People develop strong opinions about things they do or believe and sometimes have a difficult time seeing another point of view. This certainly exists for politics and religion but is also strong in the technology sector. Whether you use Mac or Windows, Android or iPhone, C++ or Delphi, it's not hard to find heated discussions about what is the best or "right" choice. We'll tackle some of these issues in search of increased wisdom.

With several people unable to attend this month, we've decided to move our topic to the September meeting.

Embarcadero has a contest going on right now for creating the most beautiful GUI with Skia for Delphi. Skia is a 2D graphics engine, sponsored by Google, that provides a common API across various hardware and software platforms, including all the major web browsers.

A couple of smart guys in Brazil have created an open source library called, Skia4Delphi to make this API work in both VCL and Firemonkey applications. We'll run their sample programs and perhaps even show some of our own creations at the June meeting.

What kind of logging do you implement in your Delphi apps? Do you simply write out a few lines to a .LOG file? Or do you use a library that has detailed and highly structured logging for every action your users take?

What about remote usage reporting? If you distribute a desktop app, how do you know how many people use it and how often?

There's no one true way for everyone or every application. Join us tonight to share what works for you and hear ideas from others.

We're meeting in person this month--and at a new location!

No specific topic planned but we will, as usual, catch up with what we're doing with Delphi and technology in general, share pizza and laughs, and evaluate the new location.

The latest version of our favorite development tool, Delphi 11.1 Alexandria has been announced! What are you looking forward to in this upgrade?

We'll chat about technology, avoid depressing world events topics, and think about where we want to meet next month.

February 14 marked the 27th anniversary of the release of Delphi. The meeting this month will focus on the history of Delphi, both reviewing products released over the years and how Delphi has impacted your life, career, or business.

Please join us online and share your experience.

Our main topic for the first meeting of 2022 will be shared by Homer Jones:

If you've ever right clicked a file in Windows Explorer and selected Properties, you may have noticed the Detail tab. Those details list the file's metadata. Depending on the type of file, that metadata can have interesting information about the data in the file (the definition of metadata). Homer will show how to extract that metadata without displaying the actual contents of the file. For example, a PDF document might contain the name of the author, or the company, or other key words. A photograph might contain the same information plus the brand and model of the camera and lens that took the photo. Metadata schema has changed over the years; Homer will show three ways to extract.