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

Learning about TAnimator shortcuts

Now that we have introduced all the capabilities of TAnimation, you may think it should be easy to animate a property value for FMX objects. However, the FMX animation model is very generic and can be applied to whatever Delphi objects are out there (from UI to business classes).

Once again, we just need to clearly address whether the animations should be synchronous or asynchronous. You may prefer the former when you need to ensure that the animation has completed before moving on to something else. Obviously, you'll want to wait for the animation to complete without preventing the animation itself from finishing; otherwise, you'd be stuck in an infinite wait deadlock.

The second kind of execution (asynchronous) also has some tricky aspects that we need to deal with. If you launch (one or more) animations and you want to continue doing other things without waiting for them to complete, who will take care of them once they've finished...