Adam’s May 2017 Meeting Feedback

• Delphi for Linux is exciting. Thanks to Brian for a rich, thorough presentation with dozens of useful key points. I will be requesting the slides. If FM-for-Linux is added to the Delphi product with 32bit support I could use low-cost linux tablets for my apps, which might be amazing.
• There are lots of ways to obfuscate passwords, and we all agree that ten layers of obfuscation are better than nine. Salting encrypted passwords with other user input (IP Address, unique id’s for the computer etc.) or Peppering passwords with additional random input to make them less easy to hack were all discussed. Mark did well under fire!
• I will have to research PDFTK Builder.
  A useful “PDF-mashing” utility. We saw demos of “watermarking” one PDF over another and merging PDFs on a page-by-page basis. Unfortunately PDFTK builder is written in C, so no chance of wholly building it into a Delphi application. However it is a command line utility with an SDK, and Angus J has written a Delphi application which includes all the code needed to call this utility … thanks to Doug
• Parnassus have written “TFiremonkeyContainer” demo’d by Patrick. This makes it easy to open a Firemonkey form in a VCL application. Brian Long pointed out some head-scratching issues with doing this, but it seemed that if done carefully with simple forms it could be a useful step towards some use of Firemonkey’s scaling and 3D features in VCL.

Links, additional information and insights are available to members – see the closed facebook group for more information.