The Lair of the Pythia

I still haven’t got the Win32 Turbo Professional up and running, but I have made some progress in looking at the freebies you get with the Professional upgrade. Some of them appear to be just demos – CodeHealer has a note in the install package that tells you this. But the authors of these packages sometimes make demos available off their web sites. Which is how come I have been playing with Castalia inside my copy of Delphi 7.

Castalia is essentially a productivity tool. It does a whole bunch of things that I’ve been wishing that the Delphi IDE did for you. You get line numbers, you get structural highlighting, you get block indentation, you get bookmarks, and so on. I’m hooked already, and I haven’t even started looking at things like the refactoring tools.

Of course it is easy to say that these are all things that the IDE should do, and that CodeGear ought to provide them. But if they did then they would be just like Microsoft, wouldn’t they? I kind of like the fact that they allow space for the little guy.

Besides, Castalia is only $67. The only reason I haven’t bought a copy yet is that their web site implies that you have to buy a different product depending on which version of Delphi you have, and I don’t know whether the copy that came with the Turbo Professional upgrade is a full version or just the demo. Still, that will give me an incentive to get the Turbo up and running before the 30 days of the Castalia demo license runs out.

Oh, and while you are at Castalia’s web site, take a look at the VCL Component Suite too. There is some interesting stuff there, and I expect I’ll end up buying that too because I need to learn how to do multi-threading.