You may have seen Eric Grange’s precomputed Mandelbrot set data – read the Christmas announcement and the followup. He has generated and is hosting the fractal as a multi-level tiled data set: that is, as a structure of varying levels of detail, where each level of detail is twice as large as the one before. His […]
You have probably already seen how to use DrawThemeTextEx on Vista and above to draw text with a white blurry ‘glow’ effect behind it. It’s commonly used when drawing on glass, to ensure that text has enough background contrast to be easily readable. But the API only draws a white glow. What if you want […]
The example application showing a 3D FireMonkey form. On the other tab is a standard 2D form. On Wednesday I announced TFireMonkeyContainer, a VCL control that can host a FireMonkey form, allowing you to mix FireMonkey elements into your VCL app. It was (and is) a new project, and the announcement page listed several known […]
I’ve created a small MPL-licensed component called TFireMonkeyContainer. It’s a VCL control that can host a FireMonkey form – 2D or 3D, it doesn’t matter. This will let you use FireMonkey’s swishy graphics, animations, etc in an existing VCL application, either in a form among other controls, or if the host container is client-aligned then […]
Since XE2 Update 4 was released, there have been a few online complaints (1, 2) about FireMonkey’s fonts on Windows. I had most of a blog post written explaining why it actually was fine, when I read that there will be a hot fix targeting this and other issues. I guess it is an issue after all, then!But […]
This is part 2 of a short series that examines alpha-aware graphics using native GDI only – not GDI+, not DirectX, and not with any other custom non-GDI graphics implementation.This post will cover: Non-rectangular drawing Handling GDI’s clobbering of the alpha channel Better use of per-pixel alpha (based on what’s drawn, which is more useful […]
Last post, I said that the next part of my transparent graphics series would be Part 2, and would introduce a class I’ve written to simplify drawing to glass, drawing partially transparent shapes and text, etc.I haven’t posted this yet, simply because life has got in the way – since my last post, I spent […]
Transparent graphics are used everywhere these days. Half the UIs you will have used today will have made some use of composited graphics, overlays, or something similar. You’ve probably seen: Selections with transparent rectangles or other shapes Text with a transparent shape behind it, so you can see the through to the background and still […]
Hullo from Cologne! Yesterday I attended the Cologne stop in the Delphi World Tour. There were over 250 attendees, and they sold out all their tickets: Delphi-Tage about to begin Introduction to XE2 The first talk was an introduction by David Intersimone. XE2 is, he said, “in my twenty-six years [working for Borland / Embarcadero], […]
Welcome! This is the first article on my new blog, and it examines XE2. I’ll dig right in: First impressions XE2 uses the same installer as previous versions, and has a fairly simple setup process. For some reason the help uses a separate installer and so installation isn’t ‘set it and forget it’ – you’ll […]
