Drawing in code

The key to FireMonkey’s cross-platform support is its rendering architecture. When you create a new multi-device project with Delphi, on the first page of the wizard, you can choose an application type. Effectively, this selects the type of the first form to add to a new app. For this, you can choose Blank Application. This will add a form inherited from TForm to the project, which is a basic two-dimensional form. The second choice is 3D Application. This will add a form inherited from TForm3D. All other choices give you a TForm descendant with some additional controls already added.

If you decide to add more forms to the project, then you’ll come across the real choice: HD Form or 3D Form. Here, HD stands for high-definition and is just a different name for 2D. Depending on the chosen platform, FireMonkey forms are rendered using different graphics APIs, such as OpenGL or DirectX. These are the same APIs that many developers use to implement graphically...