I am happy to report that the award winning HTML5 3d system Sprite3d has been converted to Object Pascal and will ship with Smart Mobile Studio. Sprite3d is a fantastic javascript library which allows you to perform advanced 3d transformations on ordinary HTML elements. Since CSS 3d is hardware accelerated both on mobile and desktop browsers -the results often outperform drawing graphics using the canvas object.
As an example of what you can do with Sprite3d have a look at the following demo (written by the Sprite3d author). Keep in mind that this is not webGL It uses nothing but CSS and javascript and all the objects are ordinary DIV tags.
Under Smart Mobile Studio, using Sprite3d to rotate a button in 3d-space is as simple as:
FSprite:=TW3Sprite3d.Create(button1); try FSprite.SetTransformOrigin(button1.Width div 2, button1.height div 2); FSprite.RotateY(1.5); FSprite.RotateZ(-0.5); FSprite.Update3d; finally FSprite.free; end;
The exciting part is that you can apply these transformations to any Smart control. While it is highly doubtful that a spinning edit-box will be of much use in serious business applications, the effects could be leveraged as a means to add life to otherwise static interfaces (options that scale in/out, drop down lists that rotate on close, buttons that move as a response to touch) – and last but not least, it opens up for some interesting multimedia possibilities.
That is awesome news! Woo Hoo!
Thanks man. I must say i just went “wow” when i saw sprite3d in action. We did a 1-1 conversion of the library and having played with it for a while — it’s awsome 🙂 It does require some reading, but when you are done the sky is the limit. Cant believe so few JS coders have actually taken the time to read the docs. This is a bonus for us Spartans. We are used to large frameworks so this small things is a snap. To follow up on the spartan mythology — the “eternals” wont be so cool after a few rounds in the ring wih the Delphi crew 😉