Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

I did not expect to make an easy transition from Delphi 4 to Delphi 2009. The Unicode changes in D2009 are known to cause incompatibilities and require changes. A lot has changed and it is a big jump.

None-the-less, I still held out the hope that maybe I might be able to compile Behold under D2009, work my way through the errors that are come up, and get to a working version as fast as possible. That was a wonderful hope, but as I soon found out, there is too much different.

Some of the components I have used were needed to get around functionality that was not in Delphi 4. Many of those functions have been added, but the components themselves have not been upgraded.

My big one is TRichView, and that has been made to work with the new Delphi. I just have to upgrade it to the new version and add my hundred customizations. But it will be a major task to try to speed up its core, and that will be an interesting challenge.

Then there’s Elpack that I use for the TreeView, Registry and IniFile access, recently used files, the status line and the gauges on the status line. I could upgrade that package, as it also has a compatible version. But I want to switch to Virtual Treeview, and the other things I use it for no longer do much more than Delphi does. So it will probably go.

So what I did was start with a blank canvas again. This is (thank g-d) not a total rewrite. It is an attempt to place my current functionality into a new framework. It’s a matter of just building it back up piece by piece until Behold’s whole again. I will where I can improve things along the way. It should be very interesting!

Initial impression of Delphi 2009 was not a good one: It takes about 16 seconds to start up. Ugh. Delphi 4 took less than 3 seconds. But it compiles very fast, and that’s important.

I’ve released what hopefully is the last alpha version of Behold. I’ve gone through 3 years of figuring out exactly what Behold should be and now I think it’s quite well defined. The last 10 months of that have been slowed by the website makeover.

But now it’s time to take the next step. There’s a major technology change for me to tackle that involves the newest Version of Delphi with Unicode, Virtual Treeview, possible replacement or speedup of Richview, and inclusion of true database software to store a Behold database so you won’t have to reload your GEDCOM everytime. That will also allow the Behold database to store all your data once editing happens in Version 2.

I’m going to implement as much of this as possible in the next three months and then Behold will have its first beta release. This will begin the push towards Version 1 in earnest.

If you want to upgrade to the new alpha release, feel free to. There are just a few bug fixes in it. See the Behold History page for info on what’s changed.

There are a couple of “promised” features that I am now delaying, and I apologise to those involved. I really want to make Behold work as a Portable Application, and it would not have taken too long to do. But I expect to be changing Behold’s procedures for using its Behold file and registry, so it is best if that task wait until the pre-alpha work is done.

So if you’re interested, keep watching this Blog and I’ll post my progress.

I love the word “roadmap” when it refers to a software development plan.

I’ve now updated Behold’s Future Plans page, and you’ll again be seeing me check off the items as I do them and use my little programmer icon to indicate what I’m currently working on.

I have a few items to finish off and then I’ll get out one last alpha release, hopefully this month.

I’ll follow that with my upgrade to Delphi 2009 and attempts to improve how Behold works at its core. I want to limit my time on that and try to get the beta out in January. This is the work that I had earlier planned for version 1.1, but now I’ll be doing it prior to going beta. That will allow the beta testing phase to verify thoroughly that all this new code is working.

One feature I had promised that is being delayed yet again is merging people with the same AFNs (Ancestral File Numbers). While revising the future plans, I realized that this work is best done along with Virtual Merging, so it is now slated for Version 1.5. I apologise yet again, since it is now over two years ago since I said I’d implement it. But it will happen eventually. Thanks Max, for being very patient with this one.