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 the TLabel component

The FMX TLabel component is a style-enabled component (a TPresentedControl component, as explained in Chapter 2Exploring Similarities and Differences with VCL), which means you should not blindly overlap the concept of TLabel with the usual TText-based implementation.

For the Windows platform, the standard TLabel style is only composed of a TText object named text. This is used to provide a visual representation of the TLabel.Text property's value. But actually, a TLabel is a TPresentedTextControl, just like TButton, TCheckbox, and TRadioButton are.

TPresentedTextControl is abstracted from the actual implementation. This means TPresentedTextControl has its own properties (that is, Font, FontColor, WordWrap, Trimming, TextAlign, VertTextAlign, and so on) that can be used to fully describe how the text should be displayed. It uses these properties to configure a style object that is supposed to implement an ITextSettings...