Reviews

Feb 11 2007

Turbo Compilers: They’re Back!

After years of absense, Borland has re-released their famous Turbo compilers. They were the greatest programming tools of their day. The best selling languages were Turbo C++ and Turbo Pascal. They also created Turbo Assembler which was the easiest tool for writing assembly language for the PC. For a while, there was Turbo Basic which was Borland’s answer to Microsoft’s Quick Basic but it was never a successful product. Turbo Prolog was even less successful. Microsoft created Quick Pascal to counter Turbo Pascal, but that product was a failure.

The outcome of the compiler wars between Microsoft and Borland lead to a Microsoft dominance over programming languages, which still holds today. Visual Studio is currently a superior product over Borland’s compilers and has a much larger community that supports it.

Now you can get Turbo Delphi (one version for .NET and one Win32) — this is what Turbo Pascal evolved into. Turbo C++ and Turbo C# are also available. There are free Explorer versions that you can download and use and a commercial Professional version.

The problem with these compilers is that they all require the Microsoft .NET 1.1 Framework and SDK. Their .NET compilers can only produce code for the older .NET 1.1. Microsoft’s free Express compilers can create .NET 2.0 code. Why would anyone want to create older binaries? You even need to have .NET 1.1 and the SDK just to install Turbo C++ which compiles native Win32 code.

Another problem is that you are only allowed to have one Turbo Explorer edition installed on your computer. With Microsoft you can install all of their Express tools.

The Turbo languages are a lot of work to install. Microsoft has Visual C++ for creating Win32 applications and Visual C# / Visual Basic for creating .NET 2.0 applications. These languages also have extensive knowledge bases and community support. So if you are looking for free programming tools for Windows, its easier using Microsoft’s Express editions of Visual Studio.

You can find them at msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/.

By Johan • Applications, Reviews • 1

Jan 24 2007

Hiding Messages in Images

Everyone at one or another played spy games when they were kids. One thing that a good spy needed to be able to do was send secret messages to other spies. Normally, this would be done with a clever code or writing made with invisible inks. You would then need a special light or decoder marker to translate the secret message.

Fortunately, today in the high tech 21st Century, you don’t need to do this sort of thing anymore. You can send secret messages using Hide In Picture from Davi Figueiredo.

This program will allow you embed a small text file in a .JPG or .BMP file. You can specify Blowfish or Rijndael for the encryption algorithm. A password then needs to be selected. That’s all there is to inserting a secret message in an image file. The file size doesn’t change much from the original size and the program won’t allow you to insert large files in a bitmap.

The user interface for the software is very simple and it could be improved. The latest version is 2.1 which was made 5 years ago. I think it might be time to upgrade the software and make it more user friendly and include documentation that can be called from the program.

Overall, its a fun program to play with and its something that can be used to waste time when your bored. You can download it at sourceforge.net/projects/hide-in-picture.

By Johan • Applications, Reviews • 0