During conversion of our application suite to Delphi 2005, I ran into a very irritating bug where a form was flashing extremely quickly during application startup. It was so fast that I couldn't get a feel for which screen it was that was flashing. Debugging the application also didn't reveal what form it was. So, what to do? I thought of using Camtasia to record the screen during startup, and then play back the recorded session at a very slow rate so that I could find out what I needed to know. I had to be sure to crank up the frames per second capture rate as high as it would go, but after a smooth install and some tweaking of options in Camtasia, the plan worked beautifully. I found out what form it was that was flashing, and then fixed it.

The gory details were that this form only got included from a DLL that had its conditional compilation directives wrong (for this build). However, this flash didn't occur in the Delphi 6 days. So I thought back to my previous experiences with PopupMode, and set PopupMode to pmAuto for this form and everything is great again.

Some days, I long for the Ctrl-S / Ctrl-Q days again.