This last months I have been visiting many blogs and the borland newsgroups, and I see how complicated this world of Delphi is, but I keep on working and doing what I like.
This last times I was deciding about a change of the Image format that I use at my projects, as for me bmp is so simple and weighty, at the UI and so.
Since long time ago, I got bookmarked, a website from an excellent Delphi Coder Mike Lischke.He is the producer of the GraphicEx Library. When you install this library Delphi can read many,many new image formarts (PSD,GIF,TIFF,PNG) althought with some limitations in some formats, it is awesome. So I started testing this for some time using the GIF format, as it produces small files and it's transparency works perfectly in Delphi. After some tests and feelling satisfied I started implementing the GIF format to all my projects and I shorted the size of some projects about 2 or 3 megs. Great !
Well... after some time I played with the PNG format. This format is really a beast, as it accepts 16million colors (not as gif wich is limited to 256), it accepts transparency, and.. and... Alpha blending. OOOOhh... alpha blending... this is a blaster... but GraphicEx does not support the Alpha Blending feature in the PNG format, so I looked around the net, googleing, and found this page: http://pngdelphi.sourceforge.net/ Ohh... what a sweet think... when I installed the source and tryed a PNG image... my eyes started to cry.. what a beatifull think.. look.. look how pretty the thinks could look like with a Alpha blended Image:
This is an Image of a Form in Design mode using three png images from Foood's, a great Icon producer.PNG files, if you don't abuse, are a bit large than gif's but much shorter than bmps with transparency and alphablending, so I decided to change it all to PNG.. Now coding being able to use those PNG images is just fun. I really recomend it to everyone. Well I only wanted to drop some few words and got out a little article. And for the end, and knowing how I am (as my posts are countend monthly :-)) ... I wish you Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2006 in advance, and at least a happy Delphi 2006 wich is arround the corner.
3 comments:
Ha ha... I always think men are born lazy :P and laziness is the main driving force for advances in technologies :D
For image format, I think I probably use the .ico format most of the time. Not only because I am not good (and in fact pretty bad) at art, but also the stupid patent involoved in format like tif, gif, etc... PNG should be a good choice as it is open :)
BTW, I also got some blog spaces... here at Yahoo! 360 for my gossip and another one in msn spaces for the new BDS 2006 in future... btw, the latter one is Chinese only, sorry :P
Thank you for reading my blog :-)... Congratulations for the baby. I have linked your blog on my browser... (the gossip one's as I can't read chinese)... but luky are you to be able to test Dexter.. what is your experience with it good ? Fast ? responsive ?
Thanks... the baby :-O so hard to cope with, I prefer coding... For Dexter... still waiting for a trial since the last CD was broken before getting to my hands :( I was told that Dexter had already been RTM and a public download of the trial could be ready in a few weeks?
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