This thread is to explain the
GDImage Widget concept.
Definition:A GDImage widget is a custom animation composed of several graphic components linked altogether to act as a single entity.
They can be anchored, locked or dragged around with the mouse or the arrow keys (not implemented in this demo).
Their first purpose was the creation of custom dashboard, to display data in real time on an opaque or transparent composited background. But they can also be used to display HUD components.
Custom background:WinLIFT (the GDImage skin engine companion) has a built-in feature to select a custom background on the fly, by clicking with the left or right mouse button onto the top left icon of the window. The images to be selected are stored into the "EXE\Background" folder to be easily customized.
Animation:There is only one single timer that performs all the processing from the
GDImageRenderAnimation procedure with a refresh rate of 60 Hz.
Code portability:The code has been designed to work with any programming language in either 32 or 64-bit, hence the use of the core API, because this is the only Windows universal syntax understood everywhere.
Framework:Most
WinDev applications requires a huge framework, however (thanks to the core API) we need only:
1 -
wd170vm64.dll2 -
wd170mat64.dll3 -
wd170std64.dll+
GDImage64.dll and
WinLIFT64.dll Note: The binary version has been created with WD17.
Usage:Each widget can be moved around with the mouse as soon as the cursor shape change to the four direction pointer.
(When a widget is locked the cursor shape stay unchanged.)
The
Animation switch: displays a fish swimming from one side to the other.
The
Transparent switch: shows the underlaying Windows desktop in full transparent composited mode.
To change the image background click with the left or right mouse button onto the top left icon.
In this demo we use
InitRandom to compute the random widget values, however in a real application they should come from device interfaces.
Screen shot:Note: The WinDev binary version is attached to this post,
the
WD17 source code is available on the PC-Soft "
Online repository".
...