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<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>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.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>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.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>Watch out for page controls though, the panels
become white. You can fix it with a TPanel over each page.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>Apart from that, bitbuttons, are cool.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>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.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>All of these require only VCL and D2007 in my
case.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>John</DIV></BODY></HTML>