Delphi for Android

[davidsplash]

Yes you heard it Delphi for Android is comming look great works great had my hands on it and i say it wouldnt be too hard for pa to develop a android powerarchiver if they wanted.

[ardax]

Wait, what? A real Delphi for Android, not Oxygene for Java?

[spwolf]

i dont think it is real delphi in a sense that embarcadero is doing it.

[ardax]

If memory serves, Android’s one of the planned targets for future releases. Then again, I’m sure you all know how Delphi roadmaps tend to turn out too.

[spwolf]

for firemonkey?

[RJWaring]

there are very few decent Archive Apps on the Andriod at the momment.

The thought of PowerArchiver for Andriod. is a welcome one… especiialy when they are working on turning it into a office style system so users can operate office suites.

[davidsplash]

not sure but what i have seen it is very advanced and with it you should be able to do something. The code looks like delphi and works like it. Still in active development.

[ardax]

@spwolf:

for firemonkey?

It’d have to be. It’s not like the VCL can be ported.

It makes me wonder if there’s going to be a separate component or layout suite for mobile devices though. Usage patterns are so different from traditional PCs that it’d be hard to just use regular components.

@davidsplash:

not sure but what i have seen it is very advanced and with it you should be able to do something. The code looks like delphi and works like it. Still in active development.

Sounds like either Oxygene or FPC. Anything by Embarcadero would be locked up behind NDAs, unless you’ve got some very trusting friends.

@Sir:

there are very few decent Archive Apps on the Andriod at the momment.

There’s a reason for that. What would you use it for?

The thought of PowerArchiver for Andriod. is a welcome one…

Right now, I’m not sure what the use case for an archiver on Android would be. The overwhelming majority of the data I want to export from my phone is either picture or video, neither of which an archiver is going to be of much use for.

The rest of the data coming and going to the device needs to be in a format that the target application can natively digest, so again, compression is of little utility.

Now, if something like LZMA could get ARM-optmized and tuned to beat zlib/bzip2 on both compression speed and ratio, that’d be something special. But it’d be of little use to applications unless it were bundled with the OS.

A cloud-based service to stash archives that would let me download uncompressed items would be more useful. A phone-based front end that could put those files onto phone storage (SD/emmc) and then pass them to their target application? Cool.

Tablets have a different use profile, but even then they’re strongly app-based. Data needs to be app-native, so archives are again of little utility when stored on the device. Storing a file twice (once compressed, once uncompressed so an app can use it) doesn’t make much sense.

[spwolf]

only thing i can see is for opening compressed files, like from emails… everything else is another type of service.

[RJWaring]

By keeping your mind fixed on the past and current time you can limit yourself from clearly seeing the possibilities of future.

Smart Phones, Tablets are getting more powerful now with quad cores and dedicated Graphics cards. The software is now operating more like a Computer than prior.

Samsung and Asus are currently working on SmartTablets that function like a Pad and PC using Windows OS’s and Andriod OS.

The tablets become the monitor when attached to a dock where the user has a Blutooth Keyboard and Mouse. When the user takes their device off the dock it then coverts to a pad and the method in which the software works adapts for manual, voice and camera input.

So what has this got to do with phones??

Well, Sony, Asus, Samsung and HP are working on smart cloud and sync services that enable users to take their Windows & Andriod SmartTab PC with them anywhere in the world. All the user would do is Dock their phone into their Tablet via a port potentially even via Bluetooth 5.

The idea is that the user could work on their home PC in the morning, transfer their profile over to their phone then head off to work or anywhere else, during that process the user could continue to work on their emails, word documents and presentations… access emails, movies all via their phone the same files that were on the Windows or Andriod documents and desktop.

When they get to their office or college, university they then dock their phone with the PC, Smart Tab etc and that PC works, looks and has everything that their Home PC has its a complete duplicated enviroment.

It users a mixture of Compression and cloud services. but because the Next Gen smart phones have quad cores, and dedicated graphics card including Expandable internal storage they can act as a host device as well as a phone.

The average screen size of a phone is now 4.8inc with future models touching onto 5.1. Meaning users can clearly view their files, touch and type easily.

Currently 10% of internet traffic is from Mobile Phones an expected further 5% increase this year with a continued growth and expected impact in 5 years to be 46%.

So less than half of all users connected to their systems, work, emails, pictures, documents, videos to be on Smart Phones and Tablets.

So, why have i said all of the above?

