I am using Embarcadero C++ 10.3.2.
I switched my VCL buttons to use TVirtualImageList, and this greatly improved their scaling behavior.
Unfortunately, now the buttons appear on the Form at runtime extremely slowly, one by one. I am guessing this is due to the internal scaling of the icon images, as regular buttons behave normally.
I made the buttons the same size as one of the standard image sizes in the TVirtualImageList, but this made little difference. It happens whether the screen is scaled by Windows or not.
Is there any way of speeding this up?
Related
I have a problem with Sisulizer in a DPI-aware Delphi application. The application works perfect in high DPI, also along multiple monitors with multiple DPI settings.
The problem arrises if the user changes the language (resource) runtime with one or multiple forms shown. We do this using SetNewResourceFile in LaResource.pas. This loads the new resource file and will overwrite all properties of all components. This changes also the left, right, top, bottom, width, height, etc. of the components and thereby change the scaling of all forms and components. So, a form that is scaled 200% is 'reset' to 96ppi after this action. This behavior is not desirable.
Does anybody have a suggestion how to solve this?
I have the issue by adding to following lines of code:
initialization
LaEnabledProperties := STRING_TYPES_C;
Although this solves my issue, it is still a bug in Sisulizer. If you have, for example, a label with different width for each language, it will not work. If have notified Sisulizer and hope that they will fix it.
This is the first time I have really attempted a Project using Firemonkey, with the Target Platform been Android.
I am finding it difficult trying to understand the workflow with the use of views been somewhat trivial, I just can't seem to grasp the concept at the moment.
I have successfully managed to get the Delphi IDE to recognise my device (Xperia Z2) so when building and running the Project I can see the app on my phone (although so far I am not too impressed, long black screens before anything showing and sometimes the app wont show at all, not to mention slow compilation and linking time).
The first problem I ran into is that controls dont appear on the Android device in the correct places. I added Android 5" Phone as a view as that would be the closest thing to my device, the controls on the Form Designer are aligned to how I want them, for simple testing I just dropped a couple of buttons that are centered in the middle of the form horizontally. When running and viewing the app on my phone however, the buttons are wider than the visible area of the phone, I tried the same with other views such as Android 4" Phone and it's the same. The controls appear lined up correctly on the Delphi Form Designer, but when running and viewing them on my phone they are not lined up at all, it feels like I need to guess where the controls should appear making views seem pointless, after all I cannot test on a multitude of devices and therefore if they don't appear on my phone as they do on the Delphi Form Designer what hope do we have? I expected that how the controls appeared in the view window is exactly how it should appear on my Android deivce but this does not seem the case.
The other view related question is, what is the purpose of the Master View? From my vague understanding you need views to design the layout for each Android device, does this mean then for each device view we have to constantly reposition and move controls independantly for each view? What purpose does the master view have, other than from what I can tell you can only delete controls from the master view and from each view use the Revert to Inherited context menu.
It feels like I need to guess where the controls should appear, the device view at Design Time seems rather inaccurate, surely how you look at the device view on the Form Designer is exactly how it should appear on your Android device?
Now I adapt my app for tablet PC. I ask how can I fixate form when the screen was rotated. Good people says that I must adapt my app for portrait orientation and they're right.
Some forms is very specific and it's very hard (maybe impossible) to re-design they for portrait orientation. So I think I can create a illusion that my app works only in landscape orientation.
That's why I need rotate standard VCL components in Delphi XE2. For example for standard memo I need write text not only from left to right (or right to left) and from up to down (and from down to up).
Also I need rotate button. Now I use standard TButton and TRxSpeedButton.
I think enough to rotate the text for TButton but I don't know how I can do this?
In case of TRxSpeedButton I use glyphs. In theory maybe I can override canvas and change pic. Another way is create 2 buttons (one for portrait orientation, one for landscape. Each one will have their special glyph) and change their visibility. But I don't like 2nd variant because in this case exe file will be very plump, I don't like plump exe))
Thanks for advises.
You've no realistic chance of making this work using standard VCL controls. VCL controls don't have a mode that allows them to be rotated through 90 degrees. I see no easy prospect for making any control that displays text do so rotated. That's just text output. What about text input? There's also the issue of shadows and 3D effects which are based on a specific orientation. The list goes on and on.
In my view, if you want to make this work well you'll almost certainly need to write an entire GUI framework from scratch.
