Book Image

Fearless Cross-Platform Development with Delphi

By : David Cornelius
Book Image

Fearless Cross-Platform Development with Delphi

By: David Cornelius

Overview of this book

Delphi is a strongly typed, event-driven programming language with a rich ecosystem of frameworks and support tools. It comes with an extensive set of web and database libraries for rapid application development on desktop, mobile, and internet-enabled devices. This book will help you keep up with the latest IDE features and provide a sound foundation of project management and recent language enhancements to take your productivity to the next level. You’ll discover how simple it is to support popular mobile device features such as sensors, cameras, and GPS. The book will help you feel comfortable working with FireMonkey and styles and incorporating 3D user interfaces in new ways. As you advance, you’ll be able to build cross-platform solutions that not only look native but also take advantage of a wide array of device capabilities. You’ll also learn how to use embedded databases, such as SQLite and InterBase ToGo, synchronizing them with your own custom backend servers or modules using the powerful RAD Server engine. The book concludes by sharing tips for testing and deploying your end-to-end application suite for a smooth user experience. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to deliver modern enterprise applications using Delphi confidently.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: Programming Power
5
Section 2: Cross-Platform Power
11
Section 3: Mobile Power
15
Section 4: Server Power

Adding color, lighting, and movement

Adding color is pretty simple. Let's start by coloring the axes black. Add a TColorMaterialSource component to the form. This won't show up as a clickable object, but you can see it in the Structure pane. Set its Color property to Black.

Now, select the TPlane object you added for the x axis, find its MaterialSource property, and drop down the Property Editor to select the black material source component you just added. The x-axis line should now be black. You can do the same for the y-axis cylinder and its cone arrow if you'd like; if you do, notice that the red y-axis text looks as though it goes through the y-axis line. To fix that, you can pull that TText3D object forward by setting its Position.Z value to -0.5.

How would you like to transform the sphere in the lower-left quadrant into a globe? Applying a material source with the right texture bitmap makes it simple, but finding the right texture source isn't always...