Book Image

Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey

By : Andrea Magni
4 (1)
Book Image

Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey

4 (1)
By: Andrea Magni

Overview of this book

FireMonkey (FMX) is a cross-platform application framework that allows developers to create exciting user interfaces and deliver applications on multiple operating systems (OS). This book will help you learn visual programming with Delphi and FMX. Starting with an overview of the FMX framework, including a general discussion of the underlying philosophy and approach, you’ll then move on to the fundamentals and architectural details of FMX. You’ll also cover a significant comparison between Delphi and the Visual Component Library (VCL). Next, you’ll focus on the main FMX components, data access/data binding, and style concepts, in addition to understanding how to deliver visually responsive UIs. To address modern application development, the book takes you through topics such as animations and effects, and provides you with a general introduction to parallel programming, specifically targeting UI-related aspects, including application responsiveness. Later, you’ll explore the most important cross-platform services in the FMX framework, which are essential for delivering your application on multiple platforms while retaining the single codebase approach. Finally, you’ll learn about FMX’s built-in 3D functionalities. By the end of this book, you’ll be familiar with the FMX framework and be able to build effective cross-platform apps.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Delphi GUI Programming Frameworks
4
Section 2: The FMX Framework in Depth
13
Section 3: Pushing to The Top: Advanced Topics

Understanding visual continuity

If you are a long-time computer user, there surely are conventions you feel familiar with. The more conventions of a system you are familiar with, the better your overall experience using that system is. After a while, you may not even notice you are so acquainted with a number of these conventions but it becomes immediately evident when some of these conventions are set apart; for example, it happens when a long-time Windows user tries a Linux or OS X/macOS system.

Most of the time, you'll find yourself disoriented because of something you were expecting to be somewhere in the UI, but it is now in another place or hidden somewhere waiting for you to find it. Being a professional developer, I have been in this painful situation many times, as I often work with Windows virtual machines inside a MacBook Pro environment (OS X), sometimes also interacting with Linux virtual machines. This results in different conventions for the same user, making...