This is the first time I have really attempted a Project using Firemonkey, with the Target Platform been Android.
I am finding it difficult trying to understand the workflow with the use of views been somewhat trivial, I just can't seem to grasp the concept at the moment.
I have successfully managed to get the Delphi IDE to recognise my device (Xperia Z2) so when building and running the Project I can see the app on my phone (although so far I am not too impressed, long black screens before anything showing and sometimes the app wont show at all, not to mention slow compilation and linking time).
The first problem I ran into is that controls dont appear on the Android device in the correct places. I added Android 5" Phone
as a view as that would be the closest thing to my device, the controls on the Form Designer are aligned to how I want them, for simple testing I just dropped a couple of buttons that are centered in the middle of the form horizontally. When running and viewing the app on my phone however, the buttons are wider than the visible area of the phone, I tried the same with other views such as Android 4" Phone
and it's the same. The controls appear lined up correctly on the Delphi Form Designer, but when running and viewing them on my phone they are not lined up at all, it feels like I need to guess where the controls should appear making views seem pointless, after all I cannot test on a multitude of devices and therefore if they don't appear on my phone as they do on the Delphi Form Designer what hope do we have? I expected that how the controls appeared in the view window is exactly how it should appear on my Android deivce but this does not seem the case.
The other view related question is, what is the purpose of the Master View? From my vague understanding you need views to design the layout for each Android device, does this mean then for each device view we have to constantly reposition and move controls independantly for each view? What purpose does the master view have, other than from what I can tell you can only delete controls from the master view and from each view use the Revert to Inherited
context menu.
It feels like I need to guess where the controls should appear, the device view at Design Time seems rather inaccurate, surely how you look at the device view on the Form Designer is exactly how it should appear on your Android device?