i've been with this problem for some time.. I want to make a diagram, made on runtime with the data that user enters in the other forms etc etc.
My first and actual option, was making cycles and then create the shapes / labels, and applying the shape.top to a variable and increasing it every cycle for like 120. this works great, but if i turn this into a more complex thing, it will give me a lot of work to create the shapes and controlling if they are in top of each other, and more, to connect them with a line.
So, there isn't a component that can help me with this? By the way, is there any component to connect with a simple line 2 objects visually? This would be a nice help too !
Thanks.
DelphiArea has a component called Simple Graph that does this type of thing.
I have never used it myself, but I found it today and was impressed with the demo application.
Related
I'm working on a patch in Pure Data which uses an 8 number scale to decide which chords can be played. E.g. if a chord uses a note that is not in the scale, re-roll. Obviously this isn't the most musical soultion as we usually expect accidentals and such, but here we are looking at a primitive method for procedural music. Here is the problem patch:
CreateChords patch
As soon as I attempt to use a new scale, pure data freezes and requires an immediate restart.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Liam
It would be massively more efficient and easier to use an object like [coll] or [textfile] to store your chord patterns. Instead of having each pattern in a message object, which you then need to feed individually through all of the processing, you would just have one object, and feed your random number generator into it, which will then spit out the corresponding code. something like this
your patch reworked
there you have it. A spaghetti mess of wires and boxes reduced to 11 objects and 11 cables. There are several other ways to accomplish similar things, but this was the first to come to mind. If this one works for your purpose, cool, or else lemme know and I'll show you other ways.
Ah, yea, I suspected a stack overflow as the cause of the crash. It's easy to make that mistake with so many wires so close together, as it's hard to see what all has been connected or mis-connected. Accomplishing this idea using only vanilla objects is quite a bit more challenging, now that you mention it. Here's something that could possibly work.
I was looking into creating iOS-apps (especially for the iPad) with the Adobe-Flex framework. It looks very promising to code apps this way.
Is it possible to create own controls/widgets? In the far future I might want to create my own kind of gantt-calender or whatever. Is something like this possible and are there any good tutorials/book out there?
Thanks in advance!
UPDATE: I want to create iOS Components that I can use in Flex. Controls, that are not aviable by default in Flex. Is that possible? By derivating or something?
UPDATE 2: In the meanwhile I found FlexLib to be useful. How hard is it to create stuff like this on your own? Especially for mobile devices. Are there any good tutorials, books, etc. out there?
Yes, you can create your own Controls in Flex. They are commonly called Components. I suggest you start by reading the Flex Docs on how to do so. There are also plenty of other resources out there. One is a screencast series that I created for The Flex Show. Here is episode 1.
You had asked:
How hard is it to create stuff like this on your own?
It depends on what the component wants to do. The commercial components we've built at www.flextras.com have taken from three to twelve months to build. Our Calendar is built from scratch, but most of the other components extend existing Flex Framework components.
The Flextras stuff are architected for reuse. A "single use" component for a specific app can be built in 1 hour [and up].
Once again, the purpose of a component will affect how long it takes to build.
#chiffre
Ok, maybe I am guessing wrong but "iOS controls" makes me think not to "flex controls".
Anyway with Flex 4.5.1 you can add any controls you want, the only thing that you must count (and this counts a lot) is performance.
Read especially about item renderers since scrolling list is not so fast on iOS and how you can make use of cacheAsBitmap.
Also keep in mind to always use light controls when needed if not extend base controls like UIComponent or Sprite and not Button if you just need a rectangle.
Here are some links
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/06/adobe-air-2-7-now-available-ios-apps-4x-faster.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/mobile-development-flex-flashbuilder.
Does it happen that no one ever needs histogram in Delphi ?
Google gave me a bunch of half-baked code snippets. But it means that each time you need one - you have to invent one more ad hoc bycicle.
Torry mostly told me about some very expensive closed source Math Statistics or Financial packages, that as a subproduct have histograms. But they are very expensive and since you have no source code, each time you install update onto IDE/RTL/VCL you're probably screwed, until the vendor would make (soon ? ever?) updated packages. Given thatvendor is still does exists.
S.O. told me nothing, nil.
For what i found...
Mitov.com provides some histograms in PlotLab. which told to be free for non-commercial. Alas, it is again closed-source, and if the Histogram - quite fancy let's admit -is the onlything i need from it - why pay the whole price ?
One more example http://DSpatial.sf.net
Just few years ago i used it in Delphi 5, but even then i felt the author is loosing interest in the project. I made few enhancement, fixed some bugs, he merged them and that's all. The component was not very useful and lacked upon features, yet better than nothing. Now the project seems to be completely dead. Good old days, etc. But i do not want them back :-)
And Stack Overflow seemingly carries no single question about it. But maybe just no one bothered to create topic, after search found nothing ? I mean, Delphi was created for database access, histograms are one of basic ways to visualize data, and no one crosses them ? Something with nice style, with rich mouse tooltip like in HTML/CSS/JS on http://www.moskva.fm/stations/FM_95.2 ?
Or is this too domain-related and not ever possible to have good abstraction ?
TChart is a control that ships with most versions of Delphi. TChart can be used to make histograms (bar charts) in style. The following give you some ideas about how to use it: http://www.digitalcoding.com/tutorials/delphi/Simple-steps-to-create-Delphi-chart.html and http://delphi.about.com/od/adptips2006/qt/chart_selectbar.htm .
