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Winners of the Delphi 26th Showcase Challenge

Jim McKeeth
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So many great entries for the Delphi 26th Showcase Challenge! There were 170 entries covering a wide range of project types. Everything from games and multimedia to line-of-business and consumer software. Both on VCL on the desktop and FireMonkey on mobile platforms. It is so easy to get wrapped up in our view of what Delphi is useful for, we sometimes miss its amazing flexibility. I recommend browsing the entire Showcase. We are adding subcategories to make it easier to see everything that is there!

For now, I’ll list the top 12 with a few honorable mentions from the contest so everyone will know who won the big prizes! All entries that were posted will receive their gift cards as well. Thanks to everyone who’s shared their inspirational programs via the showcase! If you didn’t share yours yet during the challenge you are still invited to share via the showcase.

12th – devFlowcharter Educational Programming Tool

devFlowcharter is a small, freeware application written in Delphi. Its main goal is to be a straightforward, educational tool for use during structural programming classes.
In devFlowcharter, you create flowcharts using a user-friendly but powerful drawing engine, generate source code, compile with an external compiler and finally execute.

At the moment Pascal, C, TI-BASIC, Java, and Python are supported. The language support in devFlowcharter is an XML template, so you can easily add support for other languages, or even create your own.

11th – fotoARRAY – Image Manager For Easier Photo Browsing

fotoARRAY is a specialized database program that allows you to browse and organize large numbers of images and is similar to a Digital Asset Management System (DAM) and it is made in Delphi.

fotoARRAY will let you access, view, organize and export images quickly and easily. Browsing through your photo archive with fotoARRAY is a pleasure. If you haven’t deleted extra or unwanted shots from your photo archive, fotoARRAY can transport you back to the very moment you took the pictures. Choose the photos you want to display – either by putting them in an album, assigning a specific keyword or rating (1-10 stars) – and keep all the photos you took.

You can use fotoARRAY to organize images using albums, a time line, key words, stars and color labels. fotoARRAY allows you to concentrate on your photos, not on operating the program. Once you have created the album containing the pictures you want to publish, export the pictures to your desired location. To edit your images you can seamlessly start your favorite editor from within the program. Or you export a selection the images using the powerful image copy tool. Our goal is to integrate specialized RAW developing applications the best possible way and to provide the best browsing experience by offering lighting fast scrolling.

fotoARRAY is available for Windows and OSX.

10th – JusImperium Advogado

JusImperium is a mobile app that was built for the lawyer’s routine organization and it is developed in Delphi. It is an application that was designed for the individual organization of the lawyer. According to the developer, “With it, the lawyers can easily organize their client’s phonebook, lawsuits, documents, and receive the information from the Brazilian courts automatically. A completely free application for the registration, control, and organization of clients, processes, documents, and the entire work routine of a lawyer. The application works normally offline, and it is not necessary for the lawyer to be connected to the internet to access the data already registered or insert new data. For subscribers to the publications service of Imperium Solutions Brasil, in addition to the daily receipt of publications from official journals, there is an automatic registration of their processes in the system and the generation of a link for online consultation.”

9th – StoneQuest

If there were a category for the most realistic-looking open-world game, StoneQuest would take first. This game is a wonder to behold, and all its procedurally generated landscapes and its amazing 3D engine are all built with Delphi. Be sure to take a look at his Patreon so you can download and play the game.

Developer Zudomon (Nick Pützer) has been building an impressive procedural game called StoneQuest and 3D engine in Delphi. He has put in over 12,000 hours since 2011 building the engine and game. The whole game and content are less than 15MB in size! One of the goals of the developer is for him to build it entirely himself in Delphi. The current gameplay is reminiscent of Minecraft. According to the developer “I use a lot of procedural content. All the models are created by code only. This means, later I can do many different models from them! My engine is able to spread microgeometry over the world, real tiny 3d models. Every grass blade and clover plant is real and interacts with players. Every cube face of the voxel world has its own texture. I only have a few procedural textures yet. They don’t repeat. There are dynamic volumetric 3d clouds. And the volumetric fog in the valley, where sun rays shine through the trees. For me, atmospheric and immersion is a very important thing.” The project is still in active development but you can download and play it in its current state. At this point, it is a work of art that is beautiful to behold.

8th – RightNote

RightNote is a modern, tree-based, information manager and notes organizer, that will help you keep on top of information overload and it is developed in Delphi. I like the dark and light themes they use.

According to the developer, “You can easily store and file away, note clips of any kind, classify with tags, and then later find anything across all your notebooks with the super-fast full-text search engine. Packed with features and a modern and easy-to-use User Interface, RightNote puts all the information you need to deal with on a daily basis, at your fingertips.” 

