WinButtons 3.5.0 supports png images

Well, beside that WinButtons 3.5.0 now supports PNG image display (with control of size and opacity) it also comes with what I've called Borderless Buttons, a button that doesn't have the normal border that buttons have, but also lacks the 3D support most of us are used to. To still get the notion of a button pressed, the FlipKeycolor feature, that reverts the button color and text color for at least 250 msec, as introduced in version 3.4.0 could be used. This requires either the global/group colors or the specific button colors to be set, but that will probably be done to get a nice UI anyway.

The new Borderless Button als supports the combination of an image and a caption on the button, and the caption can be arranged to display at the bottom (default), top, left or right side of the image. When placed at the left or right, they have to share the available space, so each gets 50% of the width by default. By specifying a different size for the image, the remaining space is assigned to the caption's width.
The combination of all these features makes it possible to create a UI that closely resembles the new Metro design style, as used by Microsoft on Windows Phone 7, and in the Windows 8 demo's.
A small example file called Metro.wbuc is included with the download, and also comes with the update feature (WinButtonEdit, File/Check for updates), available when you have version 3.4.0 installed, and mouser's DCUpdater also on your system.

Ofcourse, WinButtonEdit was also updated (to v1.0.4.2) to support the new features and preview of WinButtons.

Download can be fetched from the WinButtons page on my DCMembers site

WinButtons 3.4.0 and WinButtonEdit 1.0.1 released

Another update for WinButtons and WinButtonEdit

A new feature is added, called CursorRestore, to restore the position of the cursor, if WinButtons is placed on a (external) touch-screen. It's off by default, but can easily be enabled by either using WinButtonEdit, or adding cursorrestore=1 in the [Settings] section of the .ini/.wbuc file.

Download the zipfile from my DCMembers page and comment or do feature-requests in this DonationCoder forum thread

Excel2Html v2: Full rebuild in Java

As there are some issues running AutoIt3 scripts or compiled .exe's against the Excel object model, I completely rewrote this Excel to Html converter in Java 6.

It's still called Excel2Html v2 and the version number is now 2.0.1.1, as I had to do a few improvements.

Excel2Html v2 is 99% backward compatible with the v0.x release, except for the -et command-line parameter, that is no longer supported.

Download and information is available from my DCMembers.com page.

Support questions, requests and remarks can be posted at this DonationCoder.com forum thread.

WinButtons 3.3.2.1 and configuration editor WinButtonEdit 0.9.3

It's been a while since I updated this blog, but I've not been sitting quietly.

WinButtons made it to version 3.3.2.1

and

WinButtonEdit was updated to version 0.9.3.0
(and is included with the WinButtons download)

Most notable changes:
WinButtons:
- The default file extension was changed from .ini to .wbuc
- Displaying Icons from .exe, .dll and .icl resource containers
- Resizing of .bmp Images on buttons
- Drag&Drop support to send files to a configured executable

WinButtonEdit:
- Drag&Drop support for configuration files (*.wbuc/*.ini)
- Selection of Icons from .exe, .dll and .icl resource containers
- Resizing of .bmp Images on buttons
- Set file associations for .wbuc to open with WinButtons or edit/open with WinButtonEdit

All details are as usual in the readme, included with the download.

WinButtons 3.1.2 gets a configuration editor WinButtonEdit 0.8.0

It's been a while, but I've been busy with a project: WinButtonEdit (WBE).
WBE is a configuration tool for WinButtons, and aids in the rather awkward job of creating a set of button definitions with a plain text editor in an ini file.

The download is available here, with the updated version of WinButtons 3.1.2, that also got a few more or less minor improvements, with as the most important one: Switch the context to an other group of buttons based of the currently selected control of an application, instead of selecting the application. This allows to present a set of buttons f.e. linking to information that is available in that control (listbox, combobox etc.)

AutoIt3 project WinButtons, updated, now has Conditional Buttons

I've been adding a new feature to WinButtons: Conditional Buttons. It adds a means to completely hide, make invisible or disable a button on 1 or several conditions, like the existence of a file or directory, an exe being loaded, or not, and the evaluation of AutoIt3 functions. And all this can be combined with AND and OR logical operators, and inverted by the NOT operator. Round brackets can be used to group conditions as needed.

The download of WinButtons 3.0.0 is available from this webpage.

AutoIt3 project WinButtons, Another update: it now has variables

After fiddling around with WinButtons for a while, I found a project it could be actively used for a temporary solution. It involves a set of buttons that copy files from one set of folders to another set of folders. And all this in several flavors.
As the base source and destination directories of all these folders will be the same, but the number of buttons is unknown, I would like to use some sort of constants or variables to be reused for each button. Hence the new feature 'Variables'.
This is available from version 2.5. (but never officially released).
During development of the Variables feature, I also dearly missed easy 'configuration' of these variables, so I also introduced parameters to variables. After some testing and debugging, this has become WinButtons 2.6.0 (links to the original release-thread on the DonationCoder.com forum)

All documentation and download is available from the WinButtons page on my DcMembers site

Another few extensions where made, by giving options to display a message, or ask for confirmation before a command is started, using the -ask, -asc and -msg options on a button's command<n> parameter.

AutoIt3 project WinButtons, Big update for big onscreen buttons

After only a week of live time for version 1.0.0, I released the next version of WinButtons, v2.0.0 last Friday, 11-03.
Again it was uploaded to the forum where it all originated, DonationCoder.com, the fine place to be for all 'software connoisseurs', as (one of) the site's subtitles states.

The reason for this rather quick increase in the version number, is that there's a major new feature added:
Context sensitivity: The displayed set of buttons can be made dependent on the current foreground (focused) application.
This is accomplished by defining a button group, naming one (or more) executable name of the application that should get this special set of buttons. The buttons set is defined in the same configuration file, and loaded as soon as the application gets the user's attention. Even the position of the WinButtons window can be defined for that set of buttons.

Configuration is still a bit awkward, as this involves manual editing of an ini file, but I'm working on a GUI just for setting up the buttons more easily. This is a work in progress, though.

AutoIt3 project: WinButtons, Big onscreen buttons for touchscreen use

Hi,

To aid in the promotion of the March 2011 Fundraiser, over at the DonationCoder website, I created another AutoIt3 tool I called WinButtons.
It was requested a few weeks ago at the Coding Snacks section of the DoCo forum, and I needed another small project anyways, so there you go!

Just released version 1.0.0, as scheduled for the Fundraiser, and the first responses are pretty positive. That's very nice to start with, ofcourse.
Screenshots and the latest download (source, exe and readme included) are available at the forum.

/Ton

AutoIt3 project: WinSendKeys updated to handle text from clipboard

Today I updated my AutoIt3 project WinSendKeys 3.0.1 2.6 (Thread at DonationCoder.com forum, download at the far end of the thread)

Version 2.6 adds 3 commandline parameters, -c, -cc and -cn to enable Clipboard text-contents to be sent to a specific Window.
This was triggered on DonationCoder.com by this forumthread.

Version 3.0 adds 2 more parameters, -x executable_filepath and -xp executable_parameters, to run the named executable (with optional parameters) if the WindowName is not found, or if a WindowName is not specified, it then tries to find that executable and activates it or runs it.
As requested by user kikon at the DonationCoder.com forum.

Version 3.0.1 adds 1 more parameter, -xd delay, to delay for some milliseconds after starting the file specified by -x parameter, so slow starting applications can be catered for.

The included readme file is a required read to optimally use these new options.