Spacely - Glass

I have been given permission by CodeGear to discuss some of the new features and improvements in Spacely, the next release of Delphi. When released, Spacely will be known as Delphi 2007 for Win32.

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One new feature added to the Spacely IDE is support for Glass. It is important to understand that Glass is only available under Vista when aero is active.

TForm now has a published property called GlassFrame. The GlassFrame property is a TGlassFrame which contains the following properties.

Bottom - Number of pixels from the bottom covered in glass

Enabled - The glass feature must be enabled before it is visible

Left - Number of pixels from the left covered in glass

Right - Number of pixels from the right covered in glass

SheetOfGlass - When true, the entire form is glass

Top - Number of pixels from the top covered in glass

Here is Spacely running under Windows XP. This form has the Glass feature enable around the edges.

As you can see in the screen shot, when glass is enabled the form area that will appear as glass under Vista is drawn with diagonal pattern.

Running this sample application under Windows XP, displays as a normal form. When run under Vista, it displays like the following screen shot.

The large version of the first screen shot gives clues to two other changes to the IDE for Spacely. Do you see what they are?

TJSDialog - Component Editor video

As mentioned previously, here is a video showing the component editor in action.

Not that I used Wink (www.debugmode.com) to capture this video under Win2000 while Vista Business was running in VMWare. Sorry no Aero candy.

I'm surprised my actual machine can run it to be honest. It is an AMD1800+ with 1 gig. The VM has 512 allocated.

Anyway hope you get an idea of how the component editor works.

http://www.jed-software.com/video/TJSDialogEditor01.htm

Enjoy!

TJSDialog - Trial version update

Registered users got a TJSDialog update a day or so ago, now I have updated the Trial/Non-commercial version on the TJSDialog download page.

http://www.jed-software.com
http://www.jed-software.com/jsd_download.htm

Fixes the case of the magical focus rect as well as some other minor issues.

Stay tuned as I'm about to do a short video capture of the Component Editor that is available in the registered version.

JSDialog - Live Templates

The registered version of TJSDialog currently ships with four Live Templates. The templates are for MessageDlg and TaskDialog wrapper function calls.

There are four because each wrapper function has a template that displays a preview of how the dialog will look at runtime once you have typed in the template. The preview functionality is provided by a custom Template Engine which can be installed using the JEDSoftwareInstall (http://www.jed-software.com/jsd_install.htm) application.

Lets see the functionality in action. A short video demonstrating the functionality is available from the following URL:

http://www.jed-software.com/video/JSDialogLiveTemplates.htm

Some more Live Templates are scheduled, as well as improvements to the custom Template Engine.

You can download the TJSDialog here: http://www.jed-software.com/jsd_download.htm
Purchase the registered version and get the Live Template functionality (plus more) here:
http://www.jed-software.com/jsd_purchase.htm

TJSDialog - Trial and Free version now available

Now available for download are the Trial and Free versions of TJSDialog. Please review the Free (non-commercial only) license to see if your usage qualifies you for the free version.

It is recommended that before installing the Trial (and Free) version you review the following documents.

• Free (non-commercial) license
  


• Trial Installation and additional info
  


• Installing TJSDialog
  


• So many properties, where do I start?
  

There are 6 demos included with the download, each demo includes full source so review these demo applications.

There are no NAG screens in the Trial version.

www.jed-software.com
www.jed-software.com/jsd_download.htm

I am currently working on some additional documentation (there is a help file included).

Forgive some of the new web pages, I'm in the middle of updating my site and didn't want to delay the release further because the website has an inconsistent look.

Tomorrow I will blog about a couple of items that aren't included in the Trial version.