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

Accessing the clipboard service

In this section, we will encounter our first (simple) example of a platform service wrapped by the FMX framework. Clipboard support may be taken for granted but actually is an integration with the underlying OS (and has more platform-specific behaviors than you may notice at first glance). This will serve you in two different ways, that is, to understand and properly use the clipboard in your applications, and as an introduction to the FMX approach to wrapping platform services.

The clipboard is a very widely used feature of most operating systems out there. Basically, it provides the user with the capability to share a piece of content (text, graphics, custom content) across different parts of the application; for example, to copy some text from an edit box and paste it in another one. It can even be across different applications, such as copying some text from a browser to a text editor (you're brave!).

Even though it is a very popular feature and...