floatingbbar

Emmanuel Frecon - emmanuel@sics.se Swedish Institute of Computer Science Interactive Collaborative Environments Laboratory

Abstract

The floatingbbar library implements a new Tcl/Tk widget that presents itself as an (animated) floating button bar that pops up from one of the side of the screen in a direction that can be chosen. The floatingbbar features any number of buttons.

The floatingbbar library provides support for a button bar that will pop up from one side of the screen whenever the mouse hoovers into it. It is useful when trying to save screen space while letting users know that there are more commands available if they need it. The library geared towards fullscreen applications but can be used in any other settings. The library is built on top of the notifier library, available from the same site.

For the time being, floatingbbar has very little documentation and you will have to read the code.

New floatingbbars are created with the command ::floatingbbar::new, the command takes (possibly) the path to a new toplevel floatingbbar, together with a number of key values parameters. The options recognised by the floatingbbar are:

-bg: The background color image. -pad: Padding in pixels between buttons. -side: Side of the bbar (always centered): right, left, top, bottom -content: An even list describing the content of the button bar. First item is the path to an image, second item is the command to associate to the button.

The command returns the path to the floatingbbar. This path is also a command on which you can perform a number of operations:

Any other command will be passed further to the notifier widget.

floatingbbar is subject to the new BSD license, I would appreciate to incorporate any modifications and improvements that you make to the library.

The library is hosted at the following address: http://www.sics.se/~emmanuel/?Code:floatingbbar