Whilst it is clear possible to do this it doesn't seem like a realistic choice when set aside the alternative of making your app work in both portrait and landscape orientations.
You have no chance with fake landscape approach.
There are three solutions for your problem:
Best one - make your application work with any screen size / orientation combination. This is the Windows way.
If your application "must" work in landscape mode, inform users when you detect wrong orientation, that application only functions in landscape mode. Show either message box, or special form with message that cannot be missed, while you hide your other forms, or something like that.
Lock device in landscape mode, like described in How to prevent the screen from automatically rotating on a tablet? But you should know that this is not the way Windows are meant to be used in Desktop mode.
The VCL was not built for this, so I dont really see that happening without major work done to the presentation layer of the RTL.
The have been skinning engines that were capable of this, but they essentially patched the RTL and took over rendering. Rotation data was held in a lookup table for each control that you had to set separately from the actual class.
If Delphi had support for partial classes like Smart Pascal does, then perhaps (if the architecture allowed it) this could be postfixed. But as of writing the VCL is simply not made for this. I am writing a tweening library as I type this, so I have looked into this.
One way that might work for you would be to use the PaintTo method of various controls. Have them paint their fully drawn image onto a bitmap and then rotate the bitmap by 90 degrees to get the portrait versus landscape effect. Then draw that image on the canvas of your form in its OnPaint method (you would want to make the actual controls invisible when in the portrait mode, showing only your painted and rotated bitmaps.)
There are some controls (like TRichEdit) whose PaintTo Method doesn't work correctly, though. So this may be of limited use for you. Another way is to grab a screen capture of the entire client area of the form on the desktop and then rotate and display that. that works even with TRichEdit...
I have a Delphi XE2 Firemonkey application that I want to run on both iPad and iPhone. The iPad and iPhone real estate is different of course and I have been experimenting repositioning and resizing (visual) components according to the platform they are running on - triggered by the forms OnResize event. Started out changing the component "Margins" property with not much success (maybe that relates more to adjacent components...?) and then found the component "Position" property seems to do the job.
Question: Is the Position property the way to go? Or is there a more appropriate way using "Margins" (I seem to have read something about this somewhere, but can no longer find it). Or is there some other method, maybe not based on the OnResize event? (Yes, I am sure this is just 1 question.)
Brief details of the project - displays a costomer database record on the screen using around 30 components, mostly TLabel components, some buttons and search fields or 2 using TEdit's.
Thanks
Really depends on how differently you want to use the extra real-estate.
Do you want to display additional information, or just stretch everything out to use the space? If the latter, then you can use the Scale property.
For accessibility purposes, I need to make the scrollbars for all scrollable controls (lists, list views) wider and the scrollbar arrows bigger.
How to get the scrollbars (handles) from a scrollable control (ex: TListView) ?
How to make the scrollbar and the arrows wider/bigger ?
10x for any hints and code...
Accessibility is something that does not concern a single application, but the whole system. That's why there is no API defined to adjust things like border widths, scrollbar size and similar properties of the native controls only for your program. You can however adjust these settings globally in Windows, either by using the Accessibility Wizard, or by adjusting fonts, colours, border sizes and scrollbar sizes in the Display Properties applet.
For more information you should check out the Microsoft Accessibility page and follow the various links.
Edit: Changing the global settings (as the accepted answer suggests) for the benefit of your own program is rude in the extreme. Please keep in mind that this interferes with all other running programs. It is maybe excusable for a system with a touch screen, where controls need to be large to be usable at all - but on such a system the control sizes would probably already be set correctly.
I'm not sure that you can - You have to change it (and restore back) for whole Windows.
http://www.greatis.com/delphicb/tips/lib/system-captionfont.html
Setting and reading property TNonClientMetrics.iScrollWidth
Edit: I know that this solution is rude, but in common cases is the best that you CAN do. If you have specialized TabletPC application then you usually use only that application at one time, not others. But - almost all Windows applications are not designed to work with so big scroolbars. So when you need to use OS dialogs and other applications then you have to switch it back.
There is no better solution than "while is my touchscreen application running set Window scroolbars big, then return it back". We have exactly this application in real world so I know what I'm talking about.
Of course you can write your own grid control (if you have so much time) or use some thirdparty controls (if you have money and time), but that was not question.