I am looking for a graphical component in Delphi winch have such features:
allows to paint text in different font types, sizes and colors
allows to select previously drawn text and copy it
paints images on a given coords, gif support would be nice
its very fast in terms of CPU usage
I need this component as a main chat window. I don't want to use it as a text editor.
I've tried two solutions so far:
TVirtualStringTree
THtml
Currently I am using THtml. It performs quite nice but it is a bit to slow due to two facts:
It supports many features which are not necessary in my case
Each time I want to add some content to it, I must reload the whole content
I really don't want to go into its sources and modify them until I have no other choice. So maybe someone of you knows some nice lightweight component which I can use instead?
Take a look at TRichView. It's derived from TCustomControl so no external dependencies. It's third party commercial component, but a very good one. Skype Win client uses it.
What about a TRichEdit? Most of the things you mention should be easiliby possible with this component.
Concering the insertion of a bitmap, see this article on Delphi 3000.
Did you consider using TWebBrowser?
At least it ticks all your boxes...
Related
This is a question about picking the right Delphi components.
Using Delphi for a new app.
I'm looking to allow my user to have a list of (his own, on harddisk) pictures (just jpg for now, but should support different formats in the future), import them into my app, and then display them to him in a TListView. I was planning to tie that TListView to a TImageList (since this comes out of the box)... but when I tried, I ran into a set of weird problems about importing jpg's into a TImageList, reported here:
TImagelist not adding bitmap
So I'm wondering, am I using components for something they aren't intended for? Specifically, is the TImageList (even with some pre-formatting on import) useful for this kind of freestyle-all-sizes-and-formats-allowed stuff?
Any advice appreciated!
TImageList is designed to contain images of stored with the same format and size. If I am understanding correctly, TImageList doesn't do what you ask for.
TListView is tied to TImageList and therefore has the same limits. In my experience, a component flexible as you ask requires a custom component and manual drawing.
If you could change the requirement and decide a fixed size, you can preprocess the images making a thumbnail of the decided sizes and store them in the image list. This way you avoid building a component specific for your needs.
If my designer gives me a 960x640px image of what the screen should look like, as well as all of the individual elements as images or text, is there a way to lay out the images and text on the iPhone/iPad screen without doing it manually through code? The way I'm doing it now is a series of trial and error, trying to guess the position of each element.
By the way, the types of layouts I'm trying to do are simple static layouts for stuff like Menus and High Scores lists, etc.
You should try one of the editing tools: LevelHelper, CocoShop and CocosBuilder. The problem will be the output format, make sure that not only the editing part works to your specification but that you can actually use just the snippet of code you need to plug it into your code.
Do you have an image-editing software like Photoshop or GIMP? How about opening the 960x640px image with any such software, then hovering your mouse over the center of each element for its coordinates, and then finally pumping these values into your code?
In my opinion, this is at least better and way faster than trial and error:)
If you want to measure position of graphic elements. You can try a commercial called xscope. The trail version can be downloaded form their official website. It is the best tool I ever seen to measure distance, color(like, it can copy color measured directly to [UIColor ...] format), etc. If you want something freeware, I would like to recommend markman, which is a Chinese software, it's built on adobe air. All elements/button are graphic, so you don't need to read chinese to use it..
You can try to use some open source editor and write your exporter. For example I am using blender as a level editor for the game I am working on. It has a nice python API that can be used to export all the information you need.
Is there some simple component that could display PNG 32-bit images and alpha-blend it to another image on mouse enter and on mouse leave? Or even just a simple image that can load 32-bit PNG and additionally would have Alpha parameter...
I suppose I could use some skin library (alphacontrols?) or some graphics library, but for some simple purely visual effects that would be quite an overkill and I can't seem to find a simple one that does it for me and would work on Glass surface as well...
It is not quite a component, but here is a link to a good article on how to do it yourself. Its just a few lines of code:
http://melander.dk/articles/alphasplash/
The basic TImage is capable of displaying a PNG image and alpha-blend-it to whatever is behind it. You just need to add the "pngimage" unit to the uses clause of your form. You didn't mention the version of Delphi you're on: Delphi 2010 has this unit, but I have no idea with what version of Delphi they started shipping it. For Delphi 7 I know for sure you'll need to find the open source "pngimage".
If you need to do this when the user moves in and out of your control, consider caching the state images in bitmaps: it will be faster at runtime and you can use a single TImage that shows the current image, you don't need two overlapping TIMage controls.
i use to create a full transparent form, but the png and the 32bit image will not blend to the form and images is not properly displayed its trnsparency. i get the concept here but i cannot put button on it. all abject are invisible except the image backgound. by the way my compiler is delphi7 and D2009
Seems that Andreas Hausladen stumbled upon a similar problem and has already implemented a solution: he rewrote TJvTransparentForm in the JVCL library.
