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FEATURE
PostMortem: UltraToolBar
Toolbars Made Simple
Issue: 5.4 (May/June 2007)
Author: Paul Lefebvre
Author Bio: Paul Lefebvre is the President of LogicalVue Software, Inc.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 8,524
Starting Page Number: 18
Article Number: 5410
Related Web Link(s):
http://www.logicalvue.com/
Excerpt of article text...
It all started in the summer of 2005. I was working on the next version of SQLVue (Which still hasn't been released, but that's another story!) and needed a better toolbar than what I had. I had looked at MaxiToolBar Pro, but it did not have Linux support and I didn't like the way it created toolbars (by using lots of controls on the window). So, I put together a plan and started working on something I called UltraComponentSuite, which was going to be a collection of UI components, classes, and other things for developing REALbasic software. It was going to be much like the .NET products Infragistics NetAdvantage and ComponentOne Studio. Like most of you, I always thought it would be great to have a software company that built tools for software developers. Since there were so many of these types of companies in the .NET world, I thought it would be a good idea to do something similar for REALbasic.
Version 1.0
The first component in this set was the toolbar. Now remember that this was also about the time that REALbasic 2005 was released and it had a pretty decent toolbar in the all-new IDE. So I used the IDE toolbar as my design and essentially built a copy of it using a single Canvas control. I replicated the look and feel, the different size toolbar icons and the toolbar preferences window. Mostly because I'm not a graphics person and did not want to create masks for my icons, I also added a feature to automatically calculate icon masks. It certainly wasn't perfect but it made it pretty easy to get a toolbar up and running quickly.
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