Old 02-18-2013, 08:18 AM   #1
DarkStar
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Join Date: May 2006
Location: Surrey, UK
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Default TIP: Making big tool-bars easier to use

Here's a tip for those of you with big tool-bars.

I have some tool-bars with several rows and columns of buttons. They are a bit difficult to read, unless I design different icons for each, but representing each action in a suitably different icon is beyond me.

So I did the following:
(a) I grouped the action into sections,
(b) I used "no-operation" actions at the start of each section to highlight the section and name it,
(c) I added a row of Separators before each section AND assigned a special icon (toolbar_sep.png) to them

Here is the result:

-- there are five groups, each with a coloured square (from my track colour icons) and a double-width text button naming the section
-- and two section separators.

Note:
-- the toolbar_sep.png image is 92 * 18 pixels,
-- excluding the "Power of Pink" corners, each button image is 30 * 16,
-- that way I do not get a big vertical gap between the sections,
-- the pale grey line is drawn across the whole image,
-- and the background is dark-grey, otherwise the "underlaid" toolbar_blank.png is visible.

Here (and attached) is the .png file:

------------------------
For some reason, this does not work in all themes (including the default) - if you know why, please let me know.
Attached Images
File Type: png toolbar_sep.png (229 Bytes, 568 views)
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Last edited by DarkStar; 02-18-2013 at 08:40 AM.
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