I feel very privileged! Tomorrow at three different time slots I'm going to present online my "RAD in Action" webinar "FireMonkey FM2 Ready for Multiplatform Business"! It lasts for about 65 minutes and is all about live demonstrations of using Delphi XE3 and C++Builder XE3 for creating different kinds of business applications with FireMonkey FM2. There are three demos that I'm building from scratch live plus a whitepaper and code samples. In the first step by step demo I'm building a native ...

FM2 introduces TMediaPlayer, a non visual control similar to the Vcl TMediaPlayer but this one works on both Windows and Mac. It can play audio and video files which are displayed using TMediaPlayerControl. To get the list of the supported files you can use TMediaCodecManager in FMX.Media which contains functions such as GetFileTypes : string or GetFilterString : string. The last is created to help opening media using open dialogues and setting the Filter property so you can open only supported...

RAD Studio XE3 is a very solid release to me. There are no new compilers since XE2, but there are many new features plus improvements in performance and architecture. This is quite obvious when looking into source code and refactorings of the second edition of FireMonkey framework, now called "FM2", and originally introduced in RAD Studio XE2 for cross-platform compilation to multiple operating systems. Architecting one framework and one code base for compiling for multiple different operatin...

There is another change in FireMonkey 2 in RAD Studio XE3 which does not show up on the What's New page, but which pays dividends in terms of performance, usability and extensibility: Refining component properties. The FireMonkey team has performed a comprehensive audit of all the component properties to re-examine whether each property should be published or not, whether the property's default value is appropriate and whether it is published at the appropriate level of the component hierarch...

As you I hope know, styles in FireMonkey are common FireMonkey objects, working on the level of a single control. The behavior and design of the control is defined by simple objects or graphical primitives (rectangle, ellipse, text), animation, effects and event triggers. But there is still a question. Is it effective to use such a number of objects and instantiate and load them right in the process of application startup? Yes, you’re right. Thus in the new version of FireMonkey we modified t...

RAD Studio XE3 introduces the next evolution of the FireMonkey framework: FM2. The What's New in FM2 page highlights a lot of the new features. I wanted to point out some under the hood changes that are also significant. Platform One of the key concepts at the base of a cross-platform framework is providing an abstraction of the runtime environment, the operating system and hardware. In the original release of FireMonkey in RAD Studio XE2, this abstraction was provided by an abstract class, TP...