Are you a big Star Trek fan? If you are then this Delphi project might be a perfect fit for you. From the recently concluded DelphiCon, Embarcadero MVP Ian Barker shares a very interesting project where he attempts to recreate the LCARS user interface, a fictional computer operating system from the Star Trek franchise. Using Delphi, Ian reimagines the futuristic user interface with the help of Google’s Skia Graphics Library. In particular, he will be using the Skia4Delphi library, a simple yet powerful windows ui toolkit that comes with a great number of useful components.
How to Create a Futuristic Data Dashboard Using Skia4Delphi
Skia is an open-source 2D graphics library that provides common APIs that work across a variety of hardware and software platforms. It serves as the graphics engine for Google Chrome OS, Android, Flutter, Mozilla Firefox, Firefox OS, and more. This session, however, will highlight the Skia4Delphi which is a cross-platform 2D graphics API for Delphi platforms based on Google’s Skia Graphics Library. It provides a set of components that are open source and free-to-install and free-to-access. Some of the main components include the TSkLottieAnimation, TSkPaintBox, and TSkSvg
In this project, Ian creates an imitation LCARS simulation using all the interesting components from the Skia4Delphi library. One of the notable advantages of using this library is that it gives you the ability to combine or merge different animations with transparency. Using the Lottie Animation component, for instance, allows you to easily overlay animations on top of each other. By gathering some well-fitting animation and merging them together, Ian managed to simulate a Star Trek-inspired data dashboard. These include some futuristic elements like radar, satellite, a Star Trek logo (SVG image), and even a Klingon font!
The session also demonstrates the Skia4Delphi in action and explains all its basic functionalities. Here, you’ll see all the things you can work on in this library including a collection of shapes, texts, paths, effects, and Lottie Animation (as well as the use of Lottie Editor). The most interesting part of this project is that it is surprisingly easy to create and it doesn’t involve many lines of code at all. There is no single line of code that actually manipulates the animations. They all work automatically. To learn more about this amazing project using Delphi and Skia, feel free to watch the video below.
