Hi Wilhelm,
Both Chipp's "ButtonGadget" and Richmond's "Button Basher" automate
the process of glueing together images with text - and other
properties - and finally produce buttons with 2 or 4 icon states.
Chipp's application possesses a number of nice and useful features,
which otherwise you may find only in other commercial or open-source
Photo tools. Richmond will probably develop his stack in a similar
direction. It is good to know that there are quite a number of
possibilities inside Revolution.
Of course one could also use low-priced or free photo tools for such
tasks, like "RealDraw Pro" (which I use a lot), "PaintShopPro", or
"Gimp".
The result of all these approaches are buttons or images with
"static" text, i.e. text that needs not and cannot be changed - with
the exception that you could produce different texts, colors etc.
for the different icon states.
This is probably sufficient for the majority of applications in
which buttons are being used.
However, in some cases, especially for certain types of educational
software, you need the feature to be able to *dynamically* change
the text/label of buttons at runtime.
As an example, imagine a Matching Exercise for second-language
learning where you have got two columns of 10 buttons each - one
columns of buttons with words of the first language, the other
column for the second language - in which you have to drag the
matching button near to the foreign language equivalent.
Then after all pairs have been correctly matched, a new set of 10x2
words or expressions are being displayed in the labels of the 20
buttons etc. etc.
We use quite a variety of such exercises for the students studying
in our Language Department that rely on assigning new labels
dynamically from an attached database or a hidden vocabulary field
inside the stack itself.
If you just use normal buttons - without icon images - there is of
course no problem to achieve such dynamic setting of labels, but if
you choose to be creative with presumeably more appealing buttons
with icon images and transparent shapes then you run into
difficulties:
- The name or label of a button can be displayed on the right or the
left side of an icon or *beneath* the icon, but not directly *on
top* of an icon. If the latter would be the case, this would be very
convenient for dynamic label setting.
About 10 years ago - or maybe even earlier - I had asked Scott Raney
to introduce such a feature for Metacard, but apparently it was of
limited priority on his agenda.
- The other possibility to place text directly over icon images is
to set an icon as a backpattern of the button. This works fine as
long as the icons are rectangular, when they are oddshaped, however,
the transparent parts of the image show as black.
I assume that this basically could be changed in a future version of
Revolution so that the transparent parts of backpattern really would
remain as transparent.
Lacking such features at present, one workaround would be to take a
labelles/nameless button with several icon states and to combine the
button with a graphic/field, grouped together with the button or
just as an overlay to the button. This is one way to achieve dynamic
setting of labels at runtime.-
I have put together a very small stack that just shows four
different icon images and four dynamic button entities which
replaceable text; this is not an educational exercise, just
demonstrating in which ways buttons and graphics could be combined.
<http://www.sanke.org/Software/DynamicImageButtons.zip>
(I will be out of home and office for the next three days.)
Regards,
Wilhelm Sanke
See also my "enhancement request" from about two years ago:
http://quality.runrev.com/qacenter/show_bug.cgi?id=3265
I do not think this is too difficult for a man like Mark W., but... ;-)
Best
Klaus
--
Klaus Major
kl...@major-k.de
http://www.major-k.de
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