Transparent Animated Splash Screen Demo

[jpbro]

I've seen a few questions re: transparency, splash screens and the like, so I thought I would some old-ish code of mine that demonstrates how you can create a transparent animated splash screen with vbRichClient5 (aka RC5).

First a screenshot that shows the transparent splash screen in front of the VB6 IDE:



Some features:

• The splash screen fades into view, then throbs in and out of view to indicate that your app is loading.
• The splash screen runs on a separate thread so your main slow-loading app can continue processing while the splash screen animates.
• If another window takes focus before your main app loads, the splash screen will fade out quickly to avoid annoying the user who wants to work on something else while your app loads.

To use the demo:

You will need the usual vbRichClient5 DLLs registered on your computer.

Don't run the demo app in the IDE!. First compile the demo app to a folder, then compile the splash DLL to a subfolder of the compiled app folder called "bin". Finally, run the compiled EXE and enjoy the demo.

Alternately, if you just want check out the animation, open the RC5SplashAnim.vbp and type TestAnim in the immediate window.

The animation part is not written particularly well, so I apologize in advance. There are no comments and I made extensive use of magic numbers. It's also not properly DPI aware (doesn't auto-scale depending on DPI). That said, I'll be happy to answer any questions about the code and I hope it works as a small demonstration of what is possible when you write your own animated splash screens.

Enjoy!

Source Code: RC5SplashAnim.zip

[dreammanor]

Hi jpbro, I tested your demo, it's very nice. Thanks for sharing.