The Delphi Magazine to close

published: Fri, 24-Nov-2006   |   updated: Fri, 24-Nov-2006

This is a sad day. Chris Frizelle, the editor and owner of The Delphi Magazine, after trying extremely hard to maintain and publish a magazine devoted entirely to programming in Delphi (although I did manage once to get an article about Chrome in it!), has decided that the subscriber base and the interest just isn't enough to keep it going with the same high quality for which it's renowned.

From a conversation with him, he mentioned that this year has been extremely hard for the magazine: apparently the subscription level started dropping off alarmingly after Borland made their announcement about spinning off the Developer Tools Group (that is, the "owners" of Delphi). And that's the same impression I get from all over: sales of Delphi-related stuff, including Delphi itself, have declined badly with the uncertainly about its future. It remains to be seen whether the creation of the CodeGear subsidiary will stabilize things enough for Delphi to recover. Chris certainly doesn't think so.

So he's decided to close it down and March 2007 will be the last issue published. All is not lost, though: he will keep the site going at least until December 2007 and has a special offer to subscribe the remainder of that time to access the articles online. He may (or may not) commission extra articles between April and December, but certainly not enough to produce a complete issue every month. I'm negotiating for sure, and I dare say so will Dr Bob and the other regular authors. All of the details can be seen here.

I've had a long and pleasurable history with Chris and the readers of the magazine, all the way from November 1997 to the present day (I'm writing an article for January's issue as we speak, on possibly the most difficult algorithm I've ever had to implement), with a hiatus when I worked for Microsoft. I've only met him once, at the Delphi Developers Conference in 1999 at some hotel outside Gatwick, but we've maintained a lively correspondence throughout. He also, through his TDMWeb subsidiary, runs the web hosting company on whose servers this site runs, so we shall continue to remain in touch, long after the magazine is finally put away.

And my readers from the magazine? Well, they've booed me and they've cheered me but either way they've generally been right. No matter what they've wanted to say when they email me, they've always been polite and friendly and I hope they'll continue to read this web site for more algorithmic information and tidbits. Many thanks to them all.

I could start pontificating about Borland and Delphi and CodeGear and the Delphi community at this point, but I fear it won't help. Oh well. Goodbye, TDM.