Friday, December 13, 2019

New Style-Designer Software

Hello!

Perhaps you read my post on FB already - if not - I'm planing together with MVP Steffen Nyeland, to develop a new "Bitmap"-Style-Designer for FMX and perhaps also for VCL or to make it work closer together, to create a style that is working on FMX and VCL. (If this is possible - never tried to create a VCL style so far) 

Perhaps you followed my posts about my tests with the current designer.


One problem with designing a new designer is - of course - the result has to work with the RTL. It would be possible to create a new StyleBook component, but the main styling should work with the given RTL. The main focus is to get the software with much better usability.  

If you are interested to work with us please give Steffen or me a call. Perhaps you have a good idea of how the designer should work, but do not have the time to help with the development, we would like to read your ideas. If you are working with the BitmapStyleDesigner and just want some improvements - we would also like to read that, too

Should we design our new designer mostly like the "original" or should we go in a completely different way? 

Without wanting to influence your ideas, this is our ideas so far:

  • new UI
  • FMX-UI for "all" platforms
  • custom style colors
  • live preview 
  • hook for own preview window
  • better documentation! (Where setting A is used in component B)
  • external icon management (load icons and compose "the" bitmap)
  • no more draw a rectangle around every image.
  • use SVG to create different resolutions

There is more, but many parts are still under consideration - we also have not decided if we do this as open-source or not...




2 comments:

  1. I (Erik from Grijjy) created my own FMX style designer a couple of years ago because the Bitmap Style Designer is too much geared towards the VCL, and I needed more/different features than MonkeyStyler.

    It doesn't compile with recent versions of Delphi anymore (because of the way the functionality of grids have changed), but I still use the executable to perform all custom styling.

    I can send you the executable if you want to check it out. Maybe it will spark some ideas for features you do or do not like in it. It is certainly a bit ugly and buggy, but it gets the job done.

    I had plans to update it myself with automatic bitmap atlas generation, auto high-DPI management and selecting global theme colors. However I don't really have the time for this at the moment.

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  2. The original Bitmap Style Designer have serious bug, I don't whether is the application's problem or the Main Menu component problem, when the mouse move accidentally to upper left corner of the screen, the content of the editing style will just reset.

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