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 alignments

The Align property, once again available in all TControl descendants, can be set to determine how the component should align inside its container. It is available both in VCL and FMX, but the set of available values in FMX is much larger than in VCL (please refer to the documentation of the Vcl.Controls.TAlign and FMX.Types.TAlignLayout types for a comprehensive overview, available at http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/en/Vcl.Controls.TControl.Align and http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/en/FMX.Controls.TControl.Alignrespectively).

Some possible values for Align are quite straightforward – that is, Top (alTop in VCL) will let your component be positioned in the top part of its parent and it is more or less equivalent to positioning it at the top-left corner of the parent, setting Width the same as its parent, and Anchors to (akLeft, akRight, akTop). You are then free to decide the height of your component, but it will always...