Features include:

7th – Fotomorsaicos

FotoMorsaicos is a Windows application built in Delphi that can generate a photomosaic from a given image.

According to the developer, “The software has three subsystems, a photomosaic generator, a final image (jpg) generator, and finally a program to build an image library index. My first approach to the subject of photomosaics was the movie The Truman Show, which had a poster showing the face of the protagonist (Jim Carrey) made with small photos, all of them taken from the film itself. It was clear that this work had been done with some program and I soon discovered that Robert Silvers was the author of this image. How did he do it? For some time I thought about the algorithm behind the photomosaics. I finally figured out what to do and got down to business. The basic idea is that a photomosaic program makes a mosaic filter but instead of using solid colors, it uses photographs whose average color is close to the solid color that should go in each region of the mosaic. So I wrote a program in Delphi that made a basic photomosaic. It used a collection of about 6,000 high-definition photographs. (Actually, in archive.org the reader can find lots of public domain collections of high resolutions photographs, for use with the software). However, over time I realized that a good photomosaic program should contemplate more features: use different image libraries, be able to tell the system if I want there to be repeated regions or not, that is, if the same photo should be put or you have to make more variety of them. Likewise, the idea of merging the original image in a percentage with the generated mosaic “softened” the final result, making it visually much better. 

The original development was published in Dr. Dobbs Journal. A researcher, Thiadmer Riemersma, published a paper studying the way humans see colors (“Color metric.” CompuPhase. May 26, 2008. http://www.compuphase.com/cmetric.htm). I used his approach and the software improved more visually. It was actually T. Riemersma himself who wrote to me about it after reading my article. 

Today the software allows:

  1. Use diverse collections of images (up to 100,000 photographs);
  2. Blending between the original photo and the generated mosaic so that both merge in a certain percentage;
  3. Allow to repeat consecutive images or not. A photo mosaic with non-repeating images is much more visually acceptable.

At https://sourceforge.net/projects/fotomorsaicos/ you will find all the source code and complete documentation of the project, written entirely in Delphi and publicly released on Delphi’s 26th birthday.

6th – Falcon 9 – First Stage Simulator

Falcon 9 – First Stage Simulator uses engineering equations to simulate the behavior, efforts, and performance, in addition to controlling the trajectory, of the first stage of a Falcon 9 (SpaceX) rocket and it is built in Delphi.

According to the developer “It has different panels for loading structural information, performance characteristics of engines, throttle control curves, and vehicle inclination, etc. The main panel shows the progress of the simulation in real-time, and a 3D model in an OpenGL window, all this, initially synchronized with a real video of the launch that allows comparing speeds and altitudes at each moment to evaluate the accuracy of the simulation. Finally, once the simulation is completed, it is possible to download all the information in an Excel file to make evaluation graphs. All parameters of the application (structural, engine, and control) are fully customizable, so you can configure and simulate every mission you want and compare the results in real-time with the real video. The application is still being developed, therefore, the experience includes the launching stage and it goes on up to the separation of the second stage. This application was written using Delphi Community 10.3.”

5th – AdVir Inventory Management Software

A modern application developed with Embarcadero Delphi for the inventory flow management of a large company. According to the developer, “Virtual Administrator (AdVir) is in charge of tracking the incoming and outgoing goods of a large Retail Distribution Center. A REST-Server-based app connected to the company’s ERP puts the control of a large warehouse in the hands of its users by rapidly scanning and processing barcodes of products through Android mobile computers. An incredible number of transactions are handled in the blink of an eye thanks to Embarcadero with its Delphi language and INTERBASE database. The system connects to the company’s ERP, which was also developed with the power of Delphi. The ERP offers a point-of-sale system designed for companies with a lot of movements and with POS terminals, capable of processing sales offline and automatically reconnecting to the network when it becomes available, immediately sending all local transactions to the store server, which then sends the data to a cloud central server, securely and remotely connecting dozens of stores.”

4th – Syncovery Desktop Synchronization Software

Syncovery is developed on Delphi and you can use it to back up your data and synchronize PCs, Macs, servers, notebooks, and online storage space.

According to the developer, “You can set up as many different jobs as you need and run them manually or using the scheduler. Syncovery works with local hard drives, network drives, and any other mounted volumes. In addition, it comes with support for FTP, SSH, HTTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, Google Drive, Microsoft Azure, OneDrive, SharePoint, DropBox, Box, and many other cloud storage providers. You can use compression and data encryption. The scheduler can run as a service – without users having to log on. There are powerful synchronization modes, including Standard Copying, Exact Mirror, and SmartTracking. Syncovery features a carefully designed GUI to make it an extremely versatile synchronizing and backup tool. The wealth of features fulfills all requirements that users typically have, while still being easy to use. A free 30-day trial version is available on the Download page.”

