In this the second, and concluding, part of our experiments with Alpha Blended forms in Delphi, I will modify the demo application to use a compressed alpha transparent PNG image instead of a BMP. I will also move the bitmap to a resource file, demonstrate run-time premultiplication and enhance the splash screen with a few visual gimmicks.
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I have released the Drag and Drop Component Suite version 4.2 and updated the development snapshot to version 5.0.

Enjoy!

This page contains the most recent development snapshot of the next version of the Drag and Drop Component Suite.

While this release hasn’t been tested on all supported versions of Delphi, there are no known bugs and I believe it to be very stable.

The focus for this next version, that’ll be 5.0, is Unicode support. The plan is to be completely Unicode capable and compatible with Delphi 2009.

The core changes from version 4.2 includes:

• Delphi 2009 (Unicode) compatibility.
  I have begun preparing the library for Delphi 2009.
• PIDLs are no longer stored in strings and string lists.
• The Netscape data formats has been deprecated.

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I finally got around to posting one of the old TGIFImage examples that have been ported to TGIFImage version 3.

The example is a small application that demonstrates:

• Creating an animated GIF at run-time.
• Optimizing a GIF to reduce the file size.
• Displaying an animated, transparent, GIF in TImage.

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In this first of two articles, I will demonstrate how to easily create an alpha blended translucent splash screen using Delphi.

Although I use Delphi 2007 and PhotoShop here, the techniques apply equally well to other versions of Delphi and other image editing tools.

[Update 2008-05-27] Part 2 has been posted: Alpha Blended Splash Screen in Delphi - Part 2 Read the rest of this article »