XE2 Update 2

I’ve just installed XE2 update 2, which wasn’t hassle-free – after a few minutes, the installer seemed to hang on what was labelled the ‘validating install’ stage. Looking at Task Manager, I saw a Windows Installer process maxing out a core, so I killed it and rebooted. Running the installer again, the same thing happened, so I left it burning CPU cycles… and waited. After a while, the progress bar crept up a bit, then another bit after another while, and so on… Finally the ‘validating install’ stage was done. After copying for a while, the installer then whinged about not having the privileges to overwrite getmem.inc though. Checking the relevant folder, I saw it wasn’t there, so I copied over the version from update 1 I had previously saved (I guess any file called getmem.inc would have done), which the installer then accepted, continuing on its merry way.

As for the update itself, grievous and even not-so-grievous bugs in the core product have been fixed nice and promptly, so on that score, the pacey update schedule for XE2 has been a nice bonus. Public pronouncements at the time of XE2’s release talked of FireMonkey rather than XE2 as such being regularly updated though – so what of the ape?

Of the specific things I’ve complained about, printing on the Mac is still not implemented, the blatent mis-declaration of the NSString methods that take a PWideChar parameter still haven’t been fixed, and the source code still assumes the native character encoding of Core Foundation and Cocoa is UTF-8 not UTF-16. On the other hand, TOpenDialog on OS X can at least now return a file name with one or more non-ASCII characters properly. (I should also add: the appalling menu loop bug I blogged about back in September was fixed in update 1.) Also, the FMX caret now looks more native, if still not quite perfectly so (the blinking might just need slowing down a tad). Furthermore, the mapping of TMainMenu to the Mac menu bar is… better: separators are now correctly treated, but ampersands (used for denoting keyboard accelerators on Windows – i.e., Alt+Letter hotkeys) are still not stripped off, and shortcuts of the form Ctrl+Letter are not mapped to Cmd+Letter.

Alas, but there are also new bugs. One I’ve found very quickly is how double clicks (which should select the current word) are now inoperative for me in TMemo, and select everything in TEdit. There may well be other things too, but I’ve only been playing with it for a few minutes.