I've started developing with Delphi on the Mac and thought I would share my observations and see if anyone else had any advice or tips for Mac development with Delphi.
A while back I had some comment discussion about Delphi development on a Mac. It was in the comments of an answer to another question. With the passing of some months, I thought it might be worth writing up a quick summary for anyone thinking about switching VM host.
Overall OS X + VMware makes a very nice development platform for making Delphi apps.
Platform
- MacBook Pro 17" 2.93GHz Core 2 Duo. OS X Leopard
- VMware Fusion 2.0.5
- Vista + Delphi 2007
Observations
- moving an existing PC development environment is straight forward. VMware can build a VM from a physical PC, or as I did, build it from a TrueImage backup. Existing host VMS's can just be copied across.
- there is obviously a performance hit using a VM, but it's not really that noticeable. I'd say speed is at least as fast as my previous HP 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo
- get plenty of RAM. 4GB or 8 if you can afford it. 4GB is quite usable
- Delphi building a fair-sized app goes fine in a 1.5GB VM
- allocate only 1 core to the VM - it's faster
- use a virtual hard drive for the guest OS. It's much faster than running the guest from a BootCamp partition
- the MBP has two video subsystems, NVidia 9400M and 9600M GT. Using the faster 9600M gives a much smoother experience when VMware is running
- VMware Fusion doesn't have the WDDM driver needed to enable Aero. If your app has Aero features you want to test, you'll need to make a separate BootCamp Windows installation to try out the Aero features
- the ctrl key vs command key of Windows and OS X will probably be quite annoying with the default settings. VMware let's you control key mappings, so you can set it so the Win vs Mac differences are minimised. You'll probably also want to tweak the keyboard and mouse settings in System Preferences
- the Mac function keys (Expose etc) conflict step on the Delphi. The Mac function keys can be disabled in the VMware preferences.
- if you are using a MBP, there are no PgUp, PgDn, Home and End keys. Apple got a bit too minimalist here. You get these keys using Fn or Cmd modifiers. There are irritating inconsistencies between some apps
- two-finger scrolling on the MBP trackpad is a thing of beauty
- if you don't have multiple monitors, putting Windows full-screen in a Space works pretty well
- if you use Time Machine for backups, it will backup the entire VM (unless you have it broken into smaller files). You can make this more manageable by creating a snapshot. Time Machine will then only backup the much smaller change file. That file will gradually grow - delete the snapshot and make a new one (doing a backup first, of course :-)
- Mac is a nice user experience, but it's not magic - they have their wtf moments too
What are you Delphi Development with Mac tips and advice? Thanks!