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 the relevant factors of responsiveness

As have already been introduced, a number of factors need to be considered when talking about responsiveness.

Here is a list of some of the most significant ones:

  • Device type (desktop, mobile, and so on)
  • Screen resolution
  • Screen form factor (3:4, 16:9, 16:10, and more)
  • Screen density (depending on screen size and resolution), aka pixel ratio
  • The ability to change orientation during the lifetime of the application (generally true for mobile devices)

Let's have a quick glance at all of the aforementioned factors and how they relate to one another. In a perfect world, our application should be capable of seamlessly adapting to deliver a fully functional, effective, eye candy user interface (UI) in every possible case. This is really hard to achieve and developers all around the world are struggling every day to improve their applications and technologies to shorten the distance to this goal.