TButton, TEdit now custom drawn?

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

Hi

After looking at the sneak peak video.... Does that now mean, some of
the standard controls are now custom drawn?

TButton - now supports image, image padding and image positioning
TBitBtn - is now obsoleate or simply become an alias to TButton
for backwards compatibility
TEdit - now custom drawn because it supports the shaded hint text
ListView - now supports images and groups etc...

All non-standard features compared to Windows standard controls since Win9x

Is my assumptions correct? If so, how do these custom controls
influence GUI speed, or no visible difference?


Regards,
- Graeme -


_______________________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

[Robert Giesecke]

Post by Graeme Geldenhuys
Hi
After looking at the sneak peak video.... Does that now mean, some of
the standard controls are now custom drawn?

That would be *horrible*. Custom drawn controls have the habit of looking clunky and alien to the OS'
look&feel. Especially when a new OS is released and older custom drawn software gives a damn about its
theming.

Post by Graeme Geldenhuys
TButton - now supports image, image padding and image positioning
TBitBtn - is now obsoleate or simply become an alias to TButton
for backwards compatibility
TEdit - now custom drawn because it supports the shaded hint text
ListView - now supports images and groups etc...
All non-standard features compared to Windows standard controls since Win9x
Is my assumptions correct? If so, how do these custom controls
influence GUI speed, or no visible difference?

None of these features require custom drawn widgets, just painting something on top of the standard
windows widget.
ListView has groups since XP, maybe the group icon is custom, but then again, it could just be a Vista
feature.

[Wayne Niddery (TeamB)]

Post by Graeme Geldenhuys
TEdit - now custom drawn because it supports the shaded hint text

Built-in to Vista, on XP and older I expect the shaded text will simply not
work.

Post by Graeme Geldenhuys
ListView - now supports images and groups etc...

Has supported this in Windows for sometime I think, the VCL listview class
is now supporting it.

Post by Graeme Geldenhuys
Is my assumptions correct? If so, how do these custom controls influence
GUI speed, or no visible difference?

Even if these are custom extensions rather than built into Windows, it is
still natively compiled code and would still work *with* Windows via the
API, so why would you expect to see any noticeable performance issues?
Delphi has included custom controls since the first version, e.g. TLabel and
TImage are not found in Windows, nor is TStringGrid, TDrawGrid, TDBGrid,
TDBLookupCombo and a host of others.

[Remy Lebeau (TeamB)]

Post by Wayne Niddery (TeamB)

Post by Graeme Geldenhuys
TEdit - now custom drawn because it supports the shaded hint text

Built-in to Vista, on XP and older I expect the shaded text will
simply not work.

Actually, the shaded text feature was introduced in XP. Themes need to be
enabled for it to work, though.

Post by Wayne Niddery (TeamB)

Post by Graeme Geldenhuys
ListView - now supports images and groups etc...

Has supported this in Windows for sometime I think, the VCL
listview class is now supporting it.

Correct.


Gambit

[Remy Lebeau (TeamB)]

Post by Graeme Geldenhuys
TButton - now supports image, image padding and image positioning

Button controls have supported images (well, owner-drawing, anyway) for a
long time. TButton never took advantage of that, but TBitBtn has.

Post by Graeme Geldenhuys
TBitBtn - is now obsoleate or simply become an alias to
TButton for backwards compatibility

Nope. TBitBtn is not going to be an alias to TButton. TBitBtn still has
its own functionality that is not present in TButton.

Post by Graeme Geldenhuys
TEdit - now custom drawn because it supports the shaded hint text

The new TextHint functionality is applied by the OS itself, not the VCL,
when the TEdit is being rendered onscreen. TEdit is not manually
owner-drawn to accomplish that. There is a EM_SETCUEBANNER message that
controls that behavior. However, the EM_SETCUEBANNER message is only
available on XP and later with themes enabled. To simulate it on previous
versions, or when themes are disabled, would require owner-drawing. TEdit
does not do that.

Post by Graeme Geldenhuys
All non-standard features compared to Windows standard controls since Win9x

Actually, they are standard OS features, just not ones the VCL has been
taking advantage of until now. There is a lot of functionality provided by
the OS for those standard UI controls.


Gambit