electrical contractor, a complete change from sitting behind a desk all day and one that I am thoroughly enjoying despite my office very often being someone's cobweb infested loft 