Buy a T-shirt
You can help by buying a T-shirt from the shop or by forwarding Andy’s posting to friends and colleagues. Andy has set up different shops for North America and Europe (for faster and cheaper shipping):

• North American shop
• European shop

Design a Delphi programming T-shirt
You can also help by designing a Delphi-related programming T-shirt or by suggesting T-shirt ideas. Either comment on this blog (and I will forward any ideas) or directly contact Andy.

We value Joe’s feedback and want to clarify some of his points (we also tried to post a clarification as a comment on his blog, but Joe hasn’t yet approved the comment, that’s why we are also posting it here). Joe highlights the following paragraph of our license agreement:

“6.1 When using the licensed programs, in order to avoid damage that may be caused to other programs or stored data being used simultaneously, the Customers shall in good time before using/utilising the licensed programs back up the programs and data involved, and not use programs of this kind in actual operation before he has verified the flawless quality of these programs by a test routine.”

Joe wrote that this paragraph, which is designed to ensure that customers backup critical data and test program interoperability before deploying our products, suggests that our software is not well tested and that our liability limitations are over the top. The contrary is actually the case; please read on.

If you carefully read typical license agreements, be it from Microsoft, Intel or most other software companies, you will find paragraphs such as the following (which is quoted from an Intel license agreement for some of their dev tools):

“LIMITATION OF LIABILITY: THE ABOVE REPLACEMENT PROVISION IS THE ONLY WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. INTEL OFFERS NO OTHER WARRANTY EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED INCLUDING THOSE OF MERCHANTABILITY, NONINFRINGEMENT OF THIRD- PARTY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. NEITHER INTEL NOR ITS SUPPLIERS SHALL BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF BUSINESS PROFITS, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, LOSS OF BUSINESS INFORMATION, OR OTHER LOSS) ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THE SOFTWARE, EVEN IF INTEL HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. BECAUSE SOME JURISDICTIONS PROHIBIT THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF LIABILITY FOR CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, THE ABOVE LIMITATION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.”

This paragraph basically states that the vendor isn’t liable for ANY kind of damage whatsoever. Our license doesn’t contain such limitations, as limiting the liability to this degree is not possible in Germany (and probably shouldn’t be, I might add). That’s why our license actually contains LESS RESTRICTIVE limitations. In the quoted paragraph, we merely ask our customers to test SmartInspect in combination with their software before deployment (which we believe is pretty standard anyway). This does of course not mean that we are not testing the software ourselves (in fact, we use more than 5000 unit tests to ensure the quality of the SmartInspect libraries, have a test plan for the Console consisting of more than 100 pages which we execute regularly, offer beta releases for new major versions and take great care in general to make SmartInspect as robust and reliable as possible).

I’m not a lawyer, but formulating international license agreements and contracts is probably a lot harder than one would think. We really tried to come up with a license agreement that’s not too restrictive and is hopefully fair for both parties. For example, we explicitly state in the license agreement that our software can be installed on up to 3 machines per licensed user, a phrase that should probably be included in all dev tools EULAs, but is sadly missing from most.

One could probably argue that software licenses in general try to limit the liability of vendors too much, and this is definitely an important topic. However, I believe that our license is actually one of the better licenses in this regard. Again, we value Joe’s feedback and we are sorry to hear that our license sent a wrong signal, but I hope we could clarify some of Joe’s concerns. I also hope that our transparency on this issue is valued, too, as I’m not sure if any of our competitors would link to a negative product comment and even promote it on their community website.

We would love to read your comments on this topic!

“It’s blindingly fast, easy to use, clear and has all manner of time saving features - easy navigation, graphs, filters, colours and much more. Yes the software is a few hundred dollars but will more than pay for itself in time savings the very first time you use it in anger.”

Thanks Ryan, we really love hearing about how SmartInspect helps developers in day-to-day use! Read Ryan’s full posting: Essential Tools - SmartInspect Logging.

Having used this library on an internal PHP project for some time now, we believe this library is very useful for debugging PHP websites and applications (the library is not well suited for production usage because there’s no support for log files at the moment).

Please note that we are offering this library as a free and unsupported download. We are also looking into providing minimal debug-only SmartInspect libraries for other languages and platforms in the future, so stay tuned!

» SmartInspect for PHP

• Added: Full support for Delphi and C++Builder 2009
• Changed: Named pipes are now opened in exclusive mode by the Console
• Fixed: Session loading via configuration files is now case insensitive
• Fixed: A possible exception when opening the Edit View dialog in the Console has been fixed

The fully functional trial version can be downloaded from our download section. Registered customers with an active support plan can download the new version from My Gurock.com.

As always, the update can simply be installed over an existing installation. There’s no need to uninstall your current version first.

In case you haven’t heard about Google Chrome yet, read this clever comic that introduces Chrome’s innovative features. Oh and in case you wonder, the Google Chrome user agent string looks like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows;U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

“What I really liked was that the SmartInspect log console feels like [Visual Studio] and is a TCP/IP server which means that you can point an app at a machine to log via TCP/IP. The version that I was given even included source for the logging library (and I think everything else). Yes, you can log to a file and other more traditional log destinations… but the TCP/IP server is so “sexy.”
– Jay Kimble for The Runtime

“Nothing you will read here or anywhere else can do this piece of software justice - you have to take it for a test drive and see what you can make it do. If you haven’t downloaded a 30 day trial yet, what could you possibly be waiting for? The more I play with this program the more I wonder how could you possibly manage without it -and- I haven’t played with much more than the basics.”
– Dave on his TDelphiHobbyist Blog

Thanks Jay and Dave, we really appreciate it!

This version introduces a new log server application (SmartInspect Router), a high-performance named pipe protocol for local live logging, asynchronous logging for even better logging performance, the ability to encrypt log files, a redesigned and more flexible log rotation mechanism, a sort feature in the Console to merge multiple log files, various session related enhancements and a lot more. You can read more about these features on our blog or on the What’s New page.

For users with an active support plan, SmartInspect 3.0 is a free upgrade. If your support plan isn’t current, just extend your support plan on My Gurock.com to gain access to this new version. To learn more about SmartInspect 3.0, please visit the SmartInspect website or take the tour.

Thanks to everyone for your continued support and for helping us reach this milestone.

Although most of the presented data is already available via other Google tools such as Google Trends and the Google Keyword Tool, Google Insights presents the data in a very clear and concise manner. It also looks like Google Insights shows trend information for some keywords that aren’t available via Google Trends.

Even if you are not advertising with Google Adwords or other search engines’ PPC programs, this new offering from Google looks like an indispensable tool for selecting the perfect keywords for your SEO efforts.