Even if you are not going to use that component directly you may gain some insight by studying the source.
Here is the link to Andreas' article.
If you want to use a PNG to control transparency you might want to look into "layered windows":
SetWindowLong(Handle, GWL_EXSTYLE, GetWindowLong(Handle, GWL_EXSTYLE) or WS_EX_LAYERED);
UpdateLayeredWindow
This allows you to have variable transparency accross the window, just as PNG allows! The problem is, controls on layered windows don't really work, I guess it's a Windows issue. My solution was to actually brake up the big window into multiple smaller windows, with all the controls on non-layered windows. This creates yet an other problem, because you now have multiple windows and you want them to move like a single window. The solution: implement your own algorithm for moving the window accross the screen and use:
BeginDeferWindowPos
DeferWindowPos
EndDeferWindowPos
... to move all windows at once, so the user has no idea she's looking at multiple windows! Finally, if you want to get fancy, you might want to look into SetWindowRgn: this allows you to create a window with a non-rectangular shape.
P.S: Reading Andrea's link from Uwe Raabe, he's using the same technique, only he packaged it ready for action!
I use a non-default Windows colour scheme on most of my machines, and have a laptop with a 124 DPI screen, which Windows is set to.
A lot of programs I tested or even use daily seem to have problems with that, showing for example non-standard sizes of controls, cut-off UI elements, unreadable text and so on. There is the whole range from slightly annoying to (nearly) unusable.
Now I feel that a lot of these issues are unnecessary. A simple test run on a high-resolution screen in a few colour schemes would show them, some of them are even very easy to correct (like always using clWindow, clWindowText and clBtnFace instead of clWhite, clBlack and clSilver). Some of them are harder, like proper control sizing.
So my question is: Do you try to follow the recommendations in the UI guidelines regarding system colours, sizing and spacing of UI elements, and font sizes and faces? Is testing for compliance to them part of your QA process? Do you even try to lay out your forms in dialog units instead of pixels, even though most of the IDEs (Delphi in my case) have pixel-oriented designers?
[EDIT]: On re-reading this after sleeping I notice that this question may look like an invitation for fruitless discussion. It is not meant that way, I'd definitely be interested in tools to help me create applications that conform to the UI interface guidelines, an area where I feel Delphi is letting me down a little. See also my own answer.
I definitely don't. It costs time that I prefer spending on improving the experience of many rather than the few who use non-standard windows settings. A few things I usually do, which should still fix some of these issues:
use clWindows etc. because that's the standard for Delphi controls anyway, so why change it?
place labels above entry fields rather than to the left, which should solve many size problems
make sure the forms resize properly, by setting the anchors
make sure the tab order is correct (which can become a major annoyance if not done)
But I certainly don't take the time to set up test computers with odd resolutions and colors, or even worse, change my development box to use them (which will screw lots of things that again take time to reset properly).
If a paying customer reports problems with non-standard settings, it depends on the customer whether they will be addressed. If he orders 100 licenses, his chances are good. If he uses these settings because he is visually impaired, his chances are good. If he makes it part of the requirement, I will do it, but charge for the additional work.
Today, so much software doesn't work properly at a non-standard DPI that I don't think it's worth trying to fix it. The trouble-shooting FAQs for many applications just instruct users to switch to a normal font size for related problems. Microsoft acknowledged lack of proper DPI support in 3rd-party software and redesigned the display scaling methods in Windows Vista, where all GDI operations are scaled on a low level instead of relying on applications being aware of the DPI setting.
Final answer: it depends on your software's audience. If your software is likely to be used by disabled users, it might be worth the effort.
Apart from using the proper colour constants for standard colours I invest some extra effort for applications that we need to use internally on high DPI screens, or where customers may need this.
I have a unit with helper functions for determining proper sizes and placement margins, which compute these from the default GUI font and the standard values in dialog units as given in the UI guidelines, and with helper functions to compute the maximum width / height of an array of controls, place controls, things like that. For fixed size forms and dialogs I calculate the placement of controls once after translating their text with GNU gettext, for resizable forms I do this in an OnResize handler.
This gives good results, is however time-consuming. I would like to have something like the wxWidgets sizer functionality, which automates resizing once the minimum size of a control is set. I have never seen something similar for Delphi, though.
I occasionally test it myself for large fonts, because my Vista laptop is set to Large Fonts. Colors, not so much, but I rarely specify colors on controls.
However, proper resizing is pretty hard. I usually set Forms scale to false, so as that they won't resize wrong.
There are a few tools for auto-resizing forms. I did look into them, but never got around to testing them properly:
TFormResizer
ElasticForm - ironically (given the component's area) most of the text in this page won't show up in Chrome...
JVAutoFormSize (in JVCL - doesn't seem to be very useful from what I read)