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.
About the author
Jon Lennart Aasenden is a software architect at Optimale Systemer AS. He is currently the lead developer of Smart Mobile Studio and have been a strong supporter of Delphi and object pascal since the beginning. He is also involved in the evangelizing of object pascal in Norway and is by many called “a Delphi fundamentalist” due to his somewhat radical teaching methods. The views of the author is his own and does not reflect the policy of Optimale Systemer AS.