Remember, this is not an advertisement for AlphaControls. The attachment shows a button in LazSkins and a standard Windows button in AlphaControls, both skinned with the Office 7 skin. And even then, the LazSkins controls do not look very good. However, AlphaSkins can skin standard controls too. Satisfactory results can only be obtained with controls that use the skinning capabilities to their advantage. That is a simplistic approach to skinning. LazSkins only works by skinning standard controls.

By setting the SkinSection of a panel to 'CHECKBOX', the panel becomes totally transparent.Īccording to their website, LazSkins is limited to a Windows version and the last update is from April 2010 (i.e. Setting the SkinSection of a button to 'TABTOP' will show the button the way a tab looks if on top of a tabsheet. That can be set to the name of another control.

So, each visible control has a property SkinSection. That should be part of the SkinManager.ĪlphaControls does allow any of its controls to mimic another one. With such a setup, the Lazarus 'Custom Drawn Controls' do not qualify as a basis for the controls in this library, because they carry the DrawStyle property. Furthermore it provides for a lot of drawing functions that the governed controls can call. One of its tasks is to take over WndProc to handle both the standard messages and the custom messages for the controls it governs.

The SkinProvider takes care of the actual drawing. The SkinManager among others is the repository for the internal skins (you can have external skins too) and the place to define the actual skin in use (there are more than 80 of them). The point of my new topic is that controls may be constructed in any way you want, but as long as they're not subject to a theming vehicle, they're not complete.ĪlphaControls starts with a SkinManager and one or more SkinProviders.

Alpha controls delphi