PLEASE READ THE INCLUDED HELP FILE FOR MORE INFORMATION! Welcome to a demo featuring the Advanced Toolbar Control (ATC) from Alien Technologies! Integrating ATC into your application is the easiest and most effective way to add a superior, user-customizable toolbar similar to those found in many high-end Windows programs on the market. Included sample code and extensive on-line documentation can help you add ATC to your code in less than a day! The rest of this document describes a quick tour of the ATC features demonstrated by this application. ==================== Version 1.5 Features ==================== - Support for MFC! A new class wrapper around the ATC dock window and sample code show how easy it is to mix ATC and MFC in the same application! In fact use MFC for a status bar and other control bars and they work perfectly with an ATC configurable toolbar! - Independent toolbar systems can exist on multiple windows with their own private toolbars, buttons, and dock. - Additional help text can be optionally drawn on the button itself. During run-time users can turn on and off this feature and the buttons dynamically resize. - Button categories can be used to help users quickly find a particular item in the Insert Item dialog box. - Bitmap resources for the buttons no longer have to be a single row of images. Multiple rows of images permits an almost unlimited number of possible buttons. - The ATC DLL is now multi-instance compatible so multiple instances of a single application or multiple applications can use ATC at the same time. ================= Areas of Interest ================= -- Toolbar Dock -- The area on the top of the screen is called a dock. Its purpose is to manage multiple toolbars. Using the left mouse button you can rearrange the toolbars by dragging them to their new locations on the dock. The dock automatically resizes as toolbars wrap off the end of the maximum window size. -- Popup Toolbar Menu -- Clicking and releasing the right mouse button anywhere on the dock or toolbar (except on an item) will display the toolbar menu. You can choose to hide or view a toolbar window by selecting its name from the menu. The last menu entry, Insert Item, is used to add new items to a toolbar. -- User Customizable -- You can drag and drop toolbar items AT ANY TIME with the right mouse button. Items can be moved between toolbars as well! A copy of an item can be moved by holding down the control key on your keyboard. To insert or remove a separator gap, move a toolbar item a small amount. To remove an item, drag it off the toolbar. To insert a new item, bring up the popup toolbar menu and choose Insert Item. Follow the directions from the dialog box that appears. Note that items can exist only once in a toolbar window. However, you can have multiple instances of an item on different toolbars. Changing the state (checked or unchecked) of one will automatically update the others. -- Floating Toolbars -- Toolbars can also float! Using the left mouse button, drag a docked toolbar window off the dock and release. The toolbar is now a resizable floating window! To reinstall on the dock just drag it back to the dock area. You can also double-click on the toolbar to quickly switch between floating and docked. -- Quick Help -- As you moves the mouse over a toolbar item a small help window appears giving the you a quick description of the button. -- Smart Buttons -- Buttons can exhibit special styles such as auto-checkbox (the Italics button), stay-pressed (the About button), or disabled (the Cut button). The Bold button is an example of a checkbox button in an indeterminate state - neither checked nor unchecked. Radio buttons, such as those within the palette toolbar, are neatly handled by ATC with a single function call. -- Smart Toolbars -- Toolbars can be configured so separators gaps between buttons are automatically removed when a toolbar is floating. This creates a traditional tool palette window found in many painting programs. The separators are restored when the window is docked again. Toolbars can also be docked-only or floating-only thus preventing the user from switching between the two. Finally, a toolbar can be non-configurable which disables removing or inserting items by the user. -- Save/Restore Layouts -- The dock, toolbar, and button layouts can be neatly saved and restored by the application through an extremely intuitive interface with ATC. Quitting this sample application then restarting will demonstrate this feature. Thanks for trying the Advanced Toolbar Control! Please feel free to contact us if you have any further questions or comments. Alien Technologies