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

Understanding anchors

The first way to obtain a responsive UI is to avoid absolute positioning (and, when it makes sense, avoid absolute sizing). In this section, we will learn about anchors and the functionalities that they enable. Even if it may seem (and probably is) the most natural approach, you should not think of having TEdit at a certain point (see the Position.X and Position.Y properties in FMX, and Left and Top in VCL) and of a certain size (Width and Height).

The main problem with this approach is that, usually, the container of your TEdit component may change its size over time. This may happen because we are talking about a form that the final user is resizing at runtime. The same happens when we are dealing with a mobile application, and the size of the form (that is, tied to the size of the device's display) is different according to the specific device the user has (for example, a phone with a 5-inch screen or a 10-inch tablet). Moreover, even...