Category: News

MMX 15 (Beta) Available

There is a new beta available. Changing the version number to 15 resembles not only the completely different new look due to theme support and new icons, but also the internal changes necessary to make all this work. Hopefully I didn’t break too much.

MMX Needs New Icons – Are You Willing To Help?

I am pretty sure all of you already noticed: The current icons in MMX not only look a bit old, they also don’t look well on the Dark Theme. They are not alpha blended and are only available in 16 x 16 pixel size. This may become a problem when the IDE will support High DPI in the future.

Unfortunately the stock icons available in the market simply don’t fit the purpose of most of the individual icons needed, so custom designed icons seem to be mandatory. Well, I  for myself am much better at programming than at designing icons. As a consequence I commissioned a professional icon designer to create new icons matching the icon guide lines of the Delphi IDE whenever suitable. The icons will be alpha blended and are provided as PNG in different sizes as well as in SVG format to support higher resolutions when necessary.

You all know that I don’t make any money with MMX. Thus I am not able to cover the cost for this endeavor from my private pockets. At least not completely. Therefore I created a MoneyPool at PayPal to collect some donations from MMX users willing and able to spare some money for this special purpose.

In case you donate: Note that you won’t get anything for your money (aside a better looking MMX). You cannot expect your favorite feature to be prioritized or your personal bug be fixed any sooner. I promise to spend the money for this special purpose and I will close that MoneyPool when the amount needed is reached.

Also I am not looking at the hobby programmer or one man show using MMX (although even those donations are welcome – of course), but I guess there are a couple of companies making some profit out of their heavy use of MMX. Perhaps they can shell out a small amount to help here. In case you are a company willing to spend and have difficulties just giving away money with Paypal, please contact me. I am able to provide a solution for that.

I have been asked several times where people can donate to support the development of MMX. While I am still not planning to accept donations for the time I am going to invest in the development, donating for the icons is a good way to show your gratitude. If you are not a able or willing to donate – that’s OK. Anyway, please consider to spread the word about this.

Many thanks to all that already donated and those who are going to do so.

For those still looking for the link to the MoneyPool, here it is: https://www.paypal.com/pools/c/8e4alQxGzA

ModelMaker IDE Integration Expert for Delphi 10.3 Rio released

Users of ModelMaker may appreciate the availability of a Modelmaker IDE Integration Expert for Delphi 10.3 Rio.

Note: ModelMaker  is a separate Native Delphi Visual modeling and Refactoring tool based on UML™ 2 technology. Not to be confused with MMX Code Explorer.

The expert requires the latest version 11.11 of ModelMaker with support for Delphi 10.2 Tokyo.

As there is and will be no new version of ModelMaker with direct Delphi 10.3 Rio support, this expert exposes itself as a Delphi 10.2 Tokyo expert. Keep this in mind when you select the Primary IDE to connect with in ModelMaker. In case you have Delphi 10.2 Tokyo and Delphi 10.3 Rio open simultaneously, ModelMaker cannot distinguish those and picks one of them. This is the same as having two instances of Delphi 10.2 Tokyo open at once.

ModelMaker IDE Integration Expert

MMX for Delphi 10.3 Rio

After apparently no critical show-stoppers were found during the beta phase, the new release of MMX version 14 is now officially available.  MMX Setup

A list of changes can be found in the Change Log.

Besides the support for Delphi 10.3 Rio perhaps the biggest change is dropping support for oder Delphi versions. Since version 14 MMX will only support Delphi 10 Seattle and higher. For older versions you can still use version 13, which can be found at the MMX download page when clicking on Previous versions.

Dropping support for those older versions was inevitable to assure further development of MMX. It turned out that making things work for those Delphi versions would burn too much valuable time, which I can now dedicate to new features and the extension of existing ones.

MMX gets a new setup

While we are at about 5300 downloads today (hooray!), some users complained about the installation process requiring admin rights and lacking proper support for multi-user environments. It turned out to be quite challenging to get MMX working properly when the actual Delphi user doesn’t belong to the admin group. To the rescue Jeroen W. Pluimers wrote an article about that, also giving a solution to fix such a broken installation.

As I am responsible for MMX now, I also feel responsible for the problems users have because of this somewhat suboptimal installation process. The setup of a product can be seen like the front door of a building. If it is hard to enter, that will produce a negative feeling, sometimes just unconscious. People may even be discouraged to enter at all.

Looking through the reports I came up with the following goals that a new setup should target.

  • Admin rights should not be a requirement to install. Also a normal user should be able to install MMX into his Delphi version.
  • It should be possible to have an administrative installation, where normal users will only have to register MMX into their Delphi. At best, the last step happens silently.

Both installation scenarios have different consequences. The per user installation, will have a separate copy of MMX for each user. This may lead to different users working with different MMX versions. As an advantage, each user can make an update on his own. The disadvantage is, that each user has to make an update on his own.

On the other hand, the admin installation guarantees all users will use the same MMX version. Updates are effective for all users at once, but have to be done by an admin.

The new setup shows this behavior:

  • When the current user has administrator rights the setup will install into <ProgramFiles> as before. If this user also happens to have a valid Delphi installation, MMX will be registered there directly. This mimics the previous behavior.
  • If a normal user executes the setup and such an administrative installation is found, the setup will only register MMX in the current users Delphi. With the exception of Delphi 7 this step is optional. All other versions do an auto-registration of MMX on the next Delphi start.
  • If a normal user executes the setup and no administrative installation is found, the setup will install in the users <AppData> folder.

In other words: When you are an admin you get an administrative installation. Each normal user has just to start Delphi then to get MMX working (except for Delphi 7). If you there is no admin available or wanted, the current user will get a personal MMX installation.

Have a look at the welcome screen when starting the setup. It will tell you what is going to happen.

BTW, the FAQ about verifying an installation still has to be updated to address these changes.