Build your own splash screen in a few minutesThis is a basic and very short tutorial for creating your own splash screen. The best way to learn Delphi is to have an example, and study the code. Do not rely on 3rd party components when you do not have to! Create your own splash screen in less than 3 minutes. Following this tutorial, you will learn to create a splash screen, that can be disabled by unchecking a checkbox on the mainform, it makes use of an Inifile to store the value and enable and disable the appearance of the Splashscreen. About the included example, to test the splash screen a simple restartbutton was added to it, in order to make that work Shellapi was added to the uses clausule of Form1.
A quick and easy way to spice up your program!
Of course a splash screen that has the default color and is empty, is not really cool so add an image to it, or anything you want to appear there, see the included example for a simple basic idea, but technically speaking you are finished and have just created your own Splash Screen, and you no longer have to rely on 3rd party components! Here is an some example I used:
Naming conventions
Note that variables can be called anything you wish [except for keywords etc], it is good practice to name them to something useful, so the name of it already tells you at least a bit what is it about. Then if you are finished with your project you can always do a search and place to make the variables shorter [saving a bit of space] and making them more difficult to guess, should you wanna'. Also, it is a good thing to name the components, and the forms, and units to something meaningful. The advantage of properly named forms, are so you can tell them apart from the standard forms with names given to them by delphi itself, and they wont be written over accidentally easy, plus it is easier to work with them in a single project that has more forms. However, for ease of use of this tutorial, I used the standard names.
Also, for your own sake [readability] it is best to name your forms like something more clear. In this tutorial however, I used the standard names Delphi gives them, to not make it more complex and lengthy. My own splash screen would be named something like: SplashForm, while Form1 would be named: MainForm. Same goes for components, Checkbox1 does not say anything what it is used for or what it is about, I myself would name it something like: chkSplash. Note that variables can be called anything you wish [except for keywords etc], it is good practise to name them to sumthing useful, so the name of it already tells you at least a bit what is it about. Then if you are finished with your project you can always do a search and place to make the variables shorter [saving a bit of space] and making them more difficult to guess, should you wanna'. Also, it is a good thing to name the components, and the forms, and units to something meaningfull. The advantage of properly named forms, are so you can tell them apart from the standard forms with names given to them by delphi itself, and they wont be written over accidentally easy, plus it is easier to work with them in a single project that has more forms. However, for ease of use of this tutorial, I used the standard names.
The position can and maybe should be altered too, but this is purely personal, so I did not discuss that. In the included example, position of Form1 was set to poDesktopCenter, and position of Form2 was set to poMainformCenter, so the splashscreen appears centered in where the Form1 will appear. Also, for your own sake [readability] it is best to name your forms like something more clear. In this tutorial however, I used the standard names Delphi gives them, to not make it more complex and lengthy. My own splashscreen would be named sumthing like: SplashForm, while Form1 would be named: MainForm. Same goes for components, Checkbox1 does not say anything what it is used for or what it is about, I myself would name it sumthing like: chkSplash. Click here for the tutorial to see it online, but that is again the limited version.Demo Delphi Application included in the download link here.
Link to the posted article on delphi3000.com |