If you need something with code, google the pages at delphiforfun.org/programs/oscilloscope.htm . These are not controls. The oscilloscope article has a histogram with source. Some of the other projects at the site have other histogram graphs with source..not elegant but useful and free. Use them as a template to make your own control.
The link at http://delphiforfun.org/programs/Math_Topics/probability_distributions.htm shows how to make your own statistics displays with "histograms." This example makes use of TChart.
Here is some more stuff to try I found looking at my resource file:
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/TAChart, http://members.home.nl/mvanwesten/en_lazarus.html , http://www.martinole.org/TAChart.html ...some of these are GPU components that supposedly work with some versions of Delphi. Perhaps this is your lucky day as there is some source code. The first and third listed probably will work reasonably for histograms. You may have to write your own statistics algorithms.
Found this thread while doing some searching. The ImageEn component suite has a THistogramBox component. It's the NOT prettiest thing in the world, but it's the only one I've found so far.
http://www.imageen.com
I came across a histogram example in a gdiplus package available for download from code central. I don't know if it will do what you need but when I saw it I remembered your SO question.
HTH.
If you were using firemonkey, you could just created a series of TRectangles in series. They can be made unclickable by turning hittest off. Or is that too easy and straightforward?
Do you know any chess move validation library for ActionScript 3 ?
I have searched in google but I can not find anything.
Please tell me if you know.
If there isn't any library, I think that I have to port from Java to AS3.
I think I'd just write it because it is going to end up very tightly bound to your game/position representation.
Think about it: ust legal moves, or move validation in game context (50-move rule, 3-time repeated position, en-passant, promoted pieces, castling availability...?).
You might even have to pass the entire move history for the game.
It is not that much work if you think about it.
http://code.google.com/p/osas3cf/updates/list
That one has code included for a chess move validator. Check it out
I am looking to build my own component and have no idea where to begin. I have some Delphi books but they are old and outdated, and am looking for some recommendations on tutorials/books to help me do this. The component will be pretty simple, basically 2 labels and an image. I need hundreds of these in an array, so I thought a component would be the best route. The text will adjust based on width etc, and have some mouseover events. So basically, where do I begin?
I am using Delphi 2009, this will be a win32 app.
Thanks!
You can order Ray Konopka's book Dev. Custom Delphi 3 Components - PDF for 25$. It's a specialized book on the subject and very good for a beginner too.
The main principles behind developing components is:
Whether the component is visual or
not (Does it need a Canvas to paint on)
Does it need a window handle or not (visual or non-visual)
Once you answered those questions you can look at Delphi's source code for examples.
As far as I know, Delphi Component Design, by Danny Thorpe, is still the best book on the subject. Component design hasn't changed significantly in the last 15 years, so whatever books you have probably aren't as outdated as you think. There are three things to keep in mind while reading older references:
Names of certain units have changed. There's no DsgnIDE anymore, for example. It's DesignIDE instead.
Design-time code is strictly separated from run-time code now. This means you can't use DesignIDE in your component's unit, or else you're barred from using run-time packages. Older Delphi versions didn't have this technical restriction (although it's always been a legal restriction), so old code examples you find might need to change a little bit.
Strings are Unicode now, so as with all old code examples you find, there might be some invalid assumptions about character sizes that you'll need to recognize.
The biggest obstacle to writing components is that you're expected to use various protected members of the classes you descend from, but those frequently aren't documented, so you'll have to be much more willing to go read the VCL source code for examples of how various methods are used.
The easiest way to do what you want is to create a new form. Drop the labels and image and arrange them the way you want; if it suits your need, put them on a panel so they can be moved around as a unit.
Select all the components you want included (and including the panel if you chose to use one), and then click the Component item on the IDE's main menu, and select the "Create Component Template". (It's only enabled if you have selected components on the current form.) A dialog will appear asking you for a name for the new component, and the Component Palette page on which you want it to appear.
Take a look at this article, which describes how to build new components made up of a group of existing components.
Don't worry about your books being old.
Just about everything from the old days still works fine and what little doesn't is generally due to name conflicts or the addition of Unicode in the 2009 version.
They aren't Microsoft, they don't go breaking old code without good reason. In fact, take some code from the old DOS days--assuming it doesn't try to manipulate the screen it's likely to run with minimal fixup.
Don't worry about your old books! Since v3, Delphi hasn't changed much. This is why most of the programs compiled with D3 still compiles in D7 or even newer versions. And if it doesn't compile, probably you need to change a line or two, here and then.
I would recommend you to search other VERY simple components on Internet and see how they are made. Then make your own and post it here. Let other take a look at it and suggest improvements or spot bugs.
About your control's design:
1) maybe you DON'T need those two labels. You can just paint the text directly on the image. If you have lots of those components as you say, you may save a little bit of memory.
2) you may NOT want to have lots and lots and lots of images loading in one form. The overhead may be significant. What you can do is to load the pictures ONLY in images that are visible on screen - and you will put on screen ONLY 5-10 images (or whatever number of images you can show on the form without going out of screen). As the user scrolls down, you keep the same same TImage controls on screen but you load new (next) images in them.
3) You may not want to store labels and TImage in an array (I suppose it is an TImage because it seems you want to show them on the screen else you won't need labels - you need to explain your problem in more details if I got it wrong). But you can store a TBitmap and the text (that you want to display in labels) instead.
So, you may need to calculate how much CPU/disk overhead your hundreds of controls will create and how much memory they need. If you stay well under 1GB and the loading time is under 10 seconds, then it is relatively ok. IF not, you may want to think about your control's design before starting to actually implement it.
Hope this was helpful.
See ya.