The new RAD Studio 12.1 Athens has been released along with Delphi 12.1 and C++Builder 12.1. RAD Studio Delphi® visual Pascal programming language and IDE is the world’s most advanced IDE for rapidly developing compelling single-source multi-platform high-performance native applications using powerful visual design tools and features. Delphi supports developing applications in the latest Windows 11, latest Android with API 34, iOS, MacOS, and Linux that you can switch between them with a single code application project. When you develop Android applications you can use mobile devices in development directly and also you can use Android simulators such as BlueStacks. In this post, we explain how you can use BlueStacks Android Simulator with Delphi 12.1.
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What are the new features of the latest Delphi 12.1
Delphi is one of the most decent and powerful compiler-based programming languages around the world that comes with an amazing new RAD Studio IDE. Delphi supports to development of applications in the latest Windows 11, MacOS 64bit ARM, latest Android API 34, iOS, and multiple Linux versions with a single code. It allows you to develop applications in VCL and FMX framework libraries.
A few months ago RAD Studio, Delphi 12.0 came with a lot of new features, bug fixes, and improvements. After a few months, Embarcadero released Delphi 12.1 now with a lot of other new features. That is impressive.
Some of the features of Delphi 12.1 are; Split Editor, faster coding by smart code navigation and LSP features, cloud-aware development with the improved REST, Accessible Data options to connect more than 20 databases with improved FireDAC, and support to other components. It has Remote Desktop development and many more new features that allow you develop applications with High DPI and 4K resolution options. Now Delphi developers can use the Split Editor feature that allows them to develop in multiple views horizontally or vertically. It has new improved Play Store deployment options, and it has LSP quality and improvements. There are customizable keystroke behavior in code completion, improved VCL and FireMonkey libraries, higher quality in rendering graphics and UI controls across all target platforms, and improved REST client library and FireDAC. If you want more details, please see here and the post by Marco Cantu below,
What is The BlueStacks Android Simulator?
The BlueStacks by now. gg is a very popular Android simulator that you can run on a PC. It is mostly designed to play Android games on PC and you can also develop and test your applications on it.
The latest BlueStacks Android Simulator has many new features such as game controls, multi-instance, smart controls, real-time translation, macros, high FPS, and scripting options are some of them. On the development side, it has an Android Debug Bridge (ADB) option that allows you to deploy your applications easily. Now let’s see how we can use this Android simulator with the latest Delphi 12.1.
How can we use The BlueStacks Android Simulator with Delphi 12.1 ?
BlueStacks Android Simulator has an Android Debug Bridge (ADB) option that allows you to deploy your Android applications in Delphi easily. Now let’s see how you can use rapidly on PC to develop Android applications in Delphi.
1. Download the latest BlueStacks Android Simulator from their BlueStacks Official WebPage
2. Install BlueStacks 10 or 5 on your PC. My current BlueStacks X installation has a 466MB installed folder size, and my ProgramData folder has a BlueStacks_nxt folder that is about 5.6GB. That means you need more than 6GB of free space on your hard drive.
3. Run BlueStacks, and allow it to download data.
4. Goto settings option, there is an Android Debug Bridge (ADB) option that allows you to deploy your applications and turn on its check.
5. That’s all ! Now we can develop and run a Delphi application in this simulator.
6. Run BlueStacks Android Simulator
7. Run the latest RAD Studio 12.1
8. Create a new Multi-Device Application in Delphi from File -> New -> Multi-Device Application in Delphi menu
9. Select Blank Application
10. On the Projects window, select Android 32-bit and on its Target folder right click and select Refresh, then you will see emulator-XXXX where XXXX is your emulator number. See example below
- Select it, and run your blank application, if it asks about your saving files. In my running tests BlueStacks does not support 64-bit Delphi applications to run on it.
BlueStacks is good to test android applications on a PC with 32bit option and you can test your 64bit on a device at the end.
Note that, sometimes Target doesn’t show emulator, It happened to me in few times. Please follow this order; Restart your Windows, run BlueStacks, then run RADS 12.1, create or load your project, switch platform to Android 32-bit, refresh Target. It should be there.
The interesting thing for me was it is also creating shortcut icon on Windows Desktop 🙂
RAD Studio 12.1, Delphi 12.1 and C++ Builder 12.1 are great releases!
Embarcadero is very excited to announce the release of RAD Studio 12.1 Athens along with Delphi 12.1 and C++Builder 12.1.
RAD Studio 12.1 Athens release primarily focuses on enhancing the new features in RAD Studio 12, adding further refinements and addressing customer requests. At the same time, we have completed the development of the new C++ Win64 Clang–based compiler and toolchain, which was initially released in 12.0.