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?