I would like to ask about the development road map for TMS Fire Monkey components. Your VCL components are the best available for Delphi and C++ Builder. Do you plan to convert the complete VCL component library to Fire Monkey components? Or will FM components be all new and different?
Thanks
Patrick Mikula
The FireMonkey framework is significantly different from the VCL framework. Components should be designed with the philosophy of the FireMonkey framework to integrate well, so, should be designed from the ground up. Not all VCL components we have make sense in the FireMonkey framework as well. So, we evaluate what makes sense to bring to the FireMonkey framework as well as listen to customer demand to steer developments.
Has there been any thought of working on image display, annotation and processing components for FireMonkey.
I have been using such components in VCL form for a number of years from another vendor (since TMS do not have any). However they seem reluctant to get involved in FireMonkey.
Given the very active support for FireMonkey from TMS I was wondering if you had any thought on moving in this direction.
Our application is displaying images (mainly TIF) from devices like electron microsocopes (but could just as easily be x-rays etc) being able to zoom and scroll round, calibrate scales and put measurements and labels on the images. Some processing to deal with brightness and contrast, etc.
Did you know that the FireMonkey framework has built-in support for the TIFF file format?
Putting a label on an image is also fairly easy to do with the standard FireMonkey framework. And finally, FireMonkey also offers standard various image effects:
Not sure what functionality you'd need beyond what is already standard in the FireMonkey framework?
I am really only on the start of my journey looking at FireMonkey, so any information is useful, thanks.
I didn't know about the TIFF support, but it does not surprise me.
I have just upgraded from XE3 to XE5 so will be able to make some more careful evaluation of what is there.
I don't want to take up too much of your time on specifics. Some of the demos I have seen and the way of using composite controls may allow us to do some of what we currently use the ImageEn components for. It is conceivable I may still be able to use them as a container for the basics of handling loading and saving images with all the additional labelling and drawing objects. However I guess I am going to have to roll my own UI components to handle the interaction with the user.
May be fun, but still would like to find something with more capability to save me as much work as possible.
If it is something you might be interested in doing at some point I would be more than happy for you to have a copy of our software to play with to see the sort of stuff we want to do. (You can contact me any time).