Google are now the top Smart Phone and Pad Operating system provider… They are striving to finish off a full blown OS very soon that will enable this level of sync support for Manufactures.

Currently there is no Phone App that has Compression, FTP, Virtual driver, Encryption application and backup tools available. a user would have to download and buy seperate apps to meet these requirments.

If powerarchiver doesnt think about the development then someone else like its competitors some of which are more well known by Companies such as Winzip will beat conexware to it.

I could easily see Conexware expanding to the Andriod OS enviroment and do apps for smart phones enabling users to email files and compress pictures using PAF format, or upload it to their attachmentcloud service.

Not to mention auto archive of the users documents and apps so should their phone crash they can recover it all using PowerArchiver App Recovery utility.

Its not about what is available now, its what will be available in the future! you limit your mind then you limit your potential.

Sorry for the long speach, but I hear this sort of thing all the time “why do we need that, i dont use it! and neither does my mates”…

But they dont think about R&D nor the hundreds of thosands of young users and business men and woman who constantly say “i wish my phone could open and compress these archives, and backup my device to a cloud service correcly”??

Cheers for reading.

[ardax]

@Sir:

Currently there is no Phone App that has Compression, FTP, Virtual driver, Encryption application and backup tools available. a user would have to download and buy seperate apps to meet these requirments.

But a lot of those programs just don’t make the same kind of sense that they do when you think about an OS with a very strong document-centric model like Android and iOS have. You don’t want to waste space by having a compressed version of a file alongside an uncompressed version of a file that an application can actually work with. That’s why we’re seeing a rise in compound documents that are simply zip files with a different extension (e.g. docx, xlsx, etc). Recompressing these files may have some utility, but it’s going to a fairly expensive operation power-wise that will be undone as soon as the application updates the file.

I can really only speak about Android at this point because its the only mobile OS I’m reasonably familiar with beyond simple usage.

Backup APIs are provided by Google that apps can use to build cloud-based backup into their programs. I think the concept could be fleshed out further to a cloud-based sync using Google Drive as a backing store, but it’s a start. Because of Android’s security model, blithely backing up the data of other applications isn’t possible without root access, which users simply don’t have by default. Programs can express intents that other applications can use, but that would require other developers to add code to their applications for each available Backup API. That’s simply a non-starter – Android really needs a system-level backup/sync API that all apps can easily use and other backup providers can supply implementations for. (Of course, that’s a lot less useful with the data capping going on with the cell providers right now, but that’s a separate problem.)

Of course, data that’s stored on “external” storage (built-in/emmc or sdcard) is fair game, but that’s a minority of the interesting data on mobiles right now and shrinking.

FTP may have some worth with a “share via FTP” intent that other programs can take advantage of, and a decent FTP client to download to phone storage.

I’m not sure about encryption though. Whole device encryption is very worthwhile. Individual file encryption… Useful when sharing documents, so as part of an “upload/download to cloud/email/other people” mechanism it’d be great. I don’t really have the time at the moment to devote the brain resources to thinking it through more though.

I could easily see Conexware expanding to the Andriod OS enviroment and do apps for smart phones enabling users to email files and compress pictures using PAF format, or upload it to their attachmentcloud service.

Now a cloud integration service would be good – something that can really compress data for transit (bandwidth’s limited and capped nowadays), but leave data on my phone that’s app-ready. The cloud has a lot more space available than my device.

Sorry for the long speach, but I hear this sort of thing all the time “why do we need that, i dont use it! and neither does my mates”…

True. I’m not trying to be dismissive, but the usage models of a mobile OS are very different from a desktop OS. There’s some fusion going on, to be sure, and some smart innovators are bound to shake things up, but at the same time you can’t just say “PA for Android would r00l!” It’s got to be useful in the context of the new usage and security models. Conexware can’t simply poop out a half-baked PA port for Android and iOS and rake in the sales. But the discussion is an interesting way to explore what’s possible and useful.

The Conexware folks might be (may have been?) having similar arguments behind closed doors trying to see where they can fit in the mobile space.

[spwolf]

generally speaking, mobile OS’s are trying to take out the user from the experience of filesystem and hence you cant use Android as if you are on Windows box, even if you wanted to.

Although save of storage space on mobile phones is probably a lot more important than on desktop. Even on destkop you use archiver for 2 things - exchanging files or backing up files.

in any case, when it comes to delphi for Android, doesnt really matter if it is delphi or not, because all of our compression libraries are in C.