2nd Runner Up – VisualNEO Web

There are a surprising number of development tools made with Delphi. Beyond the fact that Delphi makes developing any kind of software easy, I like to think people are so inspired by Delphi that they want to make new development tools. VisualNEO Web is one such development tool, and their marketing makes it sound really compelling.

VisualNEO Web, is a Windows software to create HTML5 Web Apps, Progressive Web Apps (PWA), NW.js Desktop Apps, and PhoneGap Apps and it is developed with Delphi. Develop apps yourself for the Web, Desktop, and Mobile devices with VisualNEO Web. According to the developer you can, “Combine quickly text, pictures, sound, video, HTML content, Internet links, special effects and other elements to create interactive, professional Web and Mobile Apps. Even if you don’t know modern web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, or JQuery you can create awesome applications thanks to our drag and drop visual interface and our easy-to-learn, wizard-assisted NeoScript programming language. Perfect for students and designers. VisualNEO is easy to use for novice developers and quick for experienced ones.” This is another great example demonstrating that Delphi is a great tool for building other development tools.

1st Runner Up – ALLPlayer Media Player

When it comes to playing media, your first choice for playing ALL the media is ALLPlayer! Videos, movies, and music are all covered with a modern, intuitive interface at home on smartphones, tablets as well as Windows.

All functions are readily available, the precise moment they are needed, and thanks to built-in codecs, ALLPlayer can play virtually any media file format. Some of the codecs supported by ALLPlayer include 3G2, AVI, Matroska (MKV), FLV, DAT, MOV, M2TS, MP4, 3GP, VOB, MPG, APE, AU, MKA, MP3, OGG, WAV, AC3, CDs, and even some URLs. Another useful feature it has is Artificial Intelligence subtitles which analyzes and controls the length of the text line and sets the time of its display compensating for poorly configured subtitles files. Impressive!

Grand Prize – Firecast 8

Coming in at number 1 is another program that I’m very interested in. I’m a long-time fan of pen and paper or “table-top” RPG games, and Firecast 8 lets you play those games over the internet. Version 7.5 is available now, but version 8 is coming soon and it looks really impressive. All written in Delphi!

Firecast 8 is entertainment software, in the final stage of development on Delphi, that allows the traditional pen-and-paper RPG to be played over the internet. According to the developer, “It features tools needed for a good game session, like a storytelling-dedicated chat, character sheets, combat grid, 3-D dice supported by physics simulation, and so on. It is succeeding the RRPG software, which today has about 10,000 active users and has been installed on more than 60,000 different devices in the past 12 months, and is being made with Delphi and FMX framework.”

Honorable Mention

I’m calling out 3 honorable mentions. These received a lot of likes and retweets on Twitter but ultimately weren’t selected as grand prize winners for various reasons. They still qualify for honorable mention awards though. So many other great entries that didn’t win too.

GameVision Toolkit

As an Honorable Mention is the GameVision™ Game Toolkit for Delphi. It is an advanced 2-D game development system for PCs running Microsoft Windows® and uses Direct3D® for hardware-accelerated rendering. According to the developer, “It’s robust, designed for easy use, and suitable for making all types of 2-D games and other graphic simulations. You access the features from a simple and intuitive procedural API to allow you to rapidly and efficiently develop your graphics simulations. There is support for buffers, bitmaps, audio samples, streaming music, video playback, loading resources directly from a standard zip archive, and much more.”

Features

You can download the source code for the toolkit via GitHub.

Portrait From Craps Dice

Portraits using Craps is a program that creates images with dice and it is developed in Delphi. According to the developer, “In May 2020, I wrote about a dice image created by cyber artist Barbara Lynn Helman. Apparently the creator put the dice according to the shade of gray that she visually found in each bit of the image. The photographs he submitted seem to indicate this. However, visually making a box made with dice like this would have been too complicated a task and probably too easy to make mistakes. I want to assume that Barbara used some program that told her which die to put in which position. This would be, in any case, the smart way to do this task. So I wrote a program that precisely generates images with dice, like the ones Miss Lynn Herman does. And actually what I did was modify a program that I already had that made semitones. Consequently, having made the modifications, I quickly got a program that generated the final images, putting virtual dice (dice images), instead of putting real dice on a flat surface.”

Piptermob Android App That Can Control Your Desktop

Piptermob connects with the desktop application Pipitedz, which lets you control your desktop from your phone and the app is built in Delphi. According to the developer, “Delphi IOT tethering to control PC mouse and view PowerPoint files from your Pipitermob app. You can connect with two WiFi or Bluetooth devices. You get the most options for mouse uses from your Pipitermob app. Mouse button is speed controlled so you can click quickly, just like when you use an actual mouse. You can control and open your PowerPoint files with a simple click.”

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