Okay, I'm a bad boy, and I've been using the background of TImage to do
my icons. Makes it nice and easy to see them and lay them out etc.
Works fine too.

Except I figured a spinner icon would be good for a purpose, so I
loaded the GIF into the background, and it doesn't spin. Okay, this
appears to be due to the image being bundled into the resources, which
makes sense from a performance point of view. If I set it in the URL, I
have to also manually deploy it, but it does work.

It would be nice to be able to see these at run time somehow.

Also, I can't fathom the TAnimatedIcon. It shows an icon, but how would
it be animated? I tried setting the pause symbol to animate, and coded
the StartAnimation, but it just sat there. Why would I want to animate
these icons anyway? And while I'm typing, the white icons are poor
against light backgrounds, and probably vice versa, so if any are
supposed to animate, alternative colours for them might be sensible.

Ramble over...

--

Matthew Jones

Matthew,

> Also, I can't fathom the TAnimatedIcon. It shows an icon, but how would
> it be animated? I tried setting the pause symbol to animate, and coded
> the StartAnimation, but it just sat there. Why would I want to animate
> these icons anyway?

Unless I'm misunderstanding you: to animate an icon, you have to create
an image file that holds all states of the animations.
Attached a screenshot of the animated UK-flag in my Cinedisk application.

There is a number of tools to create such sprites, e.g.

http://preloaders.net/en/circular

Hope that helps.

Uli

Uli Becker wrote:

> Unless I'm misunderstanding you: to animate an icon, you have to
> create an image file that holds all states of the animations.
> Attached a screenshot of the animated UK-flag in my Cinedisk
> application.

Okay, that makes sense. The icon in the IDE seems to be standard static
image, but custom ones would be better.

--

Matthew Jones

Matthew,

<< Okay, I'm a bad boy, and I've been using the background of TImage to do my icons. Makes it nice and easy to see them and lay them out etc.  Works fine too. >>

Yeah, except that you're possibly duplicating the same images over and over in the resultant emitted application, and that's going to bloat your application.

<< Except I figured a spinner icon would be good for a purpose, so I loaded the GIF into the background, and it doesn't spin. >>

EWB only supports PNG as background images.

<< Also, I can't fathom the TAnimatedIcon. It shows an icon, but how would it be animated? >>

Open up the TProgressDialog.wbi control interface and look at the background image of the Icon element.  That will show you how such images should be created.

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com