[DUG] Making apps look fancy

[John Bird]

Most bang for the bucks comes from making sure you can get at the XP and Vista themes - the XPManifest component in D2006 onwards, especially D2007 on goes in every project of mine....gives the later sets of controls in COMCTL32.DLL rather than the old non-themed ones if the destination PC has them.

The themed buttons and other standard VCL in XP/Vista are pretty cool - in Vista a button that has focus but the mouse is not currently on gets a slow blue pulse.  I get the rippling progress bar with TProgress as well.  I used to use a variant button I tweaked myself called TJBCLColorButton that has color options for text, background, (split colours for background to give 3d effect), and mouse-over altered style and colours for text and background too0, but the standard Windows themed controls are even nicer - so prefer them now. So there is something to be said about staying away from 3rd party components when the free ones are that good.

Watch out for page controls though, the panels become white.  You can fix it with a TPanel over each page.

Apart from that, bitbuttons, are cool.

And a bit of AlphaBlending goes a long way too - you can easily have forms fade in and out, a slightly transparent look can look classy, or you can have it become opaque (Alphablend=255) slowly on a timer when the mouse is over the form.

All of these require only VCL and D2007 in my case.

John
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