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 global animation management

As we've already discussed, the model for FMX animations relies on the presence of a global timer that periodically pings active animations to solicit each to perform the next step (providing a delta amount of time to cover in the animation).

This timer is usually created using the IFMXTimerService provider, which is platform-specific and built into the FMX framework. You can query an IFMXTimerService reference through TPlatformServices.Current in the FMX.Platform unit. For the Android platform, a different, more thread-oriented, path has been chosen for implementing the timer. Apart from this small detail, animations will be consistent across all supported platforms (a huge advantage for the developer) and will follow the model we've described so far.

A reference to the global timer is available through the TAnimation.AniThread property (an instance is created on-demand, generally at the start of the first animation). Its...