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 buttons

In this section, we will learn about various kinds of buttons and their capabilities. Buttons are, of course, a vital part of any application out there on the internet. They represent one of the most elementary and effective ways of interacting with the user.

Even though the concept of a button may sound elementary (something I can click/tap on in order to execute a piece of code), a lot of functionalities have been built around this aspect. Buttons can have (or not) visible text, hints, or images, they can be customized to have a specific color (or tint), they can have a state (pressed, active, focused, hovering, and so on), and they can be very different in terms of shape and visual representation.

TButton is the component that implements the standard button in FMX. It inherits from TCustomButton, which in turn inherits from TPresentedTextControl and implements the IGlyph interface. Basically, this means a button is also a TPresentedControl, so it actually...