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Delphi - Splash Screens (1)
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In this article we are going to cover the reasons for using splash screens, how to create a splash screen, firing splash screen events and finally how to dispose of the splash screen after application start up. Our examples relate to applications written in Delphi (5) or similar. For our examples we assume you already have a basic understanding of Delphi code syntax.
One of the most overlooked features for business applications is the 'splash screen'. If you are unfamiliar with splash screens you should invest some time to read about them and understanding how they can improve your business application. They are a valuable ally. We will start by looking at how splash screens can improve an application and where they should be used.
Splash screens provide the developer with a way to momentarily display a warm image or company logo to the user during application startup. A common splash screen is the Microsoft Word splash. Which appears when you first launch the program. The Microsoft logo appears with the version number of the application and the company name 'Microsoft'. A splash screen provides several benefits to developer:
Distraction. The user is distracted momentarily while your application continues to load data, forms or process any initialization data. This distraction is essential for any application that takes a long time to load but performs well once the application has loaded. Most peoples opinion will drop during an applications slow start up and will take time to heal.
Familiarity. The splash screen typically contains the logo of the software company that created the application. This can be a great way to familiarise people with your company name and snapshot logo. Its usually the first 30 seconds that a new user will remember your application the most.
Professionalism. It is good practice to display which version of your application users are running. A nice logo design such as 'Business Application 2006' or similar will look great to new users. Remember most Windows users will still compare your application to the larger Microsoft products so try to use techniques like displaying the year number after the application name etc..
Now we have looked at the reasons for splash screens lets take a look at the actual design of a splash screen. Splash screen are typically constructed from a single large image and small surrounding text which display the version number or progress information. The picture below shows the splash screen we created earlier, we will use it in our splash screen project example:
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