The Lair of the Pythia

In his introductory presentation Nick Hodges got back onto his favorite theme about the Turbos being somehow a different animal from the Studio products. I think the message is pretty clear now that the Turbos are intended to be somehow cut down versions of the Studio. Even if they have very similar functionality now, they may not do so in the future. Equally I think that CodeGear now understands that if it wants Turbo users as customers then it has to treat them with respect and as part of the developer family. Not everyone who does programming works in a big software house, or indeed wants to.

Anyway, we now believe that there will be an upgrade path from the Turbos to the Studio products for the benefit of those people for whom the limitations of the Turbos become burdensome. (As I noted earlier, it may not be possible to buy that upgrade yet, but we’ve been promised it will be.)

But the question that has been nagging away at my mind is this: “What do Turbo customers want?” Or, to put it another way, what is a sensible way in which CodeGear can limit the functionality of the Turbos as compared to the Studio and not irritate people by making it seem that the Turbos are not not worth having?
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In the Q&A after Nick Hodges’ session someone asked that question about upgrading from Turbo Professional to D2007/Win32. Nick’s answer was that yes you can, but they haven’t worked out the pricing yet. I guess that actually means, “no you can’t right now.”

One piece of good news, however. Apparently D2007 will co-exist with Turbos on the same machine.

So, there were two major announcements from CodeGear yesterday, but the information available was so confusing that I decided to wait until after today’s Delphi Hour before posting anything. Here’s what I think the situation is:
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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.

I’ve got email from CodeGear telling me that the special offer on upgrades to the Professional versions of the Turbos has been extended to February 28th. Nice to know that’s official. As I’ve said before, upgrading to Professional ought to be a no-brainer, because sooner or later you’ll want to include a third-party package (or at least look at a demo of one). The only real downside is that with the free Explorer versions you can have more than one Turbo on the same machine (using TurboMerger), but once you have upgraded to Professional it is only one compiler per machine.

Better get on with looking at the free stuff you get with the Professional upgrade, hadn’t I.

Lots of things have been happening. I’ve had a couple of phone calls from CodeGear, from which I gather that their systems have got a little messed up and I’m not the only person getting confused, but they are at least trying to sort things out.

I also got the Fedex package, which turned out to be a CD of the Win32 Turbo. It is nice to have, but perhaps a little over the top for a product that is freely downloadable. I’ve been promised a registration key, but that hasn’t turned up yet.

I’ve also had email from CodeGear’s tech support regarding the problem installing a Turbo on a machine that used to have Delphi 7 on it. Hopefully their suggestions will work, but I have a small amount of international travel to accomplish first so I’m unlikely to have any news on that until the weekend.

What I can say at this point, however, is that I’ve had a lot more attention from CodeGear than I’ve had from any other software company I’ve had to deal with in recent years. One of these days I’ll tell you the McAfee support story.

As you can see from comments to this post, CodeGear Customer Support has noticed me. This is good. It shows that they care. And it shows that they were looking for people talking about their products online. (I suspect their finding me had something to do with my finally getting around to registering the blog with Technorati yesterday.) I’ve sent an email off to Charles. Hopefully this will all start to make sense soon.

This morning I got an email to tell me that my product had been shipped. There is, apparently, a package on the way to me via FedEx. This didn’t happen with the upgrade for the .NET Turbo. And I haven’t had an email to give me my registration key like I did with .NET. Presumably the key is in the mysterious package. This is really quite bizarre. Still, at least they decided to honor the discount price.

Of course the obvious way to get around Turbo Delphi wanting a registration key is to buy one. I can order the Professional upgrade, and the Borland online shop is still listing the upgrades at the reduced $249 price. So I should order one.

Well actually I did. On Friday. But while my upgrade for the .NET version arrived within a few hours (still far too slow), the Win32 upgrade still hasn’t been delivered. I did get the order confirmation, but no email with my registration key. I checked the tracking page on the shop web site this morning and my purchase is described as “backordered”. Really? They are out of stock of something that only requires them to send me a registration key? How very strange.

Ah well, at least they haven’t charged my credit card yet.

I suspect what has happened is that various people are running round in circles at the Borland/CodeGear offices trying to find out who left the special offer prices online after they were supposed to expire and decide what to do about orders that have come in since the end of the year. In the meantime, however, the offer is still online, I just checked.

I am beginning to understand why so many people in the Delphi community are so very angry with Borland. CodeGear has a big mountain to climb if this is the sort of customer service people have been used to.

This one ought to be a no-brainer. Sooner or later, most people are going to want to install third-party packages. And when CodeGear ran a sale on the upgrades in December I didn’t need much encouraging. Having bought the upgrade, however, I’m interested to know how valuable the various freebies available to Turbo Professional customers are. I’ll be taking a look at each of them as posting my conclusions here.

This does, however, give me an opportunity to talk about the upgrade process. It wasn’t impressive. I’ve bought a fair amount of software online, and mostly it is a very smooth process. You fill in the payment screen, you download the software, and by the time you are done an email with your registration key is in your in box. Not so with Delphi. When I bought the upgrade it looked very much like I was going to be shipped a package (paper manuals, there’s a blast from the past!). The sale confirmation email arrived quite quickly. It was a little confusing because it was written to work for both downloads and physical packages. An hour and a half later I got an email giving me the key so that I could upgrade. But that didn’t mean that I could get the freebies. To do that I had to upgrade and register the software, because until I did that the Borland/Codegear databases didn’t know that I had bought an upgrade. And the next day I got an email saying that my product had been shipped. I’m not expecting a parcel, but you never know. Messy.