Tag Archives: component

13 Amazing Component Sets Driving Success In Delphi Berlin On Android And IOS

There are quite a few Firemonkey component sets available for Delphi Berlin which can get you ahead of the game when developing for Android and IOS. Think of component developers as another part of your team: they do the foundation work for you so you can focus on the actual functionality. Here are thirteen of these component set developers which give you access to everything from FFMPEG video playback to amazing grid capabilities to in app payments to cross platform math libraries to artificial intelligence libraries to scripting components to database access components to native maps to bar code reading and even enhanced camera functionality. Achieving success through third party components is a powerful developer force multiplier.

Alexander Sviridenkov provides the HTML Component Library which contains an HTML Component Library, an HTML Report Library, and an HTML Editor Library. The components are written in Object Pascal and do not use WebView or any other plugins or third party controls. The library contains an HTML parser, an XML parser, a CSS parser, DOM classes with JQuery support, SVG rendering, HTTP/HTTPS clients, and an HTML rendering engine.

Devart provides enterprise grade universal data access component suite called UniDAC. This is an amazing data access component suite which provides direct database access from Android, IOS, Windows, and Mac for a variety of databases. It is possible to connect to Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite without using a client library with these components. They also have a SecureBridge offering which provides SSH, SSL, and SFTP components for Firemonkey in Delphi Berlin.

Dew Research provides MtxVec which is an object oriented numerical library for mathematical, signal processing and statistical functionality. On Windows machines it leverages mathematical, signal processing and statistical SSE2, SSE3, SSE4.2 and Intel AVX 1.0 and AVX 2.0 instruction sets. The add ones for MtxVec are DSP Master which is the advanced signal processing package, Stats Master which is the statistical package, and Data Miner which are the artificial intelligence enabling components.

Flash AV Software Corp. provides professional components based on the FFMPEG library and they have a huge number of features. If you are doing video playback professionally on Android and IOS this is the component set to have. They have FFMPEG wrappers for Android, IOS, Windows, and OSX but their components are separated by platform. It features H264 Hardware Decoder playback on some devices devices and support both ARMV7 and ARMV7S CPUs. The formats it supports are all formats supported by FFMPEG and in addition it can play videos from memory stream, HTTP, HTTPS, RTMP, and MMS.

JVESoft provides the JVESoft Components Suite which is a large set of components which are vary useful for any developer releasing professional consumer level apps on Google Play and the Apple App Store. The suite comes with a large number of third party ad component integrations, analytics, in app purchases, push notifications, simplified setting storage and social login components.

Mitov Software provides quite a few components but for Firemonkey in Delphi Berlin they offer IntelligenceLab, AnimationLab, and LogicLab. IntelligenceLab consists of components with everything from classifiers, to converters, to filters, to generators, to timing components, to training components. These components could be used to build OCR applications, computer vision functionality, SPAM filters, AI, speech recognition, and decision making functionality. AnimationLab comes with three different components which are ALTimeline which allows you to manipulate components and their properties based on a timeline, ALMass which allows you to apply mass effects to Firemonkey 3D components, and ALDrag which allows you to apply drag effects. LogicLab allows you to simulate and display logic conditions using tools like logic operators, segment decoders, binary encoding & decoding, ALU & magnitude comparer, and more.

RiversoftAVG provides a number of component sets including SVG Component Library, Charting Component Suite, Genetic Algorithms, Fuzzy Logic, and Inference Engine Component Libraries.  The SVG Component Library allows you to Load, Edit and Save SVGs as SVG and Delphi Binary. Vector graphics are drawn at runtime which allows them to appear smooth regardless of the resolution and DPI of the device. The Charting Component Suite has over 19 different chart types which include area, arrow, pie, line shape, bubble, donut, candlestick, and graph to name a few. The Genetic Algorithms set is a powerful genetic algorithms and genetic programming solution. The Fuzzy Logic set has 29 different fuzzy hedges like addition, about, not, very, normalize, and many more. It does fuzzy correlation and inference. Finally, the Inference Engine is a powerful set of components which implement rule based intelligence and fuzzy logic.

Steema provides TeeChart Pro which is a charting component library that offers hundreds of Graph styles in 2D and 3D for data visualization, 56 mathematical, statistical and financial Functions for you to choose from together with an unlimited number of axes and 30 Palette components. Additionally, they have the Steema Business Intelligence component set which is open source and in active development. The SteeBI project is set to provide the an effective way for specialists and analysts to turn data into meaningful visualizations and reports.

TMS Software provides a massive number of Firemonkey interface and data exchange components. They include TMS Charts, TMS Cloud Pack, TMS FNC Chart, TMS FNC UI Pack, TMS Filters, TMS FlexCel, TMS Pack, TMS WebGMaps, TMS WebOSMaps, TMS iCL, and TMS mCL all for Firemonkey. There are all kinds of buttons, HTML components, charts, gauges, web browsers, maps, native controls, Excel components, cloud connections, and much much more. All of the Firemonkey components can be licensed as one giant Firemonkey Component Studio or each set can be licensed separately. Additionally, they provide a set of business components with ORM, scripting, workflow, REST/JSON libs, data replication, and data modeling functionality.

VIRT Laboratory’s paxCompiler provides an amazing set of Object Pascal, Basic, and Javascript scripting components. It is an embeddable compiler and interpreter engine that allows you to import the interface sections from your Delphi Berlin units and access the rest of your code from the interpreted script itself. You can access the main form of your application from the interpreted script for example. It also supports compiling executables on Windows and evaluating script at runtime. If you’re building any kind of scripting into your apps be sure to take a look.

WinSoft provides a huge number of individual components and library wrappers for accessing various devices like bar code recognition readers, the device cameras, COM ports, JDBC, DirectX Joystick, JSON files, CSV files, NFC, PDF, HID USB, and many more. Check each individual component for it’s device compatibility because they all vary across Android, IOS, OSX, and Windows. You can also get all of the components in one giant Winsoft Component Package.

Woll2Woll provides a versatile grid component suite called FirePower for all the Firemonkey platforms in Delphi Berlin which are Android, IOS, OSX, and Windows. It allows you to embed controls like buttons and images into the grid. It supports multiple columns and you can multiple select columns as well. It has seamless filtering and allows you to use in memory information from FireDAC and TClientDataSet. Records or cells can have custom fonts or custom colors for even more flexibility.

There are many more free and commercial Firemonkey components out there from other developers and vendors that we weren’t able to cover in this article.

Check out other Firemonkey posts to find out more about them!

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Polish Your Firemonkey Apps For IOS With These Twelve Tips

#1. Monetize With In App Payments And/Or Ads Like Admob And Iads

There are a number of free and commercial components which handle in app payments and ads for you on IOS with Delphi XE5 Firemonkey. Check out DPF for IOS which has both in app payments and Iads components for free. The other components are from JVESoft and from Flash AV Software.

#2. Secure Your App’s Data Connections With SSL

Users are connecting from public hotspots these days and you need to secure your data connections to keep your user’s data safe from snooping. You can use the free OpenSSL components with Indy or there are two other commercial SSL components here and here.

#3. Encourage Users To Rate Your App

Usually only people who want to give your app a low rating end up on the App Store rating page and rate your app down. In order for you to encourage users who also really like you app to rate your app you can use a component like this or build your own using dialog boxes. DPF for IOS has a free component and JVESoft has a commercial rating component.

#4. Create And Deploy Icons For Your App

There are around 30 different icon sizes that you need to create to handle both Iphone and Ipad icons with your IOS app. There is a free utility which will take your logo and turn it into all off the icon sizes that you need.

#5. Use Premium Styles In Your App

Embarcadero provided some additional premium styles which you can download and use with your apps. There is a dark style and a light style for both IOS6 and IOS7. You can provide both to your users and they can choose for themselves which one they like on your app best.

#6. Handle App Activate And Deactivate Lifecycle Events

The lifecycle events are really important on IOS (much more so than on Android). There is no functionality to exit your app on IOS so you need to use those backgrounding lifecycle events to take care of saving your settings etc.

#7. Add Google Analytics To Your App

If you are building a professional commercial app you will want to collect usage data so that you can find out how your users are using your app and use that data to guide how you upgrade your app and add new features.

#8. Keep The Focused Edit Field Visible Above The Virtual Keyboard

When the virtual keyboard pops up it will by default cover the box that is being edited if it is below the bottom half of the screen. You can scroll your form or tabcontrol so that the field being edited stays visible. Make sure to implement a version of the code that handles multiline edit controls like TMemo as well.

#9. Setup Apple Push Notifications

If you are building a long term commercial app for IOS one way you will want to keep in touch with your users is through Push Notifications. It is always easier (and cheaper) to re-connect with existing users than it is to get new users. Push Notifications can help your achieve that.

#10. Use Threads To Keep Your App Responsive

There is a multithreaded progress dialog which is the main link of this tip but in addition to that there are two native progress dialogs for IOS here. And there is the anonymouse thread unit called AnonThread which comes in the samples section of Delphi XE5 Firemonkey. You can read this blog post on how to use it. Lastly you can use the ExecuteAsync function with TRESTRequest to do asynchronous REST calls.

#11. Handle Device Idle Time Out

If you are doing any kind of downloading using your app you will want to handle the idle time out of the device so that your app doesn’t dim out and go into the background when it is actually working. You can disable the idle time out, finish your downloading, and then re-enable the idle time out to conserve the user’s battery.

#12. Check Network Connectivity Before Trying To Connect

With mobile devices your app could lose connectivity at any time as the user travels around while using your app. You need to build that connectivity detection in your app from the start so if connectivity does drop you can handle it gracefully either by queuing up actions or sending your users notifications that they need connectivity to continue.

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