The power of parenting

One of the nicest things about FireMonkey’s architecture is parenting. Essentially, any FireMonkey component can contain or “be a parent” to other components. What’s cool about this is that all children inherit different properties of their parents, such as position, scale, and rotation. This also provides a lot of possibilities when it comes to building user interfaces since we can create composite controls without having to declare completely new classes.

Shapes

A lot of low-level drawing code can be avoided by using different controls from the Shape category on the palette. There are lines, circles, ellipses, rectangles, pies, paths, and more. They encapsulate drawings on the canvas, so you don’t need to write much code.

Let’s try to recreate our Sun visualization with shapes to better compare these two possible approaches to drawing. Add a new Form HD element to the project. Drop a TRectangle component on...