Unicode vs. Windows 9x/Me

As some of you probably know, our tools are developed with an older version of Delphi. In my opinion, Delphi was always a great development system, the only disadvantage (at least for me) was that Unicode was not supported natively.

In WebSite-Watcher, we had to use third party stuff and many workarounds to get Unicode working, and it was sometimes a tricky and time intensive task. In our other tools, Unicode was not or only partially supported.

Last year, a new version of Delphi with  built-in Unicode support has been released. We are now in the progress to move all our tools to that new compiler to get the advantage of full Unicode support. It is already done for the upcoming versions of WebSite-Watcher 5.1.0, Local Website Archive 3.1.0 and AM-Notebook 5.2.0.

In WebSite-Watcher this meant removing hundreds of workarounds, but as a result we got a much cleaner code and many other advantages in handling web pages.

With that move, we can no longer support Windows 9x/Me/NT, the minimum OS that will be required to use our tools is Windows 2000 or higher.

4 Responses to “Unicode vs. Windows 9x/Me”

  1. TucknDar says:

    Is there by any chance an ETA on the new releases?

  2. admin says:

    I don’t have an ETA for the final versions yet, but beta versions will be available within the next few weeks.

  3. Guido says:

    Delphi 2009 is a great tool… since I migrated to this new compiler, from Delphi 7, the development time has halved.
    I’ve changed to D2009 when Marco Cantu (a Delphi guru) came into my company for some day to take a course, and I realized that it was worth it.

  4. frank says:

    thank alot

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