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

Custom appearance

Custom ItemAppearance lets the developer determine the visibility of each available item and control its position. The placement of a drawable is achieved through some of its properties (inherited from TCommonObjectAppearance), given as follows:

  • Height and Width: These properties dictate the size of the drawable. When the value is zero, the drawable will assume the same size of the parent item (individually for width and height, so you can set one and leave the other at zero), otherwise you may specify the actual size of the drawable.
  • Align and VertAlign: Both these properties assume values from the TListItemAlign type defined in the FMX.ListView.Types unit. Three values are available: Leading, Center, and Trailing. We can regard the list item as a rectangular shape and we can determine the desired alignment both horizontally and vertically. These three values mean at the beginning, in the center...