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 specialized animation components

Let's take color transitions as an example. How does a color shift from red to blue? If you have a basic understanding of color representation in computer graphics, you can relate the transition to a Red Green Blue (RGB) representation, where the red, blue, and green components are represented by 8-bit values (ranging from 0 to 255).

This means that transitioning from red (255, 0, 0) to blue (0, 0, 255) can be seen as a double transition; that is, moving a red channel from 255 to 0 and the blue channel from 0 to 255, respectively. This is just one of the possible paths we can take, and this becomes evident if you imagine the RGB space as a cube where each point inside the cube is a color point (a different set of R, G, and B channel values); that is, between two points, there are infinite connecting paths.

This brings us back to the beginning of this chapter, where we defined animations as the process of moving from a starting...