VCL Style support in Smooth controls

I recently upgraded my copy of the Smooth Controls Pack thinking that TTMSStyle.tsWindows7 & tsWindows8 (or some other option) would respect the VCL Styles in XE2+. Alas... :-(

OK, I should be able to manually code this for the controls of particular interest but before I do, do you have plans to support VCL Styles? I realize it is not a trivial task to map the VCL theme colors to the many TGDIPFill properties and the like.

TIA

Ian

For now, we only have limited support for VCL
Styles in TAdvStringGrid.

In other components, there is currently no VCL Styles support. There is very
little demand for this and therefore, we have not given this priority. There
are already a lot of styling capabilities in our components. See:

http://www.tmssoftware.com/site/atbdev3.asp

Thank you Nancy for your quick reply.

I'm quite surprised that there is little demand for VCL styles. Are no TMS customers writing VCL themed apps, or for the Win8 Metropolis UI...?

Can I suggest a comment is added to the Smooth Controls info page that the reference to the styles is totally unrelated to VCL styles, and cannot practically be used in applications that rely on Windows themes or Delphi's Style Manager?  I guess the same would apply to other components?

I will have to code my own style hooks for now. I'd be keen to hear of any change in plans :-)

>http://www.tmssoftware.com/site/atbdev3.asp

Yes, I had read that, thanks. It is only useful for the preset (hard coded) color definitions I'm afraid. I can understand the Office* selections but when I checked the code, tsWindows7 and tsWindows8 are just another fixed set of colors.

It's not only this, it's also that especially our smooth controls range uses particular gradient/shadow/transparency techniques that are very hard to capture in style graphics VCL styles is using.

My immediate concern is the basic color settings of some controls to respect their VCL Style equivalent. eg. The SetComponentStyle() logic in TAdvSmoothToggleButton only has a few colors to deal with and should easily be able to retrieve the respective vcl theme colors. Other controls that make the most of TGDIPFill are no doubt far more complex.
I'll do some experimenting :-)

A little late to reading this.

I also have a similar request for a unified styling strategy.
It may become a competitive issue in the future, I see other 3rd party vendors emphasize this capability.
 
Kind regards,
Adrian

I'd like to see it as well. My app runs on everything from XP to Win8. Everything is covered, except Win8.


Our styles focus on consistency with the operating system look & feel and we have meanwhile a Windows 8 style as well for TMS Smooth Controls as well as other TMS VCL components.