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Introduction
Welcome to
Splasher, A freeware MFC class to implement a splash screen.
Features
This class provides a number of advantages over and above the standard splash screen component
that is included with VC++.
- The code can optionally use an external DIB file instead of a bitmap resource. This
allows your splash screen to be easily customized at run time without the need to
change a bitmap resource inside your exe. For example you could ship two versions of
bitmap files, one for 16 color screens and a 256 color bitmap for higher screen depths.
You could also allow your end user to change the splash screen.
- The palette from the DIB is read from file and is used to provide support for more colors
than the standard 16 which are available with bitmap resources.
- The splash screen component is multi-threaded, meaning that it remains responsive and
redraws itself correctly while you can be loading up your application in the normal
InitInstance() override.
- The splash screen is coded so that it will only be brought down when you want it to,
not when the user clicks on it or a timer expires. This allows you to close it down
exactly when your application is ready for input and no longer needs to display the
splash screen.
Usage
- To use the class in your code simply include splasher.cpp in your project and
#include splasher.h in your applications' CWinApp derived module.
- A sample SDI appwizard generated application is included which demonstrates it use. To
incorporate the splash screen component you will just need to add approximately 10
lines of code to your applications
InitInstance() function. To see the
classes in action, have a look at the code in InitInstance() in the module
spltest.cpp.
- Your code will need to include MFC either statically or dynamically.
History
V1.0 (15th November 1996)
V1.1 (11th December 1997)
- Incorporation of new DIB code provided by the authors own
CDibImage
class. A static library version is used by splasher here. If you want to use
CDIbImage for anything other than CSplashThread, then
you need to download CDibImage on its own.
- Can now load from resource or bitmap.
- General tidy up of the code.
V1.2 (22nd March 1998)
- Palette is now correctly initialized on startup.
- Code now protects itself if
m_SplashScreen cannot be created.
V1.3 (22th December 1998)
- Now provided VC 5 workspace files as standard.
- Removed the dependence of splasher on CDibImage (another shareware
product of the author).
- Provision of HTML help file (this file) describing the class.
- The code is now UNICODE enabled and UNICODE build configurations are
provided in the sample app.
- General tidy up of the code.
- Fixed a potential race condition in
CSplashThread::HideSplash().
- Reduced the size of the zip file by only including the demo bitmap once.
V1.31 (21st June 1999)
- Fixed a bug which was causing an assert when loading up a bitmap which does
not have an associated palette.
V1.32 (1st March 2000)
- Fixed a problem with bitmaps which do not have a palette (Again <g>)
- Fixed a problem in Win 98 and Win2000 when the splash screen is closed but
the main window of your app fails to activate. The code now uses
AttachThreadInput to synchronise the UI activities of the main GUI
thread and the splash screen thread.
Contacting the Author
PJ Naughter
Email: pjn@indigo.ie
Web: http://www.naughter.com
1 March 2000
