In case you had doubts of Delphi’s GUI capabilities…
Hallvard Vassbotn and Infront’s latest release of their financial information and trading platform is a Delphi VCL app, and a pretty good looking one, IMO.
http://goinfront.com/Blog/Infront-6.0-Re-invented-for-the-real-world-needs-of-finance-professionals
Very nice GUI. I’d love to achieve the same in D2007
Sébastien Paradis you can achieve same with Delphi 5 and even earlier, just that it takes more work since it would involve a lot of custom drawing.
Tools are one part of it; design skills are another. Just as there is much ugly code in the world, there is also much ugly UI design. Being artistic isn’t enough, either. It requires an integration of artistic, technical, and domain skills.
Dorin Duminica
I know, but reprensent too much work for just a “cosmetic” wish. And I use the less 3rd party tools as possible, especially when not necessary: I still cannot compile some old apps after a computer reinstall, because of their heavy use of external libraries.
I should have precised: “in few clics” 🙂
Sébastien Paradis – XE6 adds some “few clicks” skinning capabilities to VCL.
Very nice, is the GUI all custom drawn or 3rd party components?
Only Hallvard Vassbotn can answer that, Sean Bertinotti 🙂
Nice……
Sean Bertinotti, it is a combination of 3rd party components (DynamicSkinForm, HMGdiPanel, both heavily modified) and custom code.
A nice GUI is hard work, whatever component set you use. I’ve too often reached limits (and bugs) of most GUI components (DevExpress, TMS, VCL). Even a simple GUI which doesn’t flicker is hard work. When needs to be really tailored to your need, often you need to draw it yourself from scratch.
Hallvard Vassbotn many thanks for the feedback. Great job on the GUI.
Congrats Hallvard Vassbotn ! Best Delphi-made GUI ever seen.
Hallvard Vassbotn What is the screen resolution? Have you used GDI, GDI+ or D2D?
Ilya S, not sure what resolution they used to produce the video.
Most of the core functionality is based on vanilla GDI-based VCL components, but the new parts of the GUI, the custom large main menu, the GO (Global Overview) menu etc is based on GDI+ and uses some subtle but nice looking partial transparency and animations.
We have a top notch UI/UX designer, Nicolai Dahlgren, on the team and he is the main reason the app looks so good. 🙂
We have a great team – both in front-end and server development and in product owners/specification.
Hallvard Vassbotn Can I ask where do you get the HDGdiPanel, was wanting to read a bit more about it ? Is this GDI+ ? Can you mention the GDI+ GO component or is this custom ?
Brett Wilton It is based on on the free “Help & Manual 6 Welcome Screen as stand-alone component” available from EC Software’s site (makers of Help and Manual authoring tool):
http://www.helpandmanual.com/downloads_delphi.html
We use this as a basic building block, so there is quite a bit of custom code in addition to this (which I cannot post). 🙂
Here is the best example with full source and Slide effect with png buttons: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yz7mtztv10sthry/helpman_welcomepage_demo.zip?dl=0 i think that infront uses this technologie of GDI+ begining from this example …
finally i wish to be developped as vcl library like Devexpress does ..