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

TBitmapAnimation

We discussed color animations in the TColorAnimation and TColorKeyAnimation sections earlier. Bitmaps, in their very raw form, are large arrays of color values (one per point of the bitmap) and can potentially include alpha channel information.

At this point, you may be thinking that bitmap animation takes place by animating every single pixel color from the initial value to the corresponding one in the final bitmap. But this is not what happens.

Here, FMX takes advantage of its built-in graphics capabilities and adopts a more efficient strategy. Each step of the animation from a source image toward a target image will consist of the drawing of the source image, along with a certain opacity (alpha) value, immediately followed by a drawing of the target image, along with a complementary opacity.

The following image exemplifies this process:

Figure 10.26

As you can see, NormalizedTime is labeled on top of each step (ranging from 0 to 1); that is, the...