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

TPathAnimation

The last kind of animation we are going to cover is TPathAnimation. Vector graphic definition is a large topic and it's way beyond the purpose of this book. For now, we'll focus on the fact that we may want to animate a visual object so that it follows a certain path.

Specifically, we are going to talk about animating the position (and possibly the rotation) of the object; we won't be addressing any other properties, as we have done for the other animations we've covered. TPathAnimation does not inherit from TCustomPropertyAnimation, even though it addresses some of the properties of the target object. The addressed properties (Position and RotationAngle) are simply hard-wired into the animation object.

First of all, we need some SVG data defining the path. There are a number of SVG editors out there, but one of the most popular ones is InkScape (https://inkscape.org). We can use one of the available tools in the editor to draw a line (I've...