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 the selection algorithm

The native platform style is the obvious default for each FMX application. Once you have built your FMX Win32 application, you'll probably want one of the Windows 10, Windows 8, or Windows 7 default styles to be applied at runtime in order to make your application look native to the OS.

If you want to set a different style for your application, right from the start, you can add some code to load the desired style directly in the DPR file of the project. You may choose to load your style from an external file (and possibly have some configuration information to select the desired file) or from binary resources of your executable; either way, the style becomes the default application style and every created form will use that style.

If you really want to override the application style in a particular form, you can always add a TStyleBook component to that form and set the StyleBook reference property of the form to that style book. However, this...