Appmethod Review [Many pictures]

Upd 10.11.16: The article has largely lost its relevance, starting in RAD Studio Seattle, FMX has become more or less suitable for development.

In this post, I express my opinion, and it may seem too emotional.
Some time ago, Embacadero announced Appmethod, a development environment for Windows, OSX, iOS, Android, using Firemonkey.
At Techcrunch they promised that there would be an Express version, but immediately after the official release of Appmethod it became known that it might, but will have limitations: http://www.embarcadero.com/products/rad-studio/appmethod-faq . You can download the trial version here: http://www.appmethod.com/ .
Personally, I had high hopes for the Appmethod, hoping that they finally fixed the stupid Firemonkey bugs.

We are greeted by the old, slightly buggy kind IDE, in which there are some changes:


The first thing that catches your eye is the new 32-bit icons and the Metro style.


If you select File-> New , then 3 types of projects will be available:

• Desktop Application - Object Pascal
• Mobile Application - Object Pascal
• Package - Object Pascal

Yes, now the language, for some reason, not Delphi, but Object Pascal.

Create a Desktop Application and see if the old Firemonkey bugs are fixed?
Unfortunately, bugs such as "soapy text" and the lack of animation when minimizing and maximizing the window, and the loss of focus after, in place.

Let's create a Mobile Application:

Win32 appeared in the list of supported platforms, which allows you to debug the basic functionality of the application without using slow-down emulators or a real device. True, every time I close it, it says, “The work of the program has stopped ...”.

We throw the components on the form and click Run (F9) , after a long compilation (although less than on DelphiXE5), we see the application on the phone (Nexus4).
Glitch with the fact that it is impossible to allocate more than one line in TMemo fixed, cheers!
Although the selection still looks not native.


But scrolling for components like TListBox is still bad: the animation slows down, the selection twitches, there are no visual effects when the end of the list is reached.

Highlighting the text in different ways I got this:

It's a pity, but the quality of testing still leaves much to be desired.

But what if I’m so crooked and standard examples are better?
I compiled an example of TabSlideTransition , in which the user enters information step by step, step-by-step input is done using TTabControl.

It contains such a strange code:


It's a pity, but I could not reach the end of the input, the application constantly crashed and hung:

And once the phone just hung tight (!).

Let's try another example:
This is an example of a simple photo editor and it works!
I wanted to send the result of his work, but again nothing came of it.



Embacadero does not try to test its products, even the basic functionality does not work normally, and I was silent if I tested in Chinese NoName, but Firemonkey is buggy on Nexus.
Attempts to rename Firemonkey to FXM and FMPlatform without fixing a fatal flaw , and this is Firemonkey itself, will not lead to anything good. And now they are getting rid of the name Delphi.

Representatives of Embacadero, please inform the management that you need to bring the VCL up to date, make the native MobileVCL, and throw it away, or completely refactor the Firemonkey code.

I look forward to the comments of representatives of Embacadero.

Thanks for reading, this is my cry of the soul.
[The funny thing is that the article did not make it to delphifeeds.ru]