Accelerated Ideas - Creating and using Splash Screens in Delphi applications

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Delphi - Splash Screens (2)

Ok lets look at how we created the splash form.

A splash form is just an ordinary form with some specific properties. These properties give the illusion that the splash form is a floating image just like the Microsoft Word example. To create this look and feel we need to set a few properties for the form. These properties are:

BorderStyle - we must set this to 'bsSingle' to stop the user trying to maximize, minimize or resize the splash screen

FormStyle - set this to 'fsStayOnTop'. This ensures that the splash form stays on top of all other forms.

Position - If you don't want to use the designed position we recommend that you set this to 'poDeskTopCenter'. This will make the form appear in the centre of the users desktop. Since users cannot move or resize the form, this is where it'll stay until we choose to hide it.

All other display properties for the form should remain as default, you don't need to change them.

Next lets take a look at what components we placed on our splash screen form. We'll, as you can see from the example we have added an image which is our company logo (with a little phrase of course). Two label controls, one with the version number and the other one to show the loading progress of the application. We have named the loading progress label 'lLoading' which we refer to in our code. That's just about it, so far so simple.

So we've seen the design of the splash screen lets now take a look at the code behind the form:

We have created our own constructor:

constructor TFSplashForm.Create(AOwner: TComponent);
begin
inherited Create(AOwner);
end;

We have also created an update method which allows us to increase the progress of the progress label. The label isn't in fact any special kind of label, we are just going to set its caption property to make it appear that the application is progressing by the use of dots (...). To make things easier we will refer to the progress dots (...) as a progress bar from